After the Premiere: Avoiding the Comfortable. Michael Egel and the Mechanics of “Risk” at Des Moines Metro Opera

By Justin Vickers

Opera companies speak candidly if not easily about “risk,” but the term is usually too elastic to be useful. Sometimes it names genuine aesthetic ambition; sometimes it functions as branding for choices that are, in practice, carefully insulated. This essay argues that “risk” in contemporary opera is best understood as a technology of listening and governance, not as a flattering adjective. For a musicologist, that matters because institutions do not merely “present” repertory; they produce interpretive conditions: what becomes audible, what becomes legible, and what forms of attention an audience is trained to bring to the art form. What follows treats repertoire, space, and institutional decision-making as interlocking musical problems.

What interested me in speaking with Michael Egel, Artistic Director and General Director of Des Moines Metro Opera, was not whether his programming is “brave,” but how his rationale hangs together: what the company’s unusual space makes possible, what repertoire he privileges, and what trade-offs follow from the particular version of distinctiveness he is pursuing.

Across our discussion, Egel’s account is notably consistent. He returns repeatedly to the idea of encounter, framed not as some vague aspiration, but as a practical criterion:

“To provide the most distinctive encounters or interactions with a variety of pieces in the repertory in a way that can’t be experienced anyplace else.”

This is not merely a slogan; it is an organizing premise. It shapes how he talks about theater architecture, vocalism, commissioning, and season-building. It also invites scrutiny, because any institution that defines itself by distinctiveness must answer a harder question: distinctiveness in service of what?

The theater as an artistic constraint, not a marketing asset

Des Moines Metro Opera’s amphitheater-style space, with the audience wrapped closely around the stage, is central to Egel’s thinking. He is frank about the degree to which it changes not only staging, but listening. The company has made a familiar aside into a statement of fact:

“Oftentimes in our advertising, we say, ‘If you sit any closer, you would need a costume…’ [which] kind of sums it all up. You sit in the front row and you almost have to be careful because you might actually have your feet on the set or on the stage.”

A small space makes even more transparent the strengths of an instrument and indeed shines a light on technical issues in a voice. Egel becomes most specific when he shifts from the parameters of the physical space to the audible realm, arguing that proximity to the artists makes vocal production legible even to listeners who lack technical vocabulary:

“One of the first big advantages is being able to hear the health of the voice up close and personal. Even in auditions, whether I’m doing auditions in a big house or an audition room, I like to be close enough that I can have that empathetic vocal empathy, that sort of feeling of how that sound is being produced, and is being produced healthfully. Because I think that anyone in the audience, no matter what their familiarity is with good singing and the criteria of good singing, can sense when there is a very high quality artist.”

The implication is straightforward: space is not merely where opera happens; it shapes what can be known about performance. Closeness changes what counts as evidence, making vocal endurance, efficiency, fatigue, and resilience unusually present to the ear and eye.

Yet intimacy in the theater is not an unqualified good. It can magnify weak stagecraft as quickly as it magnifies good singing, and it can tempt directors into a kind of naturalism that mistakes proximity for psychological depth. A style that reads as “truthful” in a 2,500-seat house can feel mannered or overdone up close; conversely, under-energized acting becomes more obvious. The question, then, is not whether closeness is “immersive,” but whether it is used to sharpen attention to vocal and dramatic consequence rather than substituting sensation for interpretation. Egel’s account suggests he sees the room as a discipline: it makes compromise audible and detail unavoidable.

Whether every production rises to that discipline is, naturally, a separate matter. But at Des Moines Metro Opera, critically-acclaimed productions that rise to that level of consistency are an annual reality.

Programming as cultivation over time

When Egel became artistic director in 2010, he set out principles that would structure the company’s seasons over a long horizon. The most consequential was a commitment that each season would include at least one company premiere. In a three-opera summer festival, that is a material constraint, not a gesture. It obliges the company to cultivate curiosity and trust on a season-by-season basis.

Egel also rejects the simplification that local audiences require safe fare while only visitors and cultural tourists consume the unfamiliar. He portrays a local public that has been cultivated — over decades — to want more than the canonical. That claim can be tested empirically, of course, but as an institutional self-understanding it is important: the audience is treated as more than just capable of being trained, but as a vital aspect of its success, wanting to be integral to that laboratory and its operations.

The early–mid twentieth century as a deliberate center of gravity

Egel’s most pointed critique of contemporary repertory ecology concerns what he sees as a widening gap. Many companies, he observes, lean heavily on an extended nineteenth century (inclusive of late-eighteenth century Mozart through Puccini; a kind of variation on musicological discussions of “the long nineteenth century”) and then leapfrog to contemporary operas, commissions, and world premieres. Meanwhile, the first six decades of the twentieth century can fall away. His own programming preference is to occupy a middle terrain, often by placing works in deliberately juxtaposed proximity.

Yet a more skeptical reading remains necessary. Distinctiveness has an edge. A festival that defines itself against the “top ten” can drift into oppositional programming: selecting works partly because others are not doing them. The long-term test is whether rarity remains a means rather than an end. The unfamiliar title should be selected because it benefits from this space and this kind of listening, not simply because it differentiates the brand.

“Risk” as governance: avoiding the comfortable decision

I asked Egel how artistic instinct becomes decision-making that staff, board, and donors can stand behind. His answer is both pragmatic and procedural: risk tolerance is built through careful cultivation over time.

Then he turns, bluntly, to an ethic of discomfort that functions as a rule of thumb:

“If the season isn’t a ‘Wow!’ then I haven’t done my job. I try to do that every year, and it seems to be to be paying off. I think that’s your top job. And if you’re doing that, your board, your donors, your audience, and the artists will come along with you. I’ve come to realize that if it doesn’t feel risky to some degree, then it’s not the right choice.”

In context, as opposed to clichéd motivational rhetoric, this reads as an authentic method of governance: a way of preserving artistic seriousness within an institutional structure — the discipline and profession of opera — that tends to reward the known. His “risk” is not episodic heroism; it is habitual, paced, and embedded in year-over-year season logic.

What emerges here is what I call the Egel Method: risk converted from adjective into procedure.

No second chances

He offers a revealing account of constraint at the level of a single career: with only three operas a year, there is no guarantee of “next time.” That scarcity heightens the ethical pressure of casting and production decisions:

“If I do three operas a year and I have a full career, with luck, I will only get to do each opera one time. And I don’t want to have any regrets when it’s over. I don’t want to have to say ‘we should have done that differently’. You know, ‘I should have cast that differently, should have produced it differently’. I want to say, ‘I’m extremely proud of that production. It will remain a special memory for me, and, I’m content’.”

Read institutionally, this is less a personal quirk than a structural feature of the festival economy: scarcity forces consequences. Decisions are not easily corrected through future revivals; they carry the weight of finality.

Commissioning, afterlife, and what “repertoire” actually means

The idea of new commissions has an especial appeal. Regarding two recent DMMO premieres, Egel begins with a question that is both aesthetic and institutional: is this story “ours to tell”? He describes Kristin Kuster’s and Mark Campbell’s A Thousand Acres (2022, based on Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 novel) in those terms, rooted in place and in a claim of interpretive authority. Damien Geter’s and Lila Palmer’s American Apollo (2024) developed differently, via a shorter pandemic-era version that grew in scale from a twenty-minute piece, as subsequent workshops clarified and expanded on its dramaturgical demands.

I asked what a company owes a new piece after opening night, once the premiere gives way to the harder locus of an opera’s existence as repertoire. Egel’s answer acknowledges the ecology beyond the originating company:

“First and foremost, we want to make sure that we’re making it as easy as possible for other companies, for other people, to make the decision to produce the work. We want to be advocates for the piece and to make it an obvious choice for it to be produced, which can be as basic as providing musical materials, archival materials, and production rentals that translate easily onto other stages. For us, it has also meant making sure that we invited a wide swath of other companies’ leadership to performances to see it.”

All of these considerations contribute to whether an opera might get a chance to exist after the initial premiere. Given the expense of the art form, there’s simply no promise of that.

When we say that commissioning “builds repertoire” in opera, we must recognize an unfortunate truth: “premiere” and “repertoire” are not synonyms.

The 2026 DMMO Festival season as a proposition: Tosca, King Roger, Of Mice and Men 

Egel’s 2026 season places Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca alongside Polish composer Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger (1918–1924), and to mark the composer’s centenary, Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men (1970). (Incidentally, Floyd was born 8 days before Szymanowski’s King Roger was premiered.)

Szymanowski’s seldom-heard opera has enjoyed increasingly high-profile performances in the United States since it was first heard here in 1981 with the Saint Louis Symphony under Leonard Slatkin. The following year it was heard at Wolf Trap Opera. Further performances include the Bard SummerScape in 2008 and Santa Fe Opera in 2012, and under Charles Dutoit with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2015 (who also led the Montreal Symphony in a 1999 performance of the opera at Carnegie Hall).

[Szymanowski co-authored the libretto with his cousin, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz. The opera is based on a two-volume novel (now lost) by the composer, titled Efebos. The homoerotic etymology of an ephebos (or ephebe) is a sensual discussion deserving its very own After the Premiere essay. My mind is teeming with salient details and musico-historical examples, but that — no mere tangent — must be later.]

This seemingly disparate Puccini– Szymanowski–Floyd triptych points to a claim that sits beneath much of Egel’s rhetoric about risk: a summer festival can build demand without relying on the most-produced titles.

The deeper proposition, however, is curatorial. The season is meant to function as conversation: works placed in proximity so that each evening alters how the next is heard.

A scene from Szymanowski’s opera King Roger at The Royal Opera House, London; directed by Kasper Holten in 2015; photo © Bill Cooper.

What should linger after the last performance

At the end of our conversation, I asked what he wants to linger after the theater empties and the season becomes memory. Egel returns to his guiding idea: conversation. He wants audiences, especially those who experience all three works in close proximity, to feel energized by how the productions speak across a series of days, and to trust the company to build that kind of dialogue again.

This is a coherent artistic model. It is not without tensions. A strong rhetoric of distinctiveness must continually prove that it is not selecting programmatic rarities for its own sake. A commissioning program must confront the problem that a production designed to exploit a singular theater can be difficult to transmit elsewhere.

In an American operatic economy that often oscillates necessarily between the familiar and the new, Des Moines is attempting — and by several visible measures succeeding — to train its audiences to listen historically and comparatively, hearing each work in relation to the next. The point is not that “risk” is intrinsically virtuous, but that it becomes governable when listening is treated as the central institutional variable.

That is the Egel Method: risk not as branding, but as a repeatable institutional practice that turns space into listening, listening into governance, and programming into conversation rather than rotation.

As an operatic curator and arts leader, Michael Egel’s work — indeed, the Egel Method — is an inspiring example to be emulated.

A Coda

A brief interlude follows.

Next week, a brief “Epilogue”—and my first lengthy discussion of Benjamin Britten in these pages—that occurred long after the premiere for which it was initially composed: Britten’s “Epilogue” to his Holocaust-saturated song cycle The Holy Sonnets of John Donne is a case study in what it means for a work to acquire its public life belatedly, and for listeners to encounter it as both discovery and inheritance.

© Justin Vickers, 2026