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BRAVO: City's opera profile goes up a notch with training program at Salem
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Published: June 8, 2008
When it comes to opera, Winston-Salem is becoming the little city that could. Each season brings us three professional productions by Piedmont Opera and two amateur ones at the N.C. School of the Arts. There's a quantity and diversity in the repertoire that many cities lack.
From June to September, though, the local opera scene has remained pretty pianissimo — until now.
Salem College is the host of the American Singers' Opera Project, which is designed to educate young American singers about "what it takes to have a career in opera." The program began last Sunday. It will wind up this week with three performances of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro; these will be Wednesday through Friday in the Drama Workshop on campus. (Marriage will be sung in Italian, with recitatives in English.) There will also be an "Aria Evening" presentation Friday and Saturday in Shirley Recital Hall.
Opera insiders, particularly those in New York, may well have heard of the project. It happened there for 10 years until the project's board concluded that rising costs were making the program unaffordable for young singers.
North Carolina came to be seen as an attractive alternative location, and last year, the project ran for a week at Greensboro College. Barbara DeMaio Caprilli, a voice instructor at Salem with many opera credits, ran the program. She studies with Nancy Stokes-Milnes, the project's founder and president.
"Everyone loved it," Caprilli said, adding that it "was a great success."
Encouraged, Caprilli moved the project to Salem College this year and lengthened it from one week to two. The additional time has enabled her to include a fully staged opera with keyboard accompaniment. (Caprilli said that she'd eventually like to employ an orchestra.) Project singers in Marriage came to Winston-Salem with their parts memorized.
The project isn't the only "intense" program out there designed to help young singers either move their careers to the next level or, as Caprilli frankly noted, helps them decide whether professional opera is for them. Caprilli believes that hers will stand apart from the others for several reasons.
The first is affordability. The price of tuition, room and board comes to $1,800. That's not a walk in the park, but for many participants it eliminates increasingly expensive plane fares. In addition, the price of attending the workshop includes pretty much everything, and all happens under one roof.
Caprilli and several other music professionals are emphasizing the practical in rehearsals, seminars, master classes and coaching sessions. Students are getting audition tips, movement classes, opera history and advice on how to decide if they need management.
How's the program going over with its 19 participants, who come from such states as Arizona, Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina? Pretty well — to judge by the assessments of two of them: mezzo-soprano Amanda Gardner, from Asheville, and soprano Andrea Howland-Myers, a Winston-Salem resident who is a rising junior at Oklahoma City University.
Gardner, 29, works as a human-resources coordinator by day and does as much opera as she can on the side. The project, she said, has provided "a safe place to hone your craft" in an environment in which "nobody can talk bad about anybody else."
Howland-Myers, who'll appear in Marriage as Susanna, likes the real-world experience, namely preparing a production on a tight schedule. She spoke of mastering each of the opera's four scenes in one day.
"It's a really great situation that you wouldn't have in a lot of programs where you are still a student," she said.
And Gardner likes the fact that the project avoids really "cerebral" talk in favor of useful knowledge.
"You can take what they teach you here and remember it the whole rest of the year," she said.
■ The American Singers' Opera Project will present "Aria Evening" at 7 p.m. Friday and Saturday in Shirley Recital Hall at Salem College. Project singers will also perform Mozart's The Marriage of Fiagoro at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Friday in the Drama Workshop on campus. Tickets for all performances are $5, $3 for seniors and children under 12. They are available at the door. For more information, call Caprilli at 336-749-5536.
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
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