“Opera is little more than a country song,” Said Alexis Hamilton, manager of education and outreach for Portland Opera. “It’s a somebody-done-somebody-wrong song and somebody is going to kill somebody about it. And the emotions have to be big enough to sing a high ‘C’ about it.”
“Opera is little more than a country song,” Said Alexis Hamilton, manager of education and outreach for Portland Opera. “It’s a somebody-done-somebody-wrong song and somebody is going to kill somebody about it. And the emotions have to be big enough to sing a high ‘C’ about it.”
This is her sales pitch to potential college-age opera-goers: Opera is not a highfalutin drag. It is exciting, intense, romantic, violent and, above all, engrossing.
“Opera has such a stigma of being elitist and foreign and silly and stuffy and somehow just ‘not for me,’” said Chris Mattaliano, Portland Opera’s general director.
Portland Opera dispelled these common misconceptions at its Big Night Gala on Saturday, held inside of the Keller Auditorium and outside in the adjacent Keller Fountain Park. The gala was both a celebration of Portland’s rich operatic tradition and an attempt broaden the opera’s audience with a free outdoor concert.
“An event like this has a unique PDX flavor to it,” Mattaliano said. “We [had] the food carts outside, a couple of rock bands, and the big thing: We simulcast this for free so that anyone could show up and get a beer and watch the opera.”
Nearly a thousand fans did just that, gathering on blankets with their picnic baskets to watch a big-screen opera performance on a picturesque late-summer evening.
Two such concertgoers—Liana Walters and Emily Franklin, both 23—sat knitting on a blanket while they waited for the opera to begin. Although Walters is not an opera enthusiast, she said that she is “into theater, music and free events outside in Portland—especially outside in September.”
Attracting younger audience members like Walters and Franklin was a primary aim of the gala. Simply by showing up, college-age attendees helped to expand the breadth of Portland Opera’s impact on the community.
“We’re interested in the people of Portland outside of the people with pearls on,” said Julia Sheridan, public relations manager for Portland Opera.
Outreach events like the gala can ignite and sustain grassroots support for an art form that competes with so much 21st century noise.
“I like to think that if there were 25 other people that might not have had opera on their radar necessarily, but now do, that’s a foot in the door,” Mattaliano said.
At the gala, Mattaliano himself offered a warm welcome to those inside the auditorium and those watching the simulcast. “Tonight, we are celebrating the art form itself,” he said. “We’re consciously focusing on some of the great highlights of the genre.”
The night’s highlights accentuated opera’s sonic diversity, from the triumphant melodic runs of Bernstein’s “Overture” from Candide to the delicate, hypnotically beautiful “Intermezzo” from Mascagani’s Cavalleria Rusticana—a piece whose mere introduction drew contented nods and murmurs of approval from the regulars inside the auditorium.
The gala featured two world-renowned vocalists, tenor Roger Honeywell and soprano Mari Kanyova, who took turns garnering rapturous applause: Honeywell for his vocal ferocity and pitch-perfect tone, and Kanyova for her high-register acrobatics and stunning vibrato.
Honeywell and Kanyova were brought in specifically for the Big Night Gala; each Portland Opera concert features one or two professional vocalists hired for that particular production. Visiting professional singers typically stay in Portland for a month before leaving for their next engagement. The chorus and the orchestra—both of which performed with staggering virtuosity at the Big Night Gala—are composed of Portland-area professional musicians and vocalists.
“It’s a combination of local artists and guest artists from all over the world who come to our opera,” Mattaliano said.
Many of these local artists contribute their time and skills to Portland Opera to Go! (POGO), an education and outreach program for which the Big Night Gala raised funds.
“POGO is a 50-minute English-language version of a famous opera with costumes and sets and piano accompaniment and it goes into schools,” Hamilton said. “It has evolved into a fully arts-integrated curriculum, which means that the teacher can teach what they want but use the opera as a springboard.”
The 2011–12 Portland Opera season continues with Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, on Friday, Nov. 4. The Portland Opera holds a final dress rehearsal the Wednesday before opening night for larger groups of K-12 and college students. Individual college students are encouraged to try the “Student Rush” program: Simply show up by 6:30 for the 7:30 p.m. show and, if tickets are still available, they are only $10.
“The little secret is that there are always some leftover,” said Hamilton, smiling.
