Nina Yoshida Nelsen (CFA’01,’03) says her new role is daunting but exciting. “As singers,” she says, “we come and we go and we do our job and we create the art. Yet rarely is there the opportunity for us to become more involved in everything else that makes the art happen.” Photo by Rosetta Greek

Opera

BU Alum Nina Yoshida Nelsen (CFA’01,’03) Named Artistic Director of Boston Lyric Opera

Mezzo-soprano will continue to sing as her new schedule permits

How did mezzo-soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen become the new artistic director of the Boston Lyric Opera? Strangely enough, the typecasting of Asian American singers and the pandemic shutdown both helped open that door for her.

Nelsen (CFA’01,’03) has sung the role of Suzuki in Madama Butterfly roughly 200 times, far more than any other role. Too often, she says, it’s the only opera in which Asian American singers get cast in prominent roles. In 2020, she was set to play Suzuki once again, with the Boston Lyric Opera (BLO), but the pandemic postponed the production. At the time, Asian communities in the United States faced prejudice over the origins of COVID; six women of Asian descent were murdered in Atlanta in 2021. 

During that long timeout of Zoom meetings and cultural reckonings, with most other live performances canceled, Nelsen founded the Asian Opera Alliance to push for changes, including a wider variety of roles for singers of Asian heritage.

Nelsen says Bradley Vernatter, the BLO’s Stanford Calderwood General Director and CEO, lent a willing ear on that and other topics, and that year she accepted a new role offstage, as an artistic advisor to the company.

“We talked a lot about what true diversity actually is on a stage and what that looks like—what shows we’re bringing into our stages, how we’re casting them,” she says. “Then…bringing in those same Asian artists that we brought in for Madama Butterfly to do non-Asian repertoire as well.”

Nelsen sang the role of Mamma Lucia in the BLO’s first post-pandemic production, 2021’s Cavalleria Rusticana. But perhaps more important, she participated in the “Butterfly Process,” the company’s in-depth yearlong examination of Madama Butterfly’s problems and potential, prior to fall 2023’s rescheduled production. Productions of Puccini’s opera have been problematic in their depiction of Japanese people and culture and the “yellowface” casting of Caucasian singers in Japanese roles. 

“She just had all these intelligent questions,” Vernatter says, “and was so inquisitive about what our intentions were, what the process was going to be, what we hoped for, what we hoped the impact to be.” 

Nelsen ended up serving as dramaturg for the BLO’s 2023 production, which relocated the action from early-1900s Japan to 1940s California, when many Japanese and Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II.

“We set Acts 2 and 3 in an incarceration camp, which made the storytelling real,” she says. “We showed photos of real families who were incarcerated, and we shared an important part of history that is often not talked about. “The impact was felt throughout the Asian American community. Months later, community members are approaching me and thanking me for the care, resources, and commitment that BLO took.” 

Daunting but Exciting

Vernatter remembers having a conversation with Nelsen around that time: “She’s telling me about her career, and she has all these ideas and has such a unique and strong perspective on our work, loves the classics, and is an advocate and a performer in new works as well. And I remember jokingly saying, ‘Well, what are you gonna be, an artistic director?’ And she laughed and sort of leaned back and said, ‘I’ve never thought of that.’”

He appreciated her input on Butterfly and other matters and felt they worked well together. The expansion of her role culminated in January, when, after a nationwide search, she was named the new artistic director of the BLO. 

“It’s been two years since I came on as an artistic advisor, and the feeling that I had influence at a company was really extraordinary for me as a singer,” Nelsen says.

Her new role is daunting but exciting, she says: “As singers, we come and we go and we do our job and we create the art. Yet rarely is there the opportunity for us to become more involved in everything else that makes the art happen.”

It’s a major appointment. Founded in 1976, the BLO is Boston’s largest and most enduring opera company, producing world and US premieres, as well as notable commissions and coproductions with operas in Detroit, San Francisco, and London. And women have long been underrepresented in leadership roles in opera, according to a widely read study last year.

This week, the BLO offers the final three performances of a new arrangement of Eurydice by composer Matthew Aucoin, who also conducts, with a libretto by Sarah Ruhl, based on her play. The work, cocommissioned with Opera Grand Rapids, is at the Huntington Theatre and is directed by Doug Fitch, with Sydney Mancasola as Eurydice and Elliot Madore as Orpheus. That production was scheduled by Vernatter, who filled both roles, general manager and artistic director, temporarily after general and artistic director Esther Nelson departed the company in 2021.

Vernatter is already putting the finishing touches on the 2024-2025 performance schedule, which will be announced in April. Nelsen is involved in casting those productions and is already discussing repertoire for the 2025-2026 season and beyond.

“My involvement in this current season has really been in artist relationships,” she says. “I know as an artist myself how important the trust is between company management and visiting artists, and I want to be someone artists feel safe coming to. Changing the culture of those relationships in our industry is really important to me, and that’s where I’ve started this season.” 

From Violin to Voice

Growing up in California, Nelsen played violin from the age of nine, and she got her bachelor’s degree in the instrument at the College of Fine Arts School of Music. She was considering a switch to psychology for grad school, until a philanthropist from her hometown, remembering her singing in a school choir, offered her $500 to take some voice lessons. So, she found a BU doctoral student who was charging “next to nothing” for voice lessons.

Then, she says, Penelope Bitzas, a CFA associate professor of music, voice, “walked into one of my lessons thinking it was the doctoral student singing, and she’s like, ‘You have a great voice.’ And so both my teacher and Penny said, ‘You should audition for a master’s in voice.’ And I said, ‘I hate opera—it’s so dramatic.” But the two were persuasive—Nelsen auditioned for a master’s in voice program at BU and was accepted.

The rest is history. Nelsen will commute from her home in Indiana for the next season, spending about 20 weeks of the year here and singing for other companies when scheduling permits. She expects to move to Boston at the end of the 2024-2025 season, when her older son finishes junior high school. Her husband, a French horn player, is a tenured professor at Indiana University.

When discussion of the Butterfly Process started at BLO, she says, “I was like, wow, they’re really doing something. They’re actually staying true to their word, and that was the first time that I started to build trust in an opera company.”

But even before that, she felt something good happening at the BLO.

“One of the first things they said in rehearsal [for Cavalleria] was, ‘Obviously this is one of your first gigs back, postpandemic. We’re worried about your physical health, but we’re also concerned about your mental health. And we’ve decided that we are going to provide mental health resources for you free of charge while you’re here. Use it as much or as little as you want. We won’t know. It’s totally anonymous. We just get the bill.’

“And the whole cast—we all turned and looked at each other. We were like, ‘A company that cares about our mental health and our well-being? What is this?’ You know, this is like a new postpandemic world. 

“I started to realize that there was something really special happening at BLO.” 

Boston Lyric Opera presents Eurydice through March 10 at the Huntington Theatre. Find tickets and information here.