Gilberto Galvez/Culture Editor
Assistant voice professor Anton Belov and voice professor Natalie Gunn worked with voice students to present an Opera Workshop: “Make Me Laugh, Make Me Cry – Operatic Scenes in Italian and French” on Sunday May 18 in Ice Auditorium.
Belov mentioned in his introduction that he wished to give the sense of an opera, but he had too many singers to have only one opera. He decided to present the Opera Workshop in scenes. The two-hour show with a ten-minute intermission allowed the audience to see a variety of scenes with a variety of singers.
“It is such a wonderful thing to stage operas with young people,” Belov said.
The first quarter of the opera workshop was made up of scenes from comedic Italian operas. Belov mentioned that these operas brought a sense of relatedness to the opera world, which was once filled with Greek gods and goddesses.
“La Serva Padrona” by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi opens the show with the interactions between an Italian bachelor and his conniving maid who is attempting to seduce him. The opera became a mix of singing and acting as the singers on stage, junior Logan Mays and sophomore Jamie Foglesong, sang with each other.
The second set of scenes was taken from “Don Giovanni” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, an opera on a womanizer and his endeavors. In the first of the scenes, “La ci darem mano,” Don Giovanni, played by junior Ryan Thompson in this scene, steals a bride, played by freshman Jamie Bostock from her wedding, but they are interrupted before they can go too far.
In the next scene, “Batti, batti, oh bel Masetto!” The bride apologizes to her husband, played by Mays.
Don Giovanni, played by sophomore Jeff Laws in the third and final scene from “Don Giovanni,” attempts to take another woman through trickery. The other woman is Donna Elvira’s maid. Senior Brita Gaeddert played Donna Elvira, and Don Giovanni distracts her by using his servant Leporello, played by Mays. Leporello dresses in Don Giovanni’s clothes to distract her. The scene ends when Don Giovanni has tricked Donna Elvira.
The next scenes came from French operas that took their inspiration from Shakespeare plays.
“Those French and Italians loved their Shakespeare, but they also took a lot of liberties,” Gunn said.
The operas “Bénatrice et Bénedict” by Hector Berlioz and “Roméo and Juliette” by Charles Gounod added new dimensions to Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Romeo and Juliet” respectively. The final French scene before intermission was Léo Delibes’ “Lakmé.”
After the intermission, the opera workshop continued with scenes from two French operas: “Les contes d’Hoffman” by Jaques Offenbach and another scene from “Roméo and Juliette.”
The final four scenes were taken from Mozart’s opera “Le nozze di Figaro.”
Gilberto Galvez can be reached at [email protected]
