No sooner had Ardis Krainik returned from vacation last June when her secretary knocked on her office door at Lyric Opera. “Ardis,” she said, “the chiefs want to see you.”
Lined up outside the general director’s office were the key members of Krainik’s administrative team: Susan Mathieson, director of marketing and communications; William Mason, director of operations, artistic and production; Farrell Frentress, director of development; and Richard Dowsek, director of administration and finance.
Krainik knew something big was up. She waited for one of her chiefs to speak up.
“We have gotten together and decided Lyric is going to put on an event,” said Mathieson. Up went Krainik’s eyebrow. “A gala to honor you and to benefit Lyric Opera.” Moreover, Mathieson added, at the end of the benefit concert the auditorium of the Civic Opera House would be renamed the Ardis Krainik Theatre.
Thus was the Ardis Krainik Celebration Gala born.
All this to honor the general director who will be retiring from Lyric in April 1997, after having served for nearly 43 of her 67 years as typist, secretary, chorister, comprimario singer, assistant general manager and chief executive of Lyric Opera. She has been Lyric’s general director since a palace coup installed her in 1981.
“I was so overwhelmed to hear they were naming the theater after me, I almost fainted dead away,” Krainik recalls.
The event, which takes place at 3 p.m. Sunday at the Civic Opera House, has turned into the hottest ticket of the music season. All 3,500 tickets, ranging from $40 to $500 patron seats, went on sale to the public at the beginning of August and were completely sold by the end of the month.
And that was weeks before the last artist had been announced. Nine performers had signed on for the event by the time Mathieson’s ticket brochure was mailed at the beginning of August. Since then, the number of musicians donating their services has jumped to 23.
True to Lyric’s voice-loving tradition, the guest list for the gala is long and starry.
Tenor Placido Domingo will co-host the affair along with Lyric president and CEO Edgar D. Jannotta. Singers who have agreed to appear are June Anderson, Vladimir Chernov, Barbara Daniels, Renee Fleming, Mirella Freni, Nicolai Ghiaurov, Hakan Hagegard, Ben Heppner, Marilyn Horne, Kristjan Johannsson, Catherine Malfitano, Eva Marton, Timothy Nolen, Samuel Ramey, Michael Sylvester, Carol Vaness, Frederica von Stade and Dolora Zajick.
A special guest is Chicago Symphony music director Daniel Barenboim. Not only did he graciously agree to switch the time of his piano recital at Orchestra Hall from 3 p.m. to 11:30 a.m. Sunday so as not to conflict with the Krainik gala, but he also will take part in the festivities.
Also donating their services will be the Lyric Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and members of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, along with conductors Bruno Bartoletti, Richard Buckley and Arthur Fagen. The program, running anywhere from 2 1/2 to 3 hours, will hold favorite operatic arias and choruses.
An easy sell
If executing the gala was a team effort, it was Mathieson who dreamed it up. “I just woke up one morning and thought: We’ve got to do a big show for Ardis, it’s essential,” says the marketing director, whose most recent accomplishment was selling out all three of Lyric’s “Ring” cycles last spring.
Before long Mason, Frentress, the Lyric board and various other members of the administration had signed onto the project. Just to guarantee their modest boss could not say no to the gala, they made sure they had Domingo and several other major participants safely under contract before springing it on her.
Without much persuasion the Sara Lee Corp.–whose chairman and CEO, John H. Bryan, is a longtime friend of Krainik’s–agreed to pick up the entire tab for the event, at an undisclosed amount.
Less easy was rounding up the rest of the musical guests. “You have to understand that, in the life of an opera company, putting together a gala of this type is like dropping an atom bomb into the middle of an already hectic season,” says Mathieson. For the Metropolitan Opera’s 25th anniversary gala in honor of James Levine last May in New York, it took more than two years to book the artists. By comparison, Mathieson and her fellow chiefs managed to sign, seal and deliver their gala in less than three months.
“With some artists, all we had to do was mention Ardis’ name and they were willing to drop everything just to be able to take part,” says Mason, who is the artistic coordinator of the gala, along with Bartoletti and artistic adviser Matthew Epstein.
About half of the singers taking part in the gala already are appearing in Lyric productions of Verdi’s “Don Carlo,” Puccini’s “Il Trittico” and Menotti’s “The Consul,” opening next Saturday. The remaining artists were trickier to recruit since most were already engaged in various theaters around the world.
Catching the ubiquitous Domingo was a feat unto itself. The tenor is singing in Giordano’s “Fedora” and conducting Verdi’s “La Traviata” at the Met on Saturday; then he will hop on his private jet, fly into Chicago, host the Krainik gala, then fly to San Francisco immediately afterward.
“He wanted to do this for Ardis,” says Mathieson, “and because Sunday was about the only free day he had all season, we sort of built (the gala) around his schedule.”
Just hours before the program was to be sent to the printer, Krainik received word that Freni and Ghiaurov would be flying in from Italy to appear at the event. That Freni agreed to attend “touches me a great deal,” says Krainik. The soprano was the very first artist the newly appointed general director signed for the first season of her new administration, in 1981-82.
Free-flowing nostalgia
Even with a few notable no-shows (tenor Alfredo Kraus had a schedule conflict in Europe and sent his regrets), operations director Mason says he never was worried the gala would go begging for singers.
“If we had announced we are holding this thing underwater at 11:30 at night, everybody would have broken their neck to be there for Ardis,” he quips.
Well, almost everybody. The name most conspicuous by his absence from the guest list is Luciano Pavarotti, whom Krainik fired in 1989 after he canceled one performance too many at Lyric. The megatenor has not sung at Lyric since, nor has he been invited to the gala. A Lyric official admitted, off the record, that planners “gave it plenty of thought” before deciding not to invite Pavarotti. “Much as we would have loved to effect a (reconciliation), that would have turned the event into something other than a gala honoring Ardis.”
Never fear: A souvenir program book will be packed with tributes and greetings from many other artists, complete with a veritable memory lane of photographs taken of Krainik on and offstage over Lyric’s 42-year history. Expect the nostalgia to flow as freely during the gala as the champagne at the patrons reception afterward in the Opera House foyers.
Frentress says the public response to the gala has been “overwhelming,” a tribute to “the love and admiration everyone has for this great lady.” The event is expected to raise roughly $500,000 for Lyric’s educational programs.
“Everybody has really gone to the mat to make this happen,” says Mathieson. “Lyric is known as a team-player company and, boy, did they ever come through for this.”
Adds Mason: “Every major opera company should do one `Ring’ cycle and one big gala concert. Now that we’ve done our `Ring’ last spring and the gala is almost history, I am inclined to think putting on the `Ring’ was easier.”
