New York Magazine, Every morning, A stocky 65year-old named Vincent La Selva sets out from his cedar shingled ranch house in Montclair, New Jersey, with a stuffed briefcase and an air of invincible purpose. Whatever your mental picture of a maestro, La Selva probably doesn't match it. You might imagine him as the man who sold you life insurance, or the maitre d' at the family trattoria. In fact, La Selva is founder, artistic director, librarian, coach, fund-raiser, secretary, all-round factotum, and, most important, conductor of a company called the New York Grand Opera. His daily destination is a twelfth-floor suite at Cagey Hall. It's an impressive address, but rather bohemian digs: two tiny offices awash in scores and clutter, and, down the narrow hall, the rehearsal studio. You'll find the piano here, surrounded by chairs rescued from lawn sales and abandoned movie palaces, as well as a forest of music stands and some framed opera posters. You'll even spot, tacked up by the doorway, the requisite tatter of fringed maroon velvet. In the summer, when full-orchestra rehearsals are required, La Selva moves on to the larger space he rents a half-block west of the Port Authority bus terminal. There are few creature comforts here either: no windows, and only drab corkboard walls. Off to one side, a red light flashes a danger signal no one present can make sense of or turn off. This is where eight soloists and some 60 orchestra members will run through Verdi's Ernani. Carrying himself with more pent-up energy than grace, La Selva steps up to the podium, thick, fluffy hair flying up in a permanent state of excitement. His dark eyes dart across the room, and the expression of relief that plays across his soft features spells a "Whew!" of Dickensian intensity. "If it had rained on Lombardi," he blurts out, "you wouldn't be seeing me here now!". Index finger at his temple, he pulls an imaginary trigger. Lombardi (Verdi's early I Lombardi alla prima crociata, or 'The Lombards on the First Crusade") is the opera he'd conducted the week before. Originally scheduled for 1994, it was a casualty of something more fortunate opera directors don't have to think about-the weather. For La Selva conducts under the most taxing of conditions: outdoors at SummerStage, on Central Park's Rumsey Field. But this is not a problem; La Selva is a very determined man. The New York Grand has been doing opera in Central Park since 1974, and not only that: Despite its paltry budget of $250,000 a summer, the New York Grand is also the only company that does its outdoor productions fully staged, with lights, sets, costumes, actions - the works-for free. Its rarities and crowd pleasers attract up to 20,000 attentive listeners on a summer evening. Last year, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani gave La Selva the coveted Handel Medallion, New York City's highest distinction for achievement in culture and the arts. La Selva's name joined an honor roll that includes Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Chagall, Charlie Chaplin, Martha Graham, John Lennon, the Metropolitan Opera, and Isaac Stem. You would suppose that a conductor in such company would need a second
stick for beating away offers. But no. To the baffled outrage of La Selva's admirers, the
Met has never taken notice of his existence, and an on-again, off-again relationship with
the New York City Opera foundered in the eighties, apparently for good. His symphonic
fortunes have been little brighter. Back in 1957, When La Selva was 28, he founded the all-volunteer Xavier Symphony Society, which regaled New Yorkers first with free symphonic concerts, then with opera. Those were heady times. The legendary Arturo Toscanini had died that year, and according to the buzz in certain quarters, this young American was his spiritual heir. La Selva and his band played at St. Francis Xavier High School on West 16th Street, which had an auditorium that was the replica of an elegant Italian opera house. (It has since been tom down.) One evening, the composer Gian Carlo Menotti, whose TV opera Amahl and the Night Visitors had secured his reputation in the early fifties, went downtown to check out the Xavier revival of his opera The Saint of Bleecker Street. The melodrama had scored a hit on Broadway several years before. In the packed house, Menotti followed his stigmatic heroine's fate with mounting emotion and eventually tears. When the curtain fell, he rushed backstage to throw his arms around La Selva. He was also curious to know, pro to pro, what La Selva had spent on the production. About $ 1, I 00, La Selva told him. "Gian Carlo flipped out,' recalls the tenor Enrico DiGiuseppe, who sang the hotheaded Michele that evening and rejoined La Selva in Central Park this July in I Due Foscari ("The Two Foscaris"). 'He said, 'What?! Eleven hundred dollars?!' "Vincent said, 'Yeah, well, considering the wood and the canvas and the paint . . .' And Gian Carlo said, 'Eleven hundred dollars?! My production cost $1 00,000, and it didn't look this good.'" In 1965, when the urbane Austrian-born conductor Julius Rudely, general director of the New York City Opera, decided to revive Menthe's Saint, the composer remembered the Xavier performance and insisted that Rudely bring in La Selva, along with key members of his cast. Rudely complied, then kept La Selva around for bread-and-butter assignments around the house. The results were at times astonishing. The percussionist Howard van Hyning
remembers a Tosca that La Selva conducted without a single orchestra rehearsal. "The
performance started to take on its own life. I just got carried away, even though I was
having to pay attention to my part. I was listening to the broad meaning in the music that
hadn't been there before. The intensity just carried you away. At a certain point, I just
started to cry from being so moved by what was going on. It didn't have to do with what
was happening in the dramatic moment. It was the rightness of what Vmcent was doing, the
sort of deep knowledge he had of the score and the love of it." Some people insist there is a plot. A budding conductor still in his teens named Cesare Civetta, writing for The Italian-American Times in the late seventies, collected blind quotes from musicians citing La Selva's loyalty, his passion, his respect for the composer's intentions, the clarity and expertise of his baton technique, his power at climaxes ("almost a sexual thing, directly related to orgasm"). On the other hand, Civetta's sources conceded, La Selva was outspoken, and not only that: "La Selva doesn't play the cocktail circuit, nor does he go to bed with men, and perhaps this has done damage to his career." 'The bit about the cocktail circuit comes close to the mark. There is a certain political n;iivet6 about La Selva. But there is also a villain of sorts in the La Selva saga: Julius Rudel. For whatever reason, La Selva's accomplishments at City Opera seem to have sat ill with the boss. There was no big blowup. La Selva was silently made to disappear. Rudel pooh-poohs the suggestion that it was a matter of jealousy. "He wasn't what we were looking for," Rudel says now. "I wanted someone with basic stylistic information to impart to our people about Italian opera at its best, not its worst. I wish it had worked out with La Selva. It wasn't to be." Are we to understand that La Selva's "stylistic information" was Italian opera at its worst? "I don't think loud and fast is the answer to every problem," Rudel sighs. "It was many years ago. I wouldn't presume to know the specifics at this moment." La Selva does not deny that he favors brisk tempi; he likes to shake things up, to keep performers on their toes. It is also the case that in animated passages, he tends to observe the loud dynamic markings more scrupulously than he does the soft. But he also has the rare gift of letting a big phrase breathe. Asked to characterize his style, he starts rather tentatively: "What I try to do is reflect what the feeling of the music is. To feel physically where everything fits and how it fits. It's dangerous when someone says you must only play what's written down. What is performing? Interpreting? Where is the room for personality? For freedom? I try not to negate all the great things learned by great performers of the past. It's pretentious that someone thinks he's gonna wipe the slate clean, like no one before knew what to do or what was right! I read music as well as the next person. But show me where it shows expression! I don't want to be bound by the printed page. I think Verdi would approve. As long as it's within taste!" La Selva will gladly let a soprano end a strenuous long section with an unwritten high note: "It's a flourish! To me, a home run is not in bad taste." Last summer, La Selva embarked on his boldest project yet: the "Viva Verdi!" festival, an unprecedented survey of all 28 Of the composer's operas in chronological order, building to the Requiem (indoors) on January 27, 2001, the hundredth anniversary of Verdi's death. Even well-traveled Verdi groupies will be encountering many of the scores onstage for the first time; no one before La Selva has ever attempted anything like this. (The season concludes this week on August 2 with Giovanna d'Arco ["Joan of Arc'].) And it is Verdi he turns to in support of his views, citing chapter and verse from operatic life in Verdi's own day. The list of partisans he has won over is impressive. There was the late B. H. Haggin, author of indispensable volumes on Toscanini, who in the sixties likened La Selva to the departed "Old Man,' ascribing to the young maestro "what Bernard Shaw described as the highest faculty of a conductor, namely the 'magnetic influence under which an orchestra becomes as amenable to the baton as a pianoforte to the fingers-and not only an orchestra but singers." There is Robert Hupka, who was, in the forties, librarian of RCA Victor's test pressings of the Toscanini recordings, and who in the sixties began telling anyone who would listen (and anyone in those civilized days included newscasters and talk-show hosts for CBS radio and television) that of living conductors, La Selva was "closest to the maestro." "La Selva is the only conductor to the present day who has the gift of the pulse," he said the other day. "He makes the music live." There is the Verdi scholar George Martin, who went on record in the British journal Opera as saying that for his money, "La Selva is probably the best conductor of Verdi, and perhaps also of Puccini, currently at work in New York. On most nights he is better than Levine or Solti or Sinopoli." The diva Licia Albanese, whose Traviata for Toscanini ranks with the very greatest, comes to La Selva's shows often and sits beaming in the front row. Born to working-class Italian parents in Cleveland, La Selva grew up with lots of music in his ears: his uncle's jazz band practicing at his grandmother's house, bright trumpets "singing" the soprano part with the bands the factory workers played in on feast days. Barely in his teens, he was playing trumpet himself at strip joints and dance halls as often as six nights a week. After violent battles with his father, he dropped out of high school to hit the road with the band of the jazz pianist Jack Olson. A few months later, Olson's band had folded, and the youngest lead player in the country was once again embroiled in violent battles with his father. This time, the elder La Selva prevailed, and Vincent reluctantly returned to school. By now, he was also studying classical music in a serious way. A teacher pointed him toward the Juilliard School, "which," La Selva notes, 'I'd never heard of." At Juilliard, he started out as a trumpet major but soon switched to conducting, with which he already had considerable practical experience. Another prescient teacher had turned the boy loose on the school orchestra when he was in seventh grade. "For some reason," La Selva says, "this man asked me to conduct. He wasn't too happy after a while, because I startedyelling, telling everybody how to play." At Juilliard, La Selva kept yelling and telling people what to do. When members of the Juilliard Orchestra played hooky rather than school-assigned run-throughs of work by composition students, La Selva took it upon himself to round them up on his and their own time. On one occasion, he summoned a particularly recalcitrant clarinetist. " 'You're going to make me play this crap?' the guy told me, with the composer sitting right there!' La Selva remembers. "And I told him, 'Sit down and play. This is what we're going to do.'" Nearly four decades on, he yells less. But he is still giving orders. "Don't look down; look up!" La Selva hectors his forces. "You hold the notes too long! You gotta watch! Remember the Golden Rule! Don't listen! Watch! You must watch my stick at all times." He points to his chest. "Let the sound go right down to your heart. You sing too much from the neck up." This is about as far as La Selva is willing to venture down the primrose path of metaphor. 'Everything's expression!" he calls out. "Got it? ... If you sing what I conduct, it'll be all right. I'm not just making a breeze in a room. Learn to read me, and you'll already have done pretty well." He intones the passage in a reedy tenor, which breaks, but the feeling is incandescent. Many of the players La Selva uses in the pit today go back to the Xavier era. Some of them occupy regular positions with the New York City Opera; the rest are drawn from the same large pool of freelancers that supplies such ensembles as the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra, not to mention Broadway musicals. Desk by desk, the players don't compare to their counterparts at the institutions their leader speaks of in tones of greatest awe (the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic), but La Selva wrests from them every last particle of music they have to give. As critic after critic has noticed, the grand emotional arc of La Selva's performances far transcends the sum of the parts. As for the soloists, at the New York Grand, you must not hope for the big or biggish names that dress up the Met's alfresco excursions. "I can't get a $15,000 artist," La Selva says, naming a fee that is actually just a fraction of a real superstar's. "I don't bother to try." Such an artist might also balk at the deplorable sound system. Yet La Selva fields casts that are often highly presentable. The handsome soprano Cynthia Springsteen, who took the killer role of Giselda in I Lombardi earlier this month, is no actress, but she boasts a rich, imperious instrument, a technique that laughs at such difficulties as a staccato scale, and a fme sincerity of expression. And she has high Cs and D flats to bum. Not to be outdone, the Bulgarian bass Valentin Peytchinov (who shares a teacher with the renowned Samuel Ramey) made a big, noble noise, articulated his words with textbook clarity, and tossed in a generous sprinkling of unwritten Fs and Gs, both high and low, without thereby violating musical decorum. In short, La Selva's artists are prepared and know their work; they never disgrace themselves by desperate high notes held on to for dear life, or lazy tempi, or other such provincial vulgarities. The productions are bare-bones, with generic costumes pulled from stock. There can still be the occasional coup de theatre. At the end of Lombardi, when the cast, in silhouette, turned to gaze upon a brightly lit little flat of Jerusalem with Lombard flags flying, the, tableau looked radiant. La Selva has never taken a salary from his company. "Not that I don't want to," he allows. "I hope that changes." He no longer looks for anyone else to donate labor, apart from the odd volunteer at the office and extra members of the chorus. And given the resources at his disposal, what he achieves falls little short of the trick with the loaves and the fishes. New York Grand Opera's principal sponsor, the Dime Savings Bank of New York, has been kicking in about 10 percent of the summer budget for the past three years. The National Endowment for the Arts, on the other hand, has yet to bestow its seal of approval, and may not survive to do so. "I think," says the violinist Joseph Diamante, who has played for La Selva over the course of three decades, much of the time in the key role of concertmaster, 'that Vince should be a candidate for a MacArthur award.' If he won the "genius" grant, maybe La Selva could at last quit moonlighting at the Juilliard School, where his courses in opera appreciation and in conducting have been selling out since they began in 1969. It is hard to imagine, though, that he would want to give up private coaching. Or that Danny, his wife, would want to stop selling real estate. Nor does one imagine much of any discretionary money flowing into La Selva's own pocket. Maybe he would splurge on a trip to Italy. It would be his first. |