The outreach portion of the program

Okay, so I realized today that I haven't posted since Monday - sorry! I guess this week has been a little tiring. On Tuesday, we rehearsed both of our school education shows and then presented them both to a small invited audience at the Opera Omaha offices. This was basically our dress rehearsal, and we started right off with two shows Wednesday and two more today.

The programs are both pretty cool - Program A is aimed at high school and college students and adults, and Program B is for middle-schoolers. We open both programs the same way, with an introduction from Rossini's La Cenerentola, and then we dive into asking the kids what they think of when they think of opera. We get a lot of the same answers, usually things like the lady with the horns (costumes!), loud singing or high notes (yes - and no microphones!), dramatic, and foreign languages. We take the things they say and talk about what opera is: storytelling using all art forms (composition, singing, orchestra, dancing, poetry, prose, set-building, costume design). We also sing musical examples from different operas along the way, explaining how composers use the music to tell a story. After each example, we ask the kids to tell us what they think was happening in the excerpt and why they think that, based on what they heard in the music. This is so interesting, because they usually get it right, even thought they can't understand any of the words!

After this, we have the students help us write our own opera, based on this simple text: It was a dark and rainy night. There was a knock at the door. We opened up the front door. It was the pizza delivery guy!

For each of the four sentences, we give the students a choice between two different styles. Is the rain gentle or stormy? Is the knock sneaky or dramatic? Do we open the front door in an exuberant way or a dreamy way? And finally, is the pizza delivery guy evil or the love of our life? Omaha Symphony conductor Ernest Richardson wrote the music for this little experiment, and it's super fun: he plays with melodies from famous pieces of the operatic and classical repertory, many of which the average person has probably heard on movies and TV commericals. The kids get really into this section, and I think it really demonstrates the way music can tell (or even change) a story.

Anyway, we wrap things up in our A program with quartets from Rigoletto and La Boheme. The B program is actually built around the theme of weather, so it includes a quartet from Street Scene and one from Regina, as well as an excerpt from The Blizzard Voices, a new opera that premiered in September at OO. We also tack the Boheme quartet onto the end of that program as well, since OO is doing it in the spring. The students all get vouchers for free tickets to the show, so it's a pretty sweet deal.

That's all for now. I need to go to bed!