XL Cover Story: Phenom of the opera

The son of a soprano takes his first Austin creative gamble this week with 'Elektra'

Photo by Brian K. Diggs/AA-S Richard Buckley at the Austin Lyric Opera offices on Barton Springs Road. Buckley took over as artistic director in August 2003. 'ELEKTRA' When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Monday and Jan. 14; 3 p.m. Jan. 16 Where: Bass Concert Hall, University of Texas campus, 23rd Street and Robert Dedman Drive Tickets: $15-$109 Information: 472-5992, www.austinlyricopera.org 'LLUMINATING ELEKTRA' A panel discussion moderated by Richard Buckley with soprano Susan Marie Pierson, psychologist Carol Pierce Davis, and UT classics professor Douglas Parker When: 7 p.m. Wednesday Where: Ducloux Hall, Austin Lyric Opera, 901 Barton Springs Road Tickets: free Information: 472-5927 More on 'Elektra' Loving 'Elektra' Richard Strauss, the burgomaster composer

Indeed the 51-year-old artistic director of the Austin Lyric Opera is as ardent as it gets.

Now is a good time to ask Buckley who he is. Though appointed artistic director of the opera company in August 2003, he spent most of the past season fulfilling previous commitments to conduct around the world. In September, he led his first production with the Austin opera, Puccini's "Tosca." It won him kudos from critics and audience members alike.

This week, however, he is taking his first big creative gamble in Austin: "Elektra," the sweeping, intense tragedy of familial revenge with the thematically compressed and fluctuating music of Richard Strauss. After two seasons of presenting opera warhorses, Austin Lyric Opera is heading in brave new directions, including the early-20th-century works of composers such as Strauss, Leos Janácek and Benjamin Britten.

Why rock the boat when the opera company is just now recovering from the new century's economic bust and an unpleasant change of leadership? Ask the long-limbed, goateed Buckley, and it comes clear instantly: He is all about the music all the time.

"I'm a 24/7 guy," he says. "And you know what, if you're going to run an arts organization in this society today, that's the only way I know that it's going to work because there are still not enough hours in the day."

Peter Bay, conductor of the Austin Symphony Orchestra, has a bead on Buckley's modus operandi.

"Richard has a laser-intense focus on what he wants to accomplish," he says. "He's demanding, but he gets results."

"I can see a difference in the quality of the productions at ALO and certainly heard a difference in the orchestra," says Glenn Chandler, director of the upwardly bound University of Texas School of Music, which hopes to collaborate closely with Buckley in its newly named Butler Opera Center. "I think there will be very interesting things in the future."

To rework a tired cliché, then: Richard Buckley is not so much an open book, he's an open opera score.

Like father, not really like son

In many ways, music runs through Buckley's veins.

He was born to an extremely musical family in New York City in 1953. His parents met when both worked with the San Carlo Opera Company in the mid-1940s.

The company played a critical role in the opera education of North America. Like a circus, the San Carlo, founded in 1913, toured the United States and Canada in a train 42 weeks a year, performing opera greats, sometimes putting on nine shows a week in places such as Galveston, San Antonio and Austin.

His father, Emerson Buckley, served as the San Carlo music director for three years; his mother, Canadian-born soprano Mary Henderson, sang lead roles in almost 400 performances. "I still meet people who tell me the first opera they ever saw was a San Carlo production," says Buckley.

His parents eventually came to roost on Manhattan's Upper West Side, not far from the Manhattan School of Music where they both taught. Emerson Buckley took the mantle of the WOR radio orchestra music director, along with other guest conducting spots with ensembles such as the New York City Opera. His mother continued performing.

Theirs was (obviously) a very musical household -- and a bit of a combustible one too. Buckley describes his parents as both "very strong, very opinionated, very straightforward" people. "My father had this very old fashioned, New Yorker style. Very quick witted, often times pretty ribald," he says. Sometimes, to his mortal embarrassment, his parents would engage in across-the-table screaming matches during dinner parties.

The younger of two sons -- his brother now practices law -- Buckley made his first appearance on stage at age 2 playing "Trouble," Cio-Cio-San's son, in a production of "Madame Butterfly" that his father conducted. Throughout his elementary school years, Buckley sang and performed in musical theater and opera productions. "It was fun," Buckley says of his youthful days in the limelight. "But it was also a way for me to be around my parents."

Indeed, any musical son would want to be around Emerson Buckley, who died in 1989. Known as a champion of American music, he conducted the debuts of important new operas such as Douglas Moore's "The Ballad of Baby Doe" in 1956 (Austin performed it in 1997) and in 1961, Richard Ward's "The Crucible," based on the play by Arthur Miller.

After moving his base of operations to South Florida in the 1960s, Emerson Buckley became the music director of the Greater Miami Opera and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Florida, positions he held for several decades. In 1965, while auditioning singers in Italy, he signed an unknown tenor named Luciano Pavarotti to his first American contract. Pavarotti remained ever grateful to the elder Buckley and subsequently made him chief conductor on his world tours.

But father and son were never all that close. "He wasn't accessible even when he was at home," says Buckley. "The door was literally always closed when my father was in his study studying scores."

Even after Richard Buckley settled into his own conducting career, a distance remained between father and son. Occasionally the two rehearsed together in the way that conductors do when they don't have an orchestra in front of them -- each seated before a music stand, baton in hand, humming and bah-bah-bumming, the elder Buckley chainsmoking incessantly. "His idea of imparting musical knowledge to me was on a very small, technical level," says Buckley. "Rarely did I ever hear my father talk about the overall architecture or emotion of a piece."

Longtime observers have discerned crucial differences between the father and son conductors. "Richard seems to be a much greater risk-taker than his father," says Tim Smith, classical music critic of the Baltimore Sun. "He's more inclined to bring his own personality to a performance, more likely to produce a jolt of extra passion from the pit."

That jolt was evident on a Sunday afternoon when Buckley took the podium in Austin Lyric Opera's rehearsal hall, the entire cast and orchestra assembled before him. After running through the opening movement, he admonished the musicians. "Please, people -- you have to respect the voices," he said. "That's what makes an opera orchestra great."

They began again, playing through the first half of Strauss' 100-minute, one-act, fiercly dramatic opera. Buckley balanced on the balls of his feet one second, half-crouched the next. His hands contorted and punched the air. His face became elastic, morphing rapidly through a multitude of expressions: pained, exalted, angry, exuberant, ghoulish.

When the music stopped and he stepped down from the podium, Buckley's face flushed red. His black polo shirt glistened with sweat. He gulped down a bottle of water, out of breath, an interpretive artist spent of passion.

Quick start, long career

Buckley turned passionate about conducting fairly early. After his parents settled in Florida (his mother, who just turned 92, currently resides in New York), the young Richard was restless and so headed to the North Carolina School of the Arts, one of the country's leading performing arts schools, to study music. He picked up the trombone and played in every type of ensemble from jazz bands to regional orchestras. He sang until his voice changed and he didn't like the sound of it anymore.

He started studying orchestration at 16 and in some ways never looked back. A precocious student, he finished high school at 16 and headed straight into the North Carolina arts school's bachelor program. He finished undergraduate work in three years, then completed a master's at Catholic University in just one year. "I figured out that the only way to be a conductor was to just get out there as quickly as possible and do it," he says.

At the age of 21, Buckley was named assistant conductor of the Seattle Opera. At 30 he was appointed music director of the Oakland Symphony. But three years later, in 1986, the symphony folded for financial reasons.

And so Buckley hit the road. For almost 20 years.

In that time, he oversaw 10 main stage productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, more than any other guest conductor in the company's history. He guested with North American companies such as Los Angeles Opera, Washington Opera, New York City Opera, Santa Fe Opera, Florida Grand Opera, Seattle Opera, Baltimore Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia and L'Opéra de Montréal. In Europe, there were gigs with the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, Deutsche Oper Berlin, L'Opéra National de Paris, Royal Danish Opera, Göteborg Opera, Norwegian National Opera, De Nederlandse Opera and Teatro San Carlo Lisbon.

"Richard developed his talents working in major international theaters with many of the finest musicians and singers in the opera business," says Robert DeSimone, director of UT's Butler Opera Center. "He completely understands the tradition of opera from A to Z."

Raising the baton in Austin

But as challenging and stimulating as it was to work with so many different people in so many different places, Buckley wanted change. Indeed, he may have chosen to hold a conductor's baton like his father, but psychological distance and rootlessness were not characteristics the son wanted to imitate. Which is part of the reason he took the job with Austin Lyric Opera.

"It was time for a paradigm shift," he says. "I want to be able to develop something, not just walk away after one production. But it had to be in some place that could resonate for me on many different levels."

Austin seemed like that place.

Buckley's reputation as a creative risk-taker made him a bit of an interesting choice for the Austin opera when it selected him in 2003 after a search. After all, his predecessor, company co-founder Joe McClain, was fired in 2002 by a board of directors who questioned his "risky" artistic choices and blamed those choices for budget deficits.

But Buckley and his international reputation were what the Austin Lyric Opera board wanted. And the Austin company was what Buckley wanted.

"The board seems to get me and I like this city -- it supports who I am on lots of different levels," he says. "I'm not about having to wear suits and starched shirts everyday. I can show up to rehearsal in jeans and a sweater and running shoes and nobody blinks an eye."

Buckley moved to Austin last year with his companion, Molly Anderson, a former stage manager who is now a real estate agent. He maintains an apartment in Santa Fe so that he can be close to his 14-year-old daughter, Megan, who lives there with his ex-wife. "As a parent you have to be really there when you're there," he says. "Not just visiting."

However, ask what he does in leisure time and he answers in a past or future tense. He had to give up running because of back problems. He would like to find time for yoga again. He used to scuba dive but hasn't in years. He and Molly enjoy cooking, when there's time. He went to a movie the other night for the first time in months. And not surprisingly, he has committments to guest conduct around the world-- something he will always continue to do.

"I know I work at a different pace than many people here," he admits. "At the same time, I don't demand anything more of anybody than I demand of myself."