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FeedThe Grammy winner
On a Sunday afternoon in February, conductor Bill Boggs was leading the Capital Orchestra through Stravinsky’s Symphony No. 1 when a colleague burst in. As a rule, conductors don’t like to be interrupted mid rehearsal, especially when showtime is only hours away. But on this day, Boggs didn’t mind; in fact, he was happy. And so was his orchestra. The colleague had big news—Boggs had just won a Grammy.
Soon enough, that would be two Grammys. The former artistic director at Opera Columbus and current adjunct professor at Capital University received the honors for his role as conductor of the contemporary opera Elmer Gantry. Performed by the Florentine Opera and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the piece was nominated for three awards and won two: new classical composition and engineered classical recording.
At the Grammys, classical awards are presented early in the day of the main event. The ceremony is a bit speedier, but still has all the trimmings—the band, the lights, the sealed envelope and the signature line “And the award goes to. . . .” But it’s not televised. Luckily, there is an app for that.
Boggs watched the video of the acceptance speech and his co-winners sent him pictures from their front row seats. Boggs could have been there, but he had a gig that night and musicians don’t miss a gig. As it worked out, there’s some harmony in winning an award for conducting while conducting. Plus, by sharing the moment with his orchestra, 70 musicians now have a Grammy story by association to tell. But even if there’d been no concert, it’s unlikely Boggs would have been there. The trip is no small chunk of change, but more to the point, to go would mean taking it a bit more seriously than Boggs seems comfortable with.
At 53, with a loose manner and tightly trimmed beard, Boggs is neither unassuming nor soft-spoken. He’s energetic and articulate, and he has stories and opinions (“my soapboxes,” he says) to share by the earful. But when it comes to his Grammy moment, he’s brief. “It’s fun and I’m happy,” he says, and then quickly shifts the spotlight. “I’m most happy for the composers—they deserve it 1,000 percent—and it’s great for opera.” Elmer Gantry, he says, is only the third opera in the history of the awards to win for best new composition.
If Boggs downplays his role, William Florescu, the director of Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera that performed the recording, sees it differently. “Bill is one of the best in the business,” he says. “We won because of how he conducted the piece.” The recognition, says Florescu, “is well-deserved.”
In its short history, Elmer Gantry has been staged only three times, each to great reviews, and Opera News, the industry standard, named the recording the best new CD release of 2011. All the accolades do not surprise Boggs. He knew it was a great piece of work back in 2007 when he was invited by the Nashville Opera to conduct the world première. “It is Gershwin-esque and very American,” he says. Based on the 1927 Sinclair Lewis bestseller, the story is about a sham preacher and the usual sins that come when religion and business join hands. Musically, the piece draws on a variety of vernacular traditions. One reviewer described a scene as a
“quasi-hoedown,” and, according to Boggs, “You’ll feel like you’ve been in a revival meeting” after Act I.
While writing the opera, composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein traveled the country visiting small churches and religious gatherings. “We were determined to be true to his biting satire of religious wrongdoing, but at the same time to dramatize the underlying, deeply moving power of American religion itself,” shares Garfein on elmergantry opera.com. “We resolved to bring audiences to the heights of both folly and glory within a single evening. . . .”
For Aldridge, Elmer Gantry is not only his first Grammy, it’s also his first opera, though one he had been working on since 1991. The New York Times chronicled the 17-year labor of love in a 2008 article. “Behold an Operatic Miracle” reads like a case study of what it takes to create new work in the classical arts if, as Boggs puts it, “You’re not the Met.” The Times called the opera an “intoxicating experience” for the audience, but for the authors, “it had been a money pit filled with bad luck, horrible road trips, hat-in-hand humiliations, hubris and its antidote.”
At first, the opera had a home with a Boston company, but financial constraints soon left it orphaned. It took a decade of bumping against closed doors before the Nashville Opera, under John Hoomes, decided to produce it. Boggs was invited to conduct.
The gig meant a lot of hard work and lost sleep. “With a new piece you commit body and soul,” he says. “If I screw up a Mozart opera, it’s still a great opera. But if I conduct a world première and don’t do a good job, I could kill the piece.”
Boggs recalls endless hours on the phone with the composer. “We had to cut, cut, cut, to get it to drive.” The result is a dramatically sound piece that moves. “There’s a great pulse to it,” says Boggs.
When he conducted the première, Boggs was still at Opera Columbus and had hoped to stage Gantry in town. But after a shake-up in 2011, the company was severely streamlined to cut costs and his position eliminated. “Opera Columbus is trying to get itself into a position to produce again,” says current managing director and CAPA CEO Bill Connor. Should it become feasible, it definitely would consider Elmer Gantry, he says, adding, “Bill is a wonderful artist; he is a Columbus artist and we all are very thrilled about his wins.”
Florescu attended the Nashville première and had, as he puts it, “a mountaintop moment.” While he knew better than to be impulsive in the cash-strapped world of classical music, he was so “blown away” he went right up to the composer and announced, “I am going to do this.” It took him a little less than three years (“five minutes in the opera world,” Florescu says) to secure funding—and not just to stage the piece, but to record it, too. Some in Columbus know Florescu better as “Biff.” He once was on faculty at Capital and formerly directed the Columbus Light Opera. He’s known Boggs for years, calling him “an undervalued asset in the city of Columbus.” To have Boggs conduct “made perfect sense, says Florescu. “Bill’s fantastic and has a great feel for the score.”
Because of the cost, opera is almost always recorded live, during a performance, and at the expense of the company. Boggs calls Elmer Gantry a “warts and all” recording, though “a really pretty bloody good one.” He hears details that he would like to fix, but with live music what you give up in perfection, he says, “you gain in broadness and real fire.” It’s a trade he would make at any time.
While he may be low-key about the Grammys, Boggs starts to soar when the subject turns to conducting opera. “It’s the most fun thing in the world,” he says. With the singers, stage, movement and music, he calls it a huge palette, yet insists it must be approached like a string quartet. Musicians always are listening and reacting to each other—with opera, it’s just on a massive scale. “To be in control, yet allow it to live, that is the skill,” he says.
Boggs, who grew up on the west side of Columbus, has musical roots that are more hootenanny than aria. His dad, a tool-and-die man, played bass at square dances and also had a jazz trio. Boggs remembers his parents and their friends playing music together on Sunday afternoons. His first instrument was the violin. Then he switched to guitar. As a teen, he started to gig at campus bars. During disco’s heyday, he was in a band called Razzle. “Big white collars and lots of Bee Gees,” he remembers.
Westland High School’s choir director, Robert Petty, inspired Boggs to pursue a career in music. He came to Ohio State and studied under choral director Maurice Casey, and in 1982 was hired as the chorus master for Opera Columbus. It marked the beginning of his accidental apprenticeship. Though not due in to work until the chorus arrived, Boggs would arrive early to watch the guest conductors at work. “These were some greats,” he says, mentioning Anton Coppola, Alfredo Silipigni and others. At first, with courage gathered, he would ask a question or two, but then he became a de facto assistant and sometimes was even handed the baton (I’m tired, kid, you take over). Eventually, the baton belonged solely to him.
While Boggs doesn’t predict big things from his Grammy wins, he hopes it does mean Elmer Gantry will gain wider play. Perhaps he’ll even be asked to conduct. Otherwise, he’ll keep doing what he’s doing. Most recently, that is conducting the opera Susannah at Capital and whatever guest conducting gigs his agent lines up. It’s a life the young Razzle guitarist in the big white collar never could have imagined. “When I was young,” Boggs says, “I thought opera was just overweight Italians with horns on their heads screaming at each other in a language I didn’t understand—and for way too long.” This perception is not unique to the young Boggs. All it took to change his mind was to listen. It’s a strategy he promotes. “When people say they don’t like opera, I’ll say, ‘Which one don’t you like?’ ” Almost always, the question is a stumper. “Opera is like movies; it’s like Broadway,” he says. “It’s a story with music. The human voice can reach highs and lows with such force it is impressive in itself. Add in beauty and tenderness . . . tension, pathos and ethos and then put a 60-piece orchestra underneath it. . . . You just can’t touch that level of drama.”
“If you come,” he says, “you’ll get it, but you have to come.”
Kendra Hovey is a freelance writer.
