Opera Starts with Oh "Expands Her World”

Opera Starts with Oh ‘Expands Her World”

“Expanding her world.” That’s how one parent responded to the question, “Sum up your experience in three words.

The respondent went on to write that what she liked the most was “The professionalism of your artists in talking about and teaching the workshop.”

Opera Lafayette kicked off the 2019/2020 season with Opera Starts with an Oh! – our programming for families – on October 20, 2019 in partnership with The Hill Center at the Old Naval Hospital in DC, and on October 27 in partnership with Carousel of Languages in New York.

With a focus on Mythology and Dance and built around Opera Lafayette’s upcoming production of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis, each afternoon began with Emma Jaster explaining about gods and goddesses and sharing the story of Venus and Adonis.

Children and adults rotated through three activities: dancing baroque style led by choreographer and dancer Julia Bengtsson; learning to sing the Little Cupid’s song from John Blow’s score; and making arrows or wings. The afternoons ended with the children performing the dance and song. The next Opera Starts with Oh! is based on Beethoven’s Leonore and will focus on Designed to Empower. DC: Saturday, January 18, 2020, 3:00 pm; and NY: Sunday, January 19, 2020, 3:00 p.m.

Ryan's Summer

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.