Dec. 13, 2024

Out of Character: Roberto Kalb

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At its heart, West Side Story is about what it means to be othered. That is something that conductor Roberto Kalb, making his highly anticipated debut at the HGO podium for this classic musical, knows something about. Kalb was born in Mexico City, where his family was seen as other for being Jewish. When he came to the United States, his peers saw him as other not only for being Mexican, but for not fitting their idea of what that looks like. In a way, he was even other in his own family—the son a banker, with three older brothers in finance, he instead decided to pursue music. These experiences mean Kalb—an accomplished composer, conductor, and, since 2022, the music director of Detroit Opera—feels the emotion of West Side Story deeply and personally.  

 

 

Cues: Tell us about your background.  

 

Roberto Kalb: I was born in Mexico City, and I’m the youngest of four brothers. My mother was born in Cairo in ’51 to a family of Sephardic Jews. Their native tongue was French. They were kicked out in ’56 and became refugees. They went to Paris for three years, then to Queens, New York, where she was until she was 18. And then she went on vacation to Mexico City because her aunt lived there, and she met my dad on a blind date. My dad’s family is Ashkenazi Jewish and had been in Mexico since 1900.  

 

My grandfather on my dad’s side wanted to be a conductor. He wanted to move to Vienna when he was 20 to study conducting. My great-grandmother cried for weeks on end, so he decided not to leave his family. He stayed in Mexico and became a banker. So the musical lineage stopped there, until me. But when I was born, there was music in my house. My dad used to blast Pavarotti and Domingo, and I used to watch The Three Tenors as a kid. And I begged my mom for piano lessons. I was 5 when I started. I loved it, and I took it seriously, but I didn’t think I’d be a pianist. I thought I’d be something in finance like my brothers, and play piano for fun. 

 

 

Cues: How did you decide to pursue music as a career?  

 

RK: When I was 13, I was playing the trumpet in my middle school band. One of my buddies came over, and he said, you have to listen to this. And it was the soundtrack to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by John Williams. I was like, oh my God, this is the best thing in the world. I went and I bought my own CD. My parents were out of town, I remember. And I put the CD in, and I just blasted it and air-conducted the soundtrack. And I thought, this is what I have to do with my life. I have to make music for film, and I have to conduct my own scores. That was my career goal when I was 13.  

 

When I was 17, I convinced my dad to let me apply to the Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan, and I got in. That, for me, was a test, to see if I could be competitive. I was quite an ambitious teenager. And I succeeded. I went as a composer. My original background is in composition. My first degrees in the U.S., from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of Michigan—those were composition degrees. I was writing music. And I did write music for film, but as soon as I did it, I didn’t like it, because I was really subject to the director’s vision, and I wanted my own creativity. At the same time, I was conducting, for fun, orchestras, and I also watched my first opera live, Fidelio, at the San Francisco Opera. 

 

 

Cues: Tell us about that experience. 

 

RK: Donald Runnicles conducted a beautiful prelude, and then the little duet at the beginning of Fidelio that’s so cute, you know? That was instantaneous love for opera. I was like, oh my God, it’s life—it’s us—with the most glorious music accompanying it and telling the story. And the bug bit pretty hard. That’s how my path started into opera. My training is in orchestral conducting, but I conduct a lot of opera because—well, I guess I got the reputation for being good at it. 

 

 

Cues: Are you looking forward to taking the podium for West Side Story for the first time?  

 

RK: Yes, somehow, it’s my first time. But I love it. I have really early memories of West Side Story, because I watched the film at home as a teen. And I remember loving it. My parents loved it. And it’s just fantastic music. Kind of like Puccini, it gets a bad rap for being beautiful, and accessible, and exciting. But it’s masterful. I think Bernstein was a compositional genius. He goes from style to style with no issue. He could write the most intense, most profound, complex music, or any dance form. Any Latin dance form, he’s at home. And I think that’s the mastery of this piece: that he weaves everything, all those styles, together so effectively. And if you dig deep into the score, it’s compositionally truly brilliant. 

 

 

Cues: How do you prepare for something like that?  

 

RK: The conductor, in the first rehearsal, has to know more about the piece than anyone else. I have a long, very specific process. The first part of it is always reading and analyzing the libretto, memorizing the text. If there’s an original literary source, I read that. I’m very meticulous. I go through the whole score, and I go role by role. I do that pass for every single character. Then I go back, and I do another pass, and I do instrumentation. Then I sit. I play. I sing. I’m writing phrasings—you know, where should this phrase go? Really important landmarks in the piece. The last step is bowings. I go through all of the string parts, and I bow every single note of it.  

 

I don’t make final musical decisions until the piece is really in my DNA. This takes a long time. West Side Story is a little easier for me because I know a lot of the music, but I haven’t conducted a complete West Side Story. So this will take me a good three months to just really get in my body.  

 

 

Cues: Is there a particular philosophy or method that guides you?  

 

RK: My philosophy is that the music speaks for itself. I believe in egoless art-making, because this idea of putting your stamp on something, I think, is a weird thought. I try to be a vessel for the composer, and also for the director’s vision. If you work with a great director—Francesca Zambello is fantastic—to bring a vision, that’s also part of the conductor’s job. And to accentuate your cast. If I do West Side Story with one cast, it might sound a little different than with another cast, right? Because you adapt to the humans that are in front of you. 

 

 

Cues: West Side Story is about the immigrant experience. As an immigrant yourself, do you connect to the story on that level?  

 

RK: I’m from a Spanish-speaking country, and I came to a non-Spanish-speaking country. Unfortunately, there’s too many parallels. I grew up in Mexico City, Jewish. I was an alien. We’re 50,000 Jews in Mexico City. There’s a large amount of antisemitism that’s ingrained in the society to a degree that you would not believe. As a kid, I would hear, oh, that girl smells like a Jew; or, oh, your voice is sounding raspy. You sound like a Jewish woman. It’s an everyday thing.  

 

When I moved to the States, there was the other aspect. I had never been left out because I was Latin. I speak English well, and I studied at an American school in Mexico, so when I got to the States, that was easy. But the culture shock was dramatic. People would say, oh, you’re Mexican? But you don’t look Mexican. And I said, what do Mexicans look like? And then people get stuck because I have pale skin. I look more European, because I have that descendance. So it was a little hard. And then, the other one was: Wait, but how are you Jewish? You’re Mexican. 

 

 

Cues: You really did feel it directly.  

 

RK: Yes. That said, I feel every opera directly. If you’re doing La bohème, we all have felt love. We all have experienced death. These are human experiences. With West Side Story, even if you’re not Latino, and even if you don’t have that immigrant experience, you can place yourself in that situation. If you’ve been left out in a playground, or were chosen last in football, or anything like that. Those feelings of rejection are universal. So, sure, I have firsthand experience. But I think we all have.  

 

That’s why people love West Side Story: because they can empathize with every single character. I really do believe that 99 percent of people are good, and that when they go into the opera, they’re empathetic. They can identify with all of these themes regardless of where they’re from.  

about the author
Catherine Matusow
Catherine Matusow is Director of Communications at Houston Grand Opera.