Opera Philadelphia gala draws a collection of creatives

Even during lean years, Opera Philadelphia could manage at least a klieg light for its season opener.

Now celebrating its 40th anniversary with financial stability and grand plans for seasons to come, Opera Philadelphia had two lanes of Broad Street blocked Friday with a climate-controlled tent to house a catered dinner. First, there was an intimate concert with 400 listeners sitting on the Academy of Music stage to hear internationally established singers whose careers began here, Ailyn Perez and Stephen Costello.

Adding luster were a bevy of singers associated with the company, including Angela Brown, William Burden, Anthony Roth Costanzo, David Daniels, Isabel Leonard, Nathan Gunn, and Eric Owens.

"If everybody here sang," said tenor Costello, "we'd be here for a week. But what a glorious week it would be."

Why have everybody onstage? "We wanted to celebrate where the work happens," said general director David B. Devan. "We didn't want to do a fund-raiser that was forced. Ailyn [who is from Chicago] and Stephen [from Northeast Philadelphia] started their careers here at Academy of Vocal Arts and their first professional engagements were on this stage. You want to make this celebration about what you do."

Tickets started at $250 for the concert only and went up to $40,000 for concert plus a table at dinner. An auction included a week's vacation in a villa in Spain. The gross was $500,000, roughly 4 percent of the $10.8 million budget this season.

Since the gala was scheduled before most musical institutions are consumed by their own seasons, guests represented a wide cross-section of the Philadelphia performing arts, with bigwigs from the Kimmel Center, the Academy of Vocal Arts, the Curtis Institute of Music, LyricFest, and Tempesta di Mare.

If any single individual represents many of the city's institutions, it's bass-baritone Owens, who is Philadelphia-born and trained in several of them. After considerable acclaim in Wagnerian roles at the Metropolitan Opera, he is the linchpin of Opera Philadelphia's Don Carlo production later this season, singing King Philip II, one of the great vocal/acting roles of his voice type - "and something I've wanted to do ever since I began singing."

The Broad Street tent, which intentionally had windows on the north and south sides to give a view of the Avenue of the Arts, had an obligatory red carpet that perhaps was barely noticed in an event that felt more like a class reunion than high-glam. Devan's predecessor Robert Driver needed 15 minutes to get only a few feet from Locust Street to the Academy door, greeting one friend after another. "It feels weird," he admitted, "but good weird." As a stage director, he's developing a new work in Brazil, where he grew up.

The composer contingent was extensive: Nico Muhly, Kevin Puts, David T. Little, and echt-Brooklyn composer Missy Mazzoli, originally from Lansdale, who admitted she was wearing a long gown for the first time in her life: "I feel like a natural."

Pulitzer-winning composer Jennifer Higdon and longtime partner Cheryl Lawson, recently married, said the event wasn't second-best to the Grammy Awards (which they've attended) "because there's a bigger biscuit at the end of the stick - an opera!" said Lawson.

That comment had two meanings: Higdon's Cold Mountain (originally for the San Francisco Opera but grabbed by Santa Fe Opera and Opera Philadelphia with respective premieres in 2015 and 2016) and the evening's Perez/Costello recital, a husband-and-wife team who both have lyric voices made for Italian opera.

The concert was planned to be intimate, but became all the more so when both performers started changing the program in midstream. Costello had a sinus infection that made him bail out on a concert in Washington earlier in the week. Arias from La Boheme had to go. Perez inserted "Je suis encore tout étourdie" from Massenet's Manon, exuding coquettish detail, and made more program changes as she went along, adding "Chi il bel sogno di Doretta" from Puccini's La Rondine. Shedding his Northeast Philly street smarts, Costello sang Italianate Tosti songs, embodying their sentiments so completely he seemed to become a different person - and sounded just fine.

"The good news," he said, "is that I didn't cancel."