Forging rural opera
Our Founder and Artistic Director, Ryan Brown, in Southwest Colorado
This summer included a trip to the Opera America conference, lots of Beethoven Leonore study, and some unusual musical development work in the west.
The Opera America conference is always an interesting barometer of trends in the field, most of which are currently focused on community engagement, so much so in fact that one employee of a major company went so far as to suggest that the future of opera may not lie with trained voices!
Back in SW Colorado, I do my best musical study in a little cabin in a river canyon. There's a piano there, but no internet. After an aria or short scene of Leonore, I'll break for a few minutes by sitting on the deck and watching the light filter through the pines, cottonwoods, and quaking aspen or the way it dances on the water in the stream. After a longer scene or at an act break, I'll go off and irrigate, do some business, and return the next afternoon. The idyllic setting isn't always accommodating, however - this year I arrived after a spring snowstorm had brought down a large number trees, two of them directly onto the cabin! Some summer work projects are unanticipated....
The nearby town has an opera house - a theater on the second floor of a 100-plus year-old mercantile building - which an enterprising and civic-minded couple recently bought and are slowly restoring. They are especially excited that Opera Lafayette is going to bring The Blacksmith to the opera house this spring. At the end of the summer the local music teacher and I played and sang our way through some of the plot over a potluck dinner at the local Grange for folks who had offered to volunteer. When they started spontaneously singing along with “Buffalo Gals wontcha come out tonight,” I began to think that maybe the Opera America conference speaker wasn't actually too far off the mark.