Personal and professional growth can come from following your passion to seemingly unexpected places.
Earlier this week, Skylight Music Theater announced that artistic director Viswa Subbaraman will be leaving at the end of June. Subbaraman came to Milwaukee three years ago in pursuit of pushing boundaries, both his own and those of the artists with whom he'd be working.
He notes that he is, at his core, an orchestral conductor. He began his career in the French National Orchestra for three seasons, and "that's really what I loved."
He ended up starting a contemporary opera company in Houston because "all the great orchestral conductors started in opera," and because "contemporary music was something I was a little afraid of." In an interesting turn of events, says Subbaraman, "now, everyone knows me for doing all this contemporary opera. So, it's funny how the world works."
But this trajectory is not actually all that surprising. The Skylight, he says, is "a company that's known for developing and throwing talent out in the world. So, I think by coming here in the first place, it put me on a lot of people's radars."
Additionally, the Skylight has been a good home for someone who likes to take risks. "When you look at the history of the Skylight... it is a company that's known for being outside the box, for being creative in the way it produces its work, which we've now kind of coined as 'Skylight style,'" Subbaraman says.
From that perspective, he notes, "all I did was continue the tradition, in my own unique way, which every artistic director will bring to the table. For me, that involved new opera, new works."
He is leaving the Skylight to pursue his longtime love of conducting.
Subbaraman will continue on in an advisory role through the end of the year, and says that the next artistic director for the Skylight, whoever that is, "is going to inherit a company that has incredible production values, has a great orchestra, has a lot going for it. So I hope whoever comes in next looks at that and says what can we do to give this community great theater. And if they focus on that, they're going to be great."
