INDIANOLA, Iowa — This town of about 16,000, 20 miles south of downtown Des Moines, might seem an unlikely place for a sophisticated opera festival. The tallest structure for miles around is a grain elevator, and dining options are largely limited to burgers, tacos and pizzas. My one previous experience of Des Moines Metro Opera, 35 years ago, suggested a pretty provincial operation.
But Alex Ross’ glowing New Yorker review of the company’s 2024 festival piqued my interest. And I could hardly resist a 2025 season of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen and Stravinsky’s Rake’s Progress.
In the event, all three productions were visually sophisticated, with casts of consistent vocal excellence rare in the most famous companies. With all performances in original languages, with projected translations, Des Moines may have supplanted Opera Theatre of St. Louis as the Midwest’s must-see summer opera festival.
The company was founded in 1973 by the late Robert Larsen, a music professor at Indianola’s Simpson College, and his former student Douglas Duncan. For 38 years Larsen served as both music and stage director. The company now seems quite transformed by Michael Egel, a Larsen protégé who has been general and artistic director since 2013.
Performances are in the intimate 500-seat Pote Theatre, in the college’s Blank Performing Arts Center. Extending beyond the stage house is a large thrust stage, with a cutout above an orchestra pit — and an elevator, used to imaginative effect in the Dutchman and Rake’s Progress.
Acoustics are quite favorable for singers, who never need to push — although they sometimes did. The constricted opening over the pit pinches the orchestral sound, though, making violins sound thin and wiry, basses inaudible. As with Santa Fe Opera, orchestra personnel are drawn from around the country, and there were obviously some fine players.
As at Santa Fe and Saint Louis, Des Moines engages young apprentice singers who take smaller roles — some not so small — and combine for chorus parts. Chorus contributions, prepared by director Lisa Hasson, were consistently excellent.
‘The Cunning Little Vixen’
Sophisticated digital projections are increasingly common in opera productions these days. But Janáček’s fairy-tale opera was backed with dazzling 3D spreads of vividly colored forest scenes, panned and telescoped, more advanced than anything I’ve seen elsewhere.
The production represented the collaboration of “visual composer” (thus identified) Oyoram, scenic designer Luke Cantarella and lighting designer Kate Ashton. Costumer Vita Tzykun supplied cute costumes for the animals and turn-of-the-20th-century duds for the humans. Stage director Kristine McIntyre brought characters both animal and human vividly to life, with admirably judged physicality — and a good deal of choreography by Lisa Thurrell. The July 6 matinee was a delight through and through.
As with familiar fairy tales, Vixen portrays animals in life dramas like those of humans. The eponymous female fox is captured by the Forester, but as a rebellious adolescent she escapes and finds love with a male fox. Surrounded by other animals, they produce a litter before she’s killed by the poacher Harašta.
In the final scene, the Forester muses on youth and old age, but a young frog reminds him of the ongoing and ever transforming cycle of life. At the end, as in Janáček’s more obviously serious operas, the orchestra produces a surge of glorious music, representing the life force itself.
Hera Hyesang Park was the aptly feisty — and physically nimble — Vixen, with a gleaming soprano she sometimes pushed more than necessary. She had her match in Sun-Ly Pierce’s Fox, also a soprano role. Roland Wood’s rich stew of a baritone was perfect for the Forester, and veteran mezzo Jill Grove was impressively imperious and sonorous as the Forester’s Wife. The drunken dialogue between the Schoolmaster and the Parson was touchingly dramatized by, respectively, tenor David Cangelosi and bass-baritone Craig Colclough.
The numerous smaller roles, and the choruses of Hens and fox/vixen cubs, were admirably executed. DMMO music director David Neely was the authoritative conductor, although some of the high violin writing could have been more precisely tuned.
‘The Rake’s Progress’
The Rake’s Progress is a morality tale, with vividly drawn characters, plenty of tension and a bit of campy humor — and music at Stravinsky’s neoclassical finest.
With libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, the opera was inspired by 18th-century engravings by William Hogarth. Tom Rakewell and Anne Trulove seem totally smitten with each other, but Tom succumbs to promises of riches and sensual pleasures from the shady operator Nick Shadow. Too late, Tom learns it’s a Mephistophelian bargain, and he saves his soul only at the price of madness and committal in a mental institution.
Stravinsky’s score mixes perky, piquant tunes and eerie wreathings, with vocal lines by turn fluid and strategically disjunct. In a nod to 18th-century precedent, vocal recitatives are accompanied by harpsichord continuo — but here with mischievously dissonant harmonies.
Designer Robert Perdziola gave the Des Moines production mix-and-match neoclassical portals, and, for the auction of Tom’s objets d’art, 18th-century answers to Louise Nevelson cabinets. Costumes were 18th century, too, quite a riot of chintz painting Mother Goose’s house of easy pleasures as a pretty fancy one. Suave lighting was by Connie Yun. Stage director Chas Rader-Shieber vividly animated the characters, with one excellent voice after another.
Joélle Harvey gave Anne Trulove a sleek, substantive soprano capable of great nuance, and Jonas Hacker’s Tom Rakewell deployed a finely honed lyric tenor and fastidious diction. Sam Carl’s Nick had a potent and well-focused bass-baritone.
But, fine as the principals’ voices were, I kept feeling they were often projected too aggressively for the compact theater; they turned intimate interchanges into big-screen dramas. This is a subtler work than it was allowed to be.
Meredith Arwady’s great trombone of a contralto worked well for Mother Goose, but I wish the campy bearded-lady role of Baba the Turk had more of Arwady’s vocal and physical oomph; Vivica Genaux’s mezzo was a bit lightweight for the part.
Matt Boehler supplied a deep-pile bass for Father Trulove, and Christian Sanders was splendidly over the top as the auctioneer Sellem. The chorus was very fine.
In a score demanding absolute rhythmic precision, singers often well in front of the deep-set orchestra pit were not always fastidiously coordinated. Even the orchestra, led by conductor Christopher Allen, sometimes sounded as if it could have used an additional rehearsal. But July 5 was opening night; some issues presumably would sort out in subsequent performances.
Much as I’ve admired this opera, though, the last act here seemed interminable, to go on way past the point it had made its point. Many an opera could use editing, this one especially.
‘The Flying Dutchman’
One thinks of Dutchman as grand opera: those heroic horn calls over orchestral thrusts and swirls of stormy seas, the dramatic confrontations, the grand choruses of carousing men and spinning women. How would it come off in a 500-seat auditorium?
The answer, at least on July 4, was quite impressively indeed. Actually, much of the opera, a study in obsessive-compulsive behaviors, is a series of charged encounters of only two or three characters.
Of the festival’s three productions, vocally this was the most consistently satisfying — in the sense that each singer’s projection was perfectly scaled to the intimate setting. And Joshua Borths’ staging admirably managed logistics as well as character development.
Julie Adams, with a lustrous soprano, gave Senta real determination. Ryan McKinny’s grim Dutchman, with substantive, aptly granular bass-baritone, was a commanding presence. Kristopher Irmiter was a restless, rich-toned Daland.
As Erik, pathologically infatuated with Senta, Joseph Dennis had a smaller, throatier baritone, but even that fit the role. Demetrious Sampson Jr., one of the festival’s apprentices, gave the Steersman a bold, finely finished tenor.
Both male and female choruses sang thrillingly. David Neely skillfully coordinated the orchestra with the singers, although the constricted pit opening sacrificed too much sonic weight.
With Ian Wallace’s bold background projections of roiling seas and the Dutchman’s looming ship, scenic designer Steven Kemp made imaginative use of the elevator for shifting props. Erik Teague’s costumes were appropriately 19th century.
Details
The 2025 Des Moines Metro Opera festival runs through July 20 at Simpson College’s Blank Performing Arts Center in Indianola, Iowa. 515-961-6221, desmoinesmetroopera.org.