‘How is everything over in a better country than ours?” comes the cheery greeting as Anthony Roth Costanzo appears on my laptop screen from an apartment in Detroit. He’s there to sing the title role in Rinaldo. The next day the American countertenor will head to Philadelphia, where he is general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, returning to Detroit the following day to sing the matinee, and then going to Boston that night to start rehearsals on another opera.
Costanzo is London-bound for an Easter concert with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. “There’s nothing better than a Jew on Easter,” he laughs, smoothing his dark hair. “I have an interesting relationship to it. But music is a space for me to feel a connection to the world and to other people that feels almost spiritual. I’m not a particularly religious person, but that is my spirituality.”
He’ll perform three pieces from Handel’s Messiah, two originally for the alto voice and one for a soprano, alongside a new piece by the composer Osvaldo Golijov entitled Laika. Yes, the space dog, “who was stolen from the streets and then sent into space and died after going into orbit,” Costanzo says. “It’s all written from the perspective of Laika, and so it’s both hilarious and absolutely crushing.”
Though he’s internationally established, Costanzo is probably most familiar for playing the title role of Phelim McDermott’s English National Opera production of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten in 2016, which was rapturously received by critics and sells out wherever it plays, despite being four hours long and sung partially in ancient Egyptian with no surtitles. Costanzo, notably, starts the production stark naked, which has its own challenges.
“Famously, London is not great at heating things, and the stage was so cold at ENO because the loading dock was open. And I was terrified, of course, so I said to the crew, ‘Guys, listen, you understand, if you were going to be naked, you really wouldn’t want it to be cold.’ So now, every time we do Akhnaten I go to the stage manager and say, ‘I’m begging you, just for that little while, get the temperature up.’”
Costanzo came to singing by accident. He struggled with sight reading when learning the piano aged about six, and his teacher suggested they sing the notes first. He enjoyed it, and when he was eight, auditioned for a local theatre company. By the age of 11 he had moved with his family from North Carolina to New York so that he might pursue a career in musical theatre, and sang in his first opera, Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, aged 13.
Getting into character as the troubled child Miles was helped by discussions with his parents — his father is a developmental psychologist, and his mother’s specialty is post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood sexual abuse.
He went to Princeton, followed by Manhattan School of Music — and then came the moment he was diagnosed, in his late 20s, with thyroid cancer, forcing him to have a life-saving operation that could have destroyed his voice. “The only major epiphany I had when I woke up from surgery was if you love people, you should tell them,” he says now. “Love gives our life meaning. I think music does the same thing, and music is a kind of love, and so that’s why I want to do it in every possible way.”
He has since carved his own path, alternating major canon roles with experimental productions including Only an Octave Apart, a sort of musical mashup with the cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, and Glass Handel, an hour-long operatic installation featuring contemporary dance, live drawing and Costanzo in an outfit worthy of the Met Gala. “Not necessarily wanting to sing Bach exclusively at churches around the world, I had to be entrepreneurial in order to create a career.”
He’s going to have to be more than entrepreneurial in his new job in Philadelphia. Why run an opera company today? “In America and even internationally, I don’t see as much innovation within opera as I think it needs. [This was] an opportunity to see what would happen if I took that creative, problem-solving, entrepreneurial spirit to a leadership role.”
He made his mark right off the bat by revolutionising the company’s ticketing strategy. Realising on arrival that he had 12 weeks to raise $4 million “or the whole company was going bankrupt”, he started to look hard at the budget, and found that ticket sales constituted just 8 per cent of the revenue, “and that seemed not a whole lot’. He decided to make every ticket in the season “pick-your-price”, starting at $11, and see what happened. “Would it actually break down one of the barriers to entry? Would it make people more interested in trying it?”
Within weeks of launch, he says, Opera Philadelphia became the only company in America to sell out their entire season — “67 per cent are first-time ticket buyers; 69 per cent are under the age of 45; 30 per cent are people of colour; 50 per cent are from household incomes of under $90,000. We’ve changed overnight the demographic of the audience.”
They’ve also made small tweaks to make the opera-going experience more obviously “fun” — sippy cups to bring your booze into the theatre; a happy hour before the show. “We made big vinyl stickers that went on all the grand mirrors, and they said things like, ‘Hello Diva’, or ‘High Drama’.” Cue a flood of Instagram selfies — otherwise known as organic advertising.
• Akhnaten review — I was entirely won over by this powerful show
Some say the new strategy will simply mean the same people pay less for tickets. It’s true, Costanzo says, that now, ticket sales account for just 4 per cent of revenue. “But our marketing budget goes way down because we’re sold out,” he counters. “And it mobilises individual donations, foundations and corporations to get on board.” It’s very appealing “to sponsor this idea that art is available to everybody in Philadelphia, which is the poorest big city in America”.
He mentions a traditional opera-goer he spoke to this season (which features two lesser-known productions alongside Don Giovanni), who had booked a full-price ticket to the Mozart production but “she wasn’t interested in seeing a new work. But when the tickets were $11, she thought, ‘Well, OK, I’ll go’. She had no idea who this composer was or anything about it, but she loved it. It is expanding what we can programme.”
The company’s new season announced this month will include a work “taking some of the best Vivaldi arias from some of his quite boring operas and stringing them together with music from The Four Seasons to a new story written by the playwright Sarah Ruhl, and using dance by the choreographer Pam Tanowitz as much as music to tell the story.”
He loves opera in all its forms, he stresses, including the grand and traditional. But “I’m trying to expand what opera can be and how we can define it. In its inception, it was quite experimental, bringing art into the set design and fashion into the costume design and theatre and poetry and dance all together. In that spirit, I’ve tried to be innovative and even at times experimental in how I define opera and what I make.
“Pick-your-price could have been a flop very easily, and we could have lost money,” he continues, “but part of the reason it worked, and part of the reason I was able to raise $7 million and cancel the debt when I came to Opera Philadelphia, is I could say to people, ‘There has to be change. What’s happening isn’t working, so we have to try something.’ I don’t have the answers, but I want to try something.”
Anthony Roth Costanzo sings with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields at Chichester Cathedral, Apr 10, and at St Martin-in-the-Fields, London on Apr 11, asmf.org
