The expanding opera

Bruce Hangen, former leader of the Portland Symphony Orchestra, is back in town, this time offering his golden touch to the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre

by Doug Hubley

Portland Opera Repertory Theatre performs Verdi's Rigoletto on July 27, 29, and 31, and a double bill composed of Menotti's The Medium and Mozart's The Impresario on July 28 and 30 at Merrill Auditorium.

Bruce Hangen's 35 years as a leader of orchestras have revealed something of the Midas touch. If you're a musical organization and Hangen waves his baton at you, sooner or later prosperity will come.

That is true now, as Hangen readies the expanded sixth season of the Portland Opera Repertory Theatre, which opens Thursday, July 27, with Verdi's Rigoletto. And it's been true since Portland met him, in 1976, when he arrived to lead the Portland Symphony Orchestra, where he stayed for 11 years. Of course Hangen has changed since then, but in style more than substance. The PSO's Hangen was charismatic, a firebrand at the podium, cocky in the public eye, a big man in an era when the Portland arts scene needed big men. The scene is different now, more complex and sophisticated -- and so is Hangen, who founded PORT in 1994 and is its artistic and general director. The mechanisms behind the Midas touch are better concealed.

"I think he's a little more subtle in the way he manages to get his way," says Jack Riddle, a friend of Hangen's from way back and now PORT's president. Leaving Portland in 1986 to head the Omaha Symphony, Hangen walked into a morass of long-standing morale problems among the Nebraskan musicians. There, Riddle says, "I think he saw a little bit of the dark side. His days in Portland were quite glittery, and when he got out to Omaha it was a different situation."

In Omaha, Riddle laughs, Hangen "realized that there was more to this than being loved."

Now the lovefest is confined to Hangen's wife and two children at home in northern Massachusetts. Much of his work is in the Bay State, too. Hangen is artistic director and principal conductor at the Indian Hill Music Center, in Littleton, and conducts the Boston Pops regularly. Not surprisingly, his musicality is deeper and more nuanced than in his Portland Symphony days, and he has added administration to his skill set -- in fact, has embraced it, along with a little something he likes to call TQITA.

Pronounced "takeeta" and meaning Total Quality In the Arts, this is an arts-management model Hangen derived from the writings of Stephen R. Covey, the highly affluent author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. To a world of arts organizations that, Hangen believes, remains authoritarian and resistant to innovation, TQITA offers methods for realizing ideals commonly honored more in the breach than the observance: individual empowerment, teamwork, accountability. PORT hasn't yet seen anything like a full-strength TQITA dose, simply because the company exists at full strength and in one place only three weeks during the year, but the basics are there. For example, the company's "performance agreements" -- read: contracts -- spell out every last detail of the obligations between PORT and its guest artists, including such intangibles as respect for the audience and maintaining a sense of humor. A thorough review process seeks feedback on all aspects of the cast and crew's experience, from the quality of lodgings to Hangen's conducting.

There must be something to it, because PORT is thriving. Its new and improved offering may be the summer's biggest classical music news. Since the company's debut, in 1995, it has offered at least two performances of one blockbuster production in Portland, plus out-of-town appearances by a flying squad of young singers. But this year PORT presents fully staged productions of three titles: Verdi's Rigoletto on July 27, 29, and 31, and a double bill composed of Menotti's The Medium and Mozart's The Impresario on July 28 and 30.

In complexity and cost, the move is a great leap forward for a young arts organization. But, as Hangen explains over coffee, it's not merely speculative. The success of 1997's Tosca convinced him and the PORT board that the organization was here to stay. Last year's offering, La Boheme, was the clincher, selling 4800 tickets for three performances at Merrill Auditorium -- for all practical purposes a sellout, says Hangen, given that 200 Merrill seats are duds because there's no view of the supertitles that translate the singing. The budget has grown from a measly $97,000 in 1995 to this year's $355,000, about a third of the PSO's budget when Hangen left. "So that means that maybe there's room for more," he laughs.

Adding productions allows Hangen to explore branches of the repertoire new to PORT. Until now, the company has relied on the heavy guns, the bloody and tubercular tragedies -- like Rigoletto -- that bring smiles to the box office. Menotti's 1945 tale of a séance gone wrong is another tragedy, but marks the company's first foray into 20th-century opera. The Impresario, a short and virtuosic spoof of the opera world itself, is the company's first comedy and its first Mozart, both important parts of a healthy operatic diet.

But the expansion is also about PORT's place in the community. "What I clearly see this as," says Hangen, "is an opportunity for us to get used to the multiple production idea, as opposed to putting all of our eggs in one basket -- energy-wise, talent-wise, organizationally -- and then poof, it's gone." Once PORT has mastered mounting more than one production per year, he says, he and the board can then think about more strategic expansion. For example, Hangen sees a possible model for PORT in Glimmerglass, a robust summer opera festival in the unlikely location of Cooperstown, New York. Alternating several different operas through its seven-week schedule, Glimmerglass attracts huge audiences (some 36,000 in 1997) and top talent. Already, thanks in part to the connections Stage Director Dona Vaughn has in New York City's opera community, PORT has become a magnet for emerging talent and a credential taken seriously by opera companies elsewhere.

HE'S BACK: Bruce Hangen confers with Revekah Mavrouitis (Magdalena in Rigoletto) in the Merrill rehearsal room.

"We're already starting to use the word `festival' in unofficial ways," Hangen says. Moreover, he is thinking about expanding the schedule beyond the summer season. "We just have to make sure that we're not stepping on toes," he says, referring to organizations like PCA Great Performances, which also presents opera at Merrill during the cold months, and the Portland Symphony, with which PORT shares both the auditorium and quite a few musicians.

Hangen and his board are convinced that, in time, PORT will be one of the major players in the Portland arts landscape -- even if the year-round paid staff, for now, consists of a part-time administrative assistant and Hangen, who visits Portland once or twice a week during the off-season. "Personally, if there were ever a rationale for me moving back here to oversee this company full-time, I would do it in an instant," he says. "But right now we're not at a point where we can afford my doing that."

The last time Hangen lived in Portland full-time, of course, was during his stint as PSO conductor and musical director. During those 11 years, the Portland Symphony doubled the number of its concerts and more than doubled the budget, to $900,000. (Under Toshiyuki Shimada, Hangen's successor, the budget has grown further still, to $2.5 million.) New concert formats and savvy marketing helped build "earned" revenues -- those from sales of tickets and ads in concert programs -- to 65 percent of total revenues, the remainder coming from grants and donations. Currently, the average percentage of earned revenues among symphony orchestras nationwide is 40 percent. (The PSO's average today is 68 percent.) Most important, the orchestra's musicianship improved immeasurably. When Hangen arrived, audiences were surprised when a PSO performance transcended mediocrity. By the time he left, mediocre playing was the surprising exception.

In those days, whether because of his need to drive the musicians or their need to be driven, Hangen's conducting was often highly charged, occasionally even harsh. "Perhaps in my earlier days, I was more known for going for the jugular," he says. "I still love to take chances musically. I still love the spontaneous feel of a performance as it unfolds." But now he knows better how to bring out the music in all its fullness and complexity. "The edges have been sort of burnished," he says. "I feel much more comfortable with what I'm doing."

Hangen signed with the Omaha Symphony Orchestra in 1984 and spent his last two PSO seasons commuting between the two cities. His first full year in Nebraska was 1987. That was the year he started giving serious thought to the philosophy of arts management, and not by coincidence. You might even trace TQITA's roots to one March day for which Hangen had arranged an Omaha Symphony concert featuring a big-name pianist and high school choruses from all over Nebraska. His plans were rewarded with a major spring snowstorm and a strike over wages by the orchestra's musicians. The strike lasted into the next snow season, the following November.

"That should have been my first clue to get out of Omaha as fast as possible," Hangen says. (In the event, he ended up staying until 1996, albeit with a minimal time commitment for his last three years). Hangen's OSO accomplished plenty -- doubling the number of classical concerts, adding successful new programming, introducing world-class guest artists, and more than quadrupling the budget. But the situation was never vibrant. Hangen and Riddle describe a stagnant institutional culture where board members have lifetime terms and many musicians, realizing they've risen as far as they can without moving to Chicago or one of the coasts, turn mercenary and musically complacent.

By the early 1990s, Hangen was seriously unhappy. And then, as if by divine intervention, he discovered the first of the Covey's 7 Habits books. "As soon as I started reading it, just suddenly it was like all that negativity started getting erased and the positive sense started coming back," he says. "All the good feelings that I had here in Portland, with the orchestra and the community and all that stuff, started revisiting my mind. I started thinking, This is really what I'm all about." This conversion experience sent Hangen into a full-tilt research campaign that included Covey's Principle-Centered Leadership seminars and ultimately inspired TQITA. Eventually, Hangen says, he hopes to provide TQITA seminars for arts leaders.

"We in culture, we in the arts organizations, often are looked up to by the corporations for the passion we bring to our tasks, et cetera, et cetera," he says. But ironically, even as corporations are evolving more humane cultures, many arts organizations still embrace what he describes as the old-style "European tyrannical methods."

"We in the cultural organizations have a lot to learn regarding corporate culture," he says. "That I see as a great opportunity for me. Nobody else is talking about it, as far as I know."

If PORT's success seems like a return to form for the Bruce Hangen once known and loved by Portland, the "known and loved" part is being downplayed this time around. It's true that many relationships Hangen forged then, musical and otherwise, sprang back to life when he was shaking loose of Omaha and talking up an opera company here. Jack Riddle and his wife, Bonnie, served in the highest echelons of PSO volunteers back in the 1980s. Jack, a real estate consultant, is now PORT's president and Bonnie's myriad volunteer roles include media relations work. But Hangen's relationship with the public is much different now -- low-key almost to the point of invisibility.

That's partly because he doesn't live here. Another part is the drastic reduction since the 1980s in coverage the mainstream media give classical music. But, more than anything, Hangen has been sensitive about appearing to play the returning conqueror. He has kept in close and solicitous contact with the organizations whose toes might feel like they're being stepped on, including the Portland Symphony. He has kept the focus on the company and the operas. "The last thing I want to do is have this impression being made, by anybody, that Bruce Hangen has come back to town to reclaim his territory, or something like that," he says. "I just don't want that to happen.

"It's a small town, and we have to be very careful about how we treat each other," Hangen continues. "That's extremely important to me."

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.