Rising conductor Kamna Gupta makes Vancouver Opera debut with a cleverly reframed The Pearl Fishers
Maestro sees her choral work, classical training, and even her childhood Bharatanatyam lessons coalesce in production of Bizet work
Kamna Gupta was born in France and raised in America.
The conductor moves fluidly between choral, symphonic, and opera music.
Vancouver Opera presents The Pearl Fishers at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on October 22, 27, and 30
IN VANCOUVER OPERA’S new The Pearl Fishers, conductor Kamna Gupta is seeing the different threads of her cultural upbringing finally weave together.
The innovatively reframed production—the first in 30 years at VO of the Sri-Lanka-set work— brings to life not just Georges Bizet’s lush, classical score but different styles of South Asian dance.
“The kid who did Bharatanatyam and Bollywood and the kid who went to piano lessons and learned to conduct: this is the first time those two things are coming together,” reflects the French-born, New York City-based artist, who is making her Vancouver debut at the podium.
In fact, the echoes through Gupta’s life and career go even further in the project here.
Gupta has been making a name lately for conducting new opera–including this year’s West Coast premiere of In Our Daughter’s Eyes at L.A. Opera–but she has been feeling deeply at home in the beautiful, bel canto-influenced world of The Pearl Fishers during rehearsals in the past few weeks.
“I love working on new opera, but my training was always on the more traditional canon. And I have to say the new works only make sense in the context of that canon,” she explains with enthusiasm. “The best new music is rooted in tradition, just like Bizet when he was writing this work in his time and it was new, and you can hear the bel canto influence in his works.”
Gupta moves with extraordinary ease and passion between the centuries, it seems. “I’ve got three pieces of music sitting on my piano bench right now: one of them is this 1863 Bizet; I’ve got this new piece from 2022; and then I’ve got this piece from 1651, early, early opera,” she says. “And it’s really so fun to have all three of these pieces in front of me, because there's more in common between these different works than on the surface. They sound very different, but the technical issues of storytelling through music, how to navigate between speaking, recitative, and singing—those things have really remained the same.”
The Pearl Fishers, with its rich, colourful choruses and constant duets–including the ultra-famous, mellifluous friendship duet “Au fond du temple saint”–also has the maestro tapping into her lifelong love of group singing. She grew up performing in choirs, and it was there that she first got the urge to conduct.
Gupta started out as a choir conductor—not once stopping to contemplate how rare it was for a female, especially one of colour, to take the podium.
“I guess a lot of my choir training was women,” she reflects. “When I started conducting, I was interested in the craft; I liked the work and I liked score studying and I liked interpreting. And it wasn't until later where I started telling people, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a conductor,’ that people were like, ‘That’s really unusual because you're a woman going into it!’ But I had never thought about it myself!”
In retrospect, Gupta sees that she was lucky not to have experienced the issues around gender in classical music early on—though she’s well aware she’s a rarity now that she’s a busy choral, symphonic, and opera conductor. She credits the work of trailblazers like Marin Alsop–who in 2007 became the first woman to lead one of America’s 25 major orchestras–for the opportunities Gupta and a wave of others in her generation have today. “I think it's a really rapidly changing world, and there are so many women doing so well—and it's just a matter of time,” she says.
Just like the classical world is opening up to women, it’s opening up to new cultural points of view–which brings us back to this production of The Pearl Fishers, and the way it addresses the dated exoticism of its portrayal of the South Asian country that was then known as Ceylon. The opera centres on a love triangle between Zurga, the leader of a fishing village, his old friend Nadir, and the priestess Leïla. Gupta hints that Vancouver stage director Rachel Peake has framed the piece so that it begins with the performers arriving at a rehearsal room in 19th-century Paris, and the classical opera then unfolding clearly from Bizet’s imagination.
“I think that was a really genius way of facing some of the issues in the piece, because this is a 19th-century Frenchman’s view of what ancient Sri Lanka was like–and we clarify that right from the beginning,” Gupta comments.
Similarly, the four female South Asian dancers–who specialize in individual styles from hip-hop to Bharatanatyam to Sri Lankan kandyan dance–bring more complexity to the depiction of women, and specifically Leïla, in The Pearl Fishers; they’re choreographed by dancer-performer-singer-actor Krystal Kiran. Gupta has been enjoying this innovative addition to an opera that normally isn’t staged with dance elements.
“These dancers are part of both worlds: they’re outside of the story and inside the story, depending on the scene; they’re sort of deified,” Gupta explains. “They function almost like a Greek chorus and a counterweight to Leïla’s story—to this view of, you know, the quote ‘brown woman’. They give a much more varied view of the story.”
Gupta too, in her own way, is bringing a new array of knowledge and experience to the opera world–and beyond.
“I started as a choral conductor, studied symphonic conducting, and now I’m doing opera, and I think I’ve learned so much from having my fingers in each style,” she says. “There are practical things that make it easier for conductors to stay in their lane. But I think the art itself has more crossover than that: these composers wrote not just opera, they did all three. And there’s so much to learn from having a global view.”
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