CRANK CALLS

posted by James Reel

    John Massaro spent seven years as chorus master and assistant conductor at Arizona Opera, mostly working for general director David Speers, but he quit indignantly after one year under the company’s new head, Joel Revzen. To say the least, Massaro is a bitter man; when he left at the end of 2004, he circulated his resignation letter among members of the press, and ever since then he has periodically sent out e-mails mocking Revzen (once in verse, to be sung to a tune from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado) and suggesting without much evidence that Revzen overstates his achievements. Massaro has maintained, for example, that Revzen misleadingly counts himself as a Grammy winner even though the Grammy in question was really intended for singer Arleen Auger, whom Revzen “merely” accompanied. I am in no position to take sides in the Massaro-Revzen conflict, but the triviality and mockery in Massaro’s e-mails make Massaro’s attacks seem less like whistle-blowing than petty manifestations of personal enmity.
    Last week, Massaro announced the formation of a new company in Phoenix, which he’s calling AZ Opera, and he seems to have enlisted Speers in the project. Several recipients of Massaro’s bulk e-mail announcement, employing the “reply to all” function, have responded, in effect, that there’s obviously something shifty about using a name so similar to Arizona Opera’s, and they are condemning Massaro’s project. One objector mentioned that she’d enjoyed many high-quality Arizona Opera productions over the years, and Massaro asserted in reply that she’d also claimed to have seen UFOs in the past.
    While there’s certainly room in Phoenix, and perhaps in Tucson, for a second professional company doing things that Arizona Opera doesn’t, the petulant Massaro seems motivated by revenge rather than service to the community. If he expects to be taken seriously, he needs to revise his rhetoric—and find a new name for his company that is not deliberately confusing. If he doesn’t, I’d expect Revzen and Arizona Opera to take him to court very soon. In which case Massaro would surely file briefs to be sung to tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury.