LY #21: But today, there's Opera!

I love opera.  It's an art that combines music, acting, and the visual arts of design and decoration to express gigantic emotions.  If I'd been a character in an opera my first year here I could have sung my loneliness while wearing a gorgeous costume rather than simply writing whiny letters back to my too-busy-to-read-them friends.

So it was a real pleasure to attend the matinee of the "first night" performance by Opera Bend, a new opera "start up."  The company, with some visiting singers, put on a very enjoyable show between commercial announcements about ways to support the non-profit organization. 

They are striving to fill the gap left by Obsidian Opera after it went belly up about seven years ago.  I remember many of its performances, both good and bad.  One of my favorites was a sharp version of of the very modern Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti.  Of course, one of the reasons I enjoyed it was that it stared my friend Lilli Ann Linford-Foreman as The Mother.

 Too often, Juniper Opera's singers were middling.  That wasn't the case today, however.  There were some truly terrific voices giving pitch-perfect renditions of some old and one new warhorses (a warhorse, by the way, is a song or entire opera that is recognized as a "standard").   Among the older repertoire were numbers from Bizet's Carmen, Mozart's Magic Flute, Johann Strauss Jr. 's Die Fledermaus, Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore, Verdi's Falstaff, and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel.   The new warhorse was the duet Agony from Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods.  The modern master's cool vision of end of romance was a tonic against the rich, romantic food of the classics.

While all the singers acquitted themselves admirably, I want to make special note of Sarah Mattox, Trish Sewel, and Scott Carroll.  Mattox, a mezzo soprano, was the featured guest artist. She makes her living from performance and has received good reviews around the west.  She had a rich voice and some solid acting chops.  Trish Sewell is a soprano who teaches voice for COCC.  Her voice is clear and precise and she had fun playing the "chambermaid" in the scene from Die Fledermaus.  If you go to Youtube there are some echo-y recordings shot in Wille Hall with a bad in-camera microphone.  But you should listen to her riff on the Queen of Night's aria from Magic Flute in the song "The Girl in 14B."  Pretty groovy.

But my favorite performer was Scott Carroll, a tenor currently getting his Masters in Music Education at the U of O.  He was a wonderful performer, using his face and body with wit and grace.  He also has a dynamite voice and plenty of lung power.  I predict his skills will take him a long way and someday I'll be able to say, "I saw him in Pinckney Theatre, singing for a start-up back in the day."

I wasn't all that keen on the cool dude they chose as an MC.  He's a local radio personality who didn't really have the right vibe for opera - his energy wasn't big enough.  (And a joke about Bill Clinton seemed awfully old and out of place.)  Nevertheless, I'm tempted to donate.  The company is a 501(c)3 so a donation will be tax deductible.  And with luck they'll get hooked up to the Oregon Cultural Trust.

But what I'd really like to do is hire the company to do a "Flash mob" style performance of the drinking song "Libiamo" from La Traviata in the COCC Student Center.   This afternoon started with that number and it's one of my absolute favorites.  They could do it with people coming in with their regular clothes and then singing with a canned broadcast orchestra.  Or even with just a recorded piano, like this flashmob in an Amsterdam Mall.  It would be awesome!