Conservatory-trained opera director Yefim Meizel remembers very well his first job after immigrating to America: He was a $2-an-hour delivery boy for a New York deli.
Meizel’s path from pastrami to Puccini is a long and winding one. He started out life listening to Yiddish lullabies sung by his grandmother back in his native Latvia. Today Meizel is a busy man. Now based in San Francisco, he serves as a stage director with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Santa Fe Opera and a host of local and regional opera companies.
He also teaches master classes for singers, such as the one coming up May 27 at Noe Valley Ministry. Open to the public, the event inaugurates the Marina Koshetz Master Class series sponsored by the Music Theater Collaborative.
Up to eight professional and student opera soloists will take part, each singing an aria and then receiving follow-up commentary from Meizel.
But he promises there will be no withering Simon Cowell-like insults. Meizel likes to keep things positive.
“It’s supposed to be entertaining,” he says of the public master class. “If it’s just students, then it’s one format, but with an audience it’s different. You have to turn on more charm, tell more jokes and make it accessible to everyone.”
That’s no problem for the affable Meizel. His love for the arts has served him well in a career that spans many years and even more miles.
Born in a town near Riga, Latvia, Meizel developed an interest in the performing arts early on, thanks in part to his mother, who was an actress and opera singer. He began violin lessons early, becoming an accomplished classical player.
But because of his love of opera and theater, he eventually put down the bow. “I was a fiddler without a roof,” he says. “Even as a boy, I always directed plays and was very theatrically inclined. Practicing alone for four or five hours a day was not what I wanted to do the rest of my life.”
He furthered his studies in St. Petersburg and Moscow, becoming a professional director of both opera and legitimate theater. But being Jewish limited his options.
“There was anti-Semitism,” he says, “though I was not exceptionally victimized. Still, in Latvia, the good jobs were reserved for Latvians or Russians.”
Nevertheless, Meizel developed his own artistic sensibility while in Russia, and it has served him well over the years. “When I started, I thought I would be very avant-garde, but it didn’t work. My efforts were not understood. Now I work in a more traditional sense. I always get right to the bottom of the emotions. It’s not about performers having a good time, but it’s important the audience is included.”
He came to America in 1989, and worked not only for the deli but also for a neighborhood grocery story (“I learned all my fruits and vegetables there,” he says). Little by little, acquiring the language and wielding his two master’s degrees, he found work in the music world.
As his work took him more often to the West Coast, including a six-month stint at the San Francisco Opera, he eventually made a permanent move to California. But he goes back and forth, working with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the Bayshore Opera locally and others. His collaborators include Placido Domingo, whom he directed in Mozart’s “Idomineo.”
Meizel is always ready to promote the art of opera to adults, kids and his fellow musicians. One of his pet projects is the Opera Academy of California, a nonprofit group whose goal is to further opera education by bringing together interested music fans and performers.
“I’m very much in favor of making [opera] as accessible as possible,” he says. “I’ve been in productions on a shoestring, but if people experience something meaningful, they will like it.”
Aside from the upcoming master class, Meizel is directing a local production of Jacques Offenbach’s classic “Tales of Hoffman,” an opera he directed once before … in Kazakhstan. “There are no opera fans there,” he says.
But when asked the old stand-by question — what his favorite operas are — Meizel says diplomatically, “My favorite is the one I’m currently working on. You have to fall in love with it, then you can do your best.”
Yefim Meizel will conduct his opera class 7 p.m. Monday, May 27, at Noe Valley Ministry, 1021 Sanchez St., S.F. Tickets: $10-$15. Information: (415) 820-1414.