Opera Company of Middlebury founder and artistic director Doug Anderson remembers lying on the living room floor of his childhood home in Ohio and watching Leonard Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” on CBS. The first internationally acclaimed American-born conductor, Bernstein led the New York Philharmonic in the televised programs from 1958 to 1972. The series was syndicated in more than 40 countries — and represented just a fraction of the music giant’s output.
In a full-circle homage, Anderson, 72, has mounted A Bernstein Festival, a multiweek celebration at Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater that he hopes will give “a 360-degree view of [Bernstein’s] talent,” he said by phone. The festival includes film screenings, preshow talks and musical performances that include a staging of a rarely seen Bernstein short opera.
The fest kicks off on Wednesday, September 24, with a screening of Leonard Bernstein: The Gift of Music, a 1993 documentary that will be introduced by Opera Company of Middlebury music director Filippo Ciabatti. The following night features a showing of the 1961 film version of West Side Story, with a prescreening talk by Anderson. On Thursday, October 2, Anderson will introduce the 2021 film of Opera Company of Middlebury’s performance of Bernstein’s Candide, which he directed.
The festival’s signature event features performances of famous Bernstein songs followed by his less famous one-act opera about a suburban marriage in crisis, Trouble in Tahiti. Chorus master Nathaniel Lew will introduce the Friday, October 3, performance; Helen Lyons, music manager and classical music host at Vermont Public, will give Saturday’s preshow talk. Danielle Simon, assistant professor of music at Middlebury College, will give Sunday’s.
Ciabatti has conducted with the company since 2023 and will lead five singers and an orchestra of 17 musicians. By phone, he called Bernstein “a towering figure” and “very interesting American” who was at once a composer, a conductor, a pianist and an educator as well as a closeted gay man and a political activist. “He was a larger-than-life figure who left a huge legacy,” Ciabatti said.
Trouble in Tahiti is not widely known within that legacy in part because the 40-minute musically hybrid work is among his “saddest and darkest,” the conductor said. Most often seen in college productions because of its small cast — it premiered at Brandeis University in 1952 — the opera will be a rare offering for Town Hall Theater audiences.
It will also appear in the wider context of Bernstein’s works for voice. The first half of the program, which Anderson is calling “The Bernstein Songbook,” features chronological selections from On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), Candide (1956), West Side Story (1957) and Mass (1971).
Ciabatti notes that Trouble in Tahiti is “not completely pessimistic. The music is wonderful, the psychology is very subtle, and there’s humor in it.” Bernstein based the work on his parents and wrote both the lyrics and the music. It follows one day in the life of married couple Sam and Dinah, with a jazz-singing trio acting as a Greek chorus that comments on their suburban life.
“Bernstein is critiquing ourslide into consumerism.”
Doug Anderson
Anderson said the trio will be “ironically costumed” in matching plaid tuxedos but “all sweetness and light and joy” when singing about the suburbs. That postwar phenomenon began with the development of the first U.S. suburb, Levittown, N.Y., in 1947 — only a few years before Bernstein wrote Trouble in Tahiti.
Anderson explained that the trio’s cheeriness echoes the advertising of the day. “[Bernstein] was hearing all these jingles on TV and radio with three-part harmony telling us how great [suburban] life is,” the director said. “These two people have everything they’ve ever wanted, but they can’t find happiness. Bernstein is critiquing our slide into consumerism.”
Mezzo soprano Olga Perez Flora, of Albuquerque, N.M., will sing Dinah. The head of voice at the University of New Mexico, Flora established a collaborative program between the college and Santa Fe Opera, a leading U.S. opera company, and cohosts the company’s podcast, “Key Change.”
Flora has sung for 20 years in companies throughout the country and has appeared in several Opera Company of Middlebury productions. She first performed Bernstein this spring when she sang Anita in West Side Story with Indianapolis Opera. Born in Louisiana to Cuban refugees, the singer considers the iconic work “a pinnacle in terms of a musical that highlights Latin American culture,” she said by phone.
“Bernstein was a genius,” Flora continued. Specifically, she appreciates how, in Trouble in Tahiti, “he puts the words into the rhythm, sets the words in the tessitura” — the comfortable core of a singer’s range — “and sets the highest notes to vowels that are easy to sing.” He also ingeniously tells the story through both lyrics and music, she added.
In “What a Movie!,” Flora’s biggest aria, Dinah describes to her hairdresser a film she just saw that sounds a lot like South Pacific — which is set in Tahiti. As her dismissive tones gradually turn to longing, the score faintly echoes a melody from the famous musical.
“I feel bad for her,” Flora said of her character. “She struggles to figure out who she is. I wonder, Will this marriage make it?”
Bernstein found an unprecedented way to tell that story, Ciabatti said: “He introduced American pop into classical music. Now, that’s taken for granted. At the time it wasn’t that way.”
Anderson added, “He really believed that all music is for all people. He was very American, very democratic.”
A Bernstein Festival, presented by the Opera Company of Middlebury, Wednesday, September 24, through Sunday, October 5, at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. Free-$94.
The original print version of this article was headlined “To Lenny, With Love | Opera Company of Middlebury celebrates Leonard Bernstein with new festival”
This article appears in Sept 24-30 2025.
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