A true romantic

Unlike many conductors, John Fiore did not come to opera from a symphonic background. Opera was his first love and has remained the focus of his musical career, starting from a remarkably early age.

"I was 8 or 9 when I saw Turandot, and that really blew me away," he recalls. "I started to learn as many operas as I could. Then I discovered [Arturo] Toscanini, and I thought he was pretty amazing. At that point, I decided I wanted to be a conductor."

Now 48, Fiore has carved out an impressive career on two continents, establishing himself as an intelligent and versatile maestro at houses like the New York Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera and Chicago Lyric Opera before venturing to Europe in the mid-1980s. He is now in his 10th season as chief conductor at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf and a regular guest at major houses in Munich, Dresden and Cologne.

Fiore first came to the attention of local audiences in 2005, when he conducted all four operas of Wagner's Ring cycle at the National Theater. It was a commanding performance, not only for its breadth and depth, but for the skill and authority Fiore showed in handling one of the major works of the world repertoire. But perhaps that shouldn't have been surprising, coming from someone who literally grew up with the Ring.

From the beginning

"I saw Die Walküre when I was 11, and that fascinated me," he says. "The next year, the Seattle opera was doing Siegfried, and that's basically how I learned to play the piano, playing that opera. It's rather bizarre, but that's what happened."

Born in New York City, Fiore moved with his family to Seattle when he was 7. Both of his parents were musicians, and his father got a job as a voice coach at the Seattle Opera. When managers there learned that he had a son who was good at replicating orchestral scores on a piano, they brought him in for rehearsals.

"That was the summer of '75, when they were doing Götterdämmerung," Fiore says. "I didn't get paid, but I didn't care. I loved it. I was having a ball."

Fiore went on to do formal music studies at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, but that's not where he learned how to conduct.

"I went to conductor school by being an assistant to a lot of different people," he says.  "I got to work with great conductors like Zubin Mehta and James Levine. I even did a project with Lenny Bernstein - at so many levels, a major titan. I took a little something from everybody, just sucked it up and learned everything I could."

In 1986, Fiore launched his own career with Gounod's Faust at the San Francisco Opera. His credits since then read like an inventory of the world repertoire, ranging from Verdi and Puccini to Strauss, Berlioz and Debussy. He's done the Czech masters, in particular Janáček, and is a champion of new contemporary works. At heart, though, he's a romantic.

"I adore my Wagner and Strauss, and Tchaikovsky falls into the romantic category too," he says.

He certainly does in Fiore's hands. Though director Andrei Serban has updated the National Theater's new production of Eugene Onegin to a contemporary setting, the music remains firmly in the 19th century, melodic and unabashedly emotional, the kind of lush interpretation that's been packing theaters since the opera premiered in 1879.

Here and now

Not every visiting conductor gets that kind of sound from the National Theater orchestra, which can be quite good or disappointingly flat, depending on who's at the podium. Fiore is a craftsman who, even in broken Czech, manages to convey to the musicians what he's after.

"I try to get them to play in their sound, to listen to each other and think about the sound they're making, and to maximize its warmth and roundness," he says. "I use the word 'legato' a lot, and talk about making the sound fluid and continuous."

One of the challenges of Eugene Onegin is balancing the large choral and crowd scenes with quiet moments, especially the famous extended scene in which Tatiana writes a love letter to Onegin. Fiore does a lot of detail work with sections of the orchestra to fine-tune those passages.

"It's interesting. The big scenes with the trumpets and trombones and the timpani are in some ways the easiest, because they're symphonic numbers with a chorus," he says. "It's the intimate stuff that one has to make a lot of decisions about - how you want to shape it, how it works with the singer. You have to devote the time to get the sensitivity and the dynamic right, because it's a very delicate score in a lot of ways."

Whatever the merits of the larger production (reviewed in the Post March 25), the letter scene is magical, with Fiore drawing a rich emotional palette from the orchestra that mirrors Tatiana's inner turmoil. There's not much action onstage, but with her hope and despair so vivid in the music, there doesn't need to be.

Now a favorite with National Theater management, Fiore will no doubt be back for future productions, a prospect that suits him just fine. "I love the house; it has very good acoustics," he says. "And I love the size of it. In America, you have to have big houses, because you need to sell a lot of tickets - that's just the way it is. Here, you can see the faces of the singers from almost every seat. It's adorable."

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com