Read George Bulanda for Detroit Press, on MOT’s The Passenger
Conductor Steven Mercurio has tackled plenty of tough projects in his career, but Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s opera “The Passenger” posed a uniquely emotional challenge.
An opera about the Holocaust can do that.
Mercurio found that he couldn’t spend more than three hours at a time learning the score.
“Concentrating on life at Auschwitz was very fatiguing,” he says. “It was so disturbing that it weighed heavily on me, so I never worked on it at night because it would keep me up.”