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High Art
Knoxville Opera continues another bang-up season
by Paige M. Travis
Opera is an acquired taste. Maybe some people are born with an affinity for that particular mix of music and theater, but it’s not an automatic kinship for most. Perhaps because opera isn’t as prevalent in our society as, say, pop music, modern listeners have to make more of a concerted effort to understand the form. Like spicy foods or raw fish, the flavor of opera isn’t to everyone’s liking, but it can grow on you. And if there was a time and place to get a feel for opera, it’s right now in Knoxville.
Under the leadership of Maestro Frances Graffeo, Knoxville Opera is in the midst of a seriously successful streak. Ticket sales are better than ever—“skyrocketing” is the word used by the Opera’s Chyna Brackeen. She states that KO’s recent snowballing success is due in no small part to Graffeo’s invention of the Rossini Festival.
In its debut year of 2002, the Italian Street Fair honoring the composer Gioacchino Rossini drew 6,000 people to enjoy a smattering of vendor booths and performance tents featuring local dance companies, singing groups, folk and string music—all stationed on a few blocks of Gay Street. Inside the Bijou Theater, there were opera performances during the day and at night during the festival weekend.
In 2004, just three years later, more than 30,000 people came to Gay Street for the all-day event that had tripled in size along Gay Street and was held in conjunction with the Dogwood Arts Festival.
In addition to the lively street fair, which this time stretched around the corner onto Main Street to accommodate the vast number of vendors, the Rossini Festival naturally features a performance of at least one of Rossini’s operas. Last year, The Barber of Seville got top billing. Brackeen says that both Saturday performances sold out, creating a clamoring demand for the performances on Sunday and Monday, days that aren’t usually that popular. Selling out opera is a big deal around here, says Brackeen. That kind of a demand is a response to buzz and results in even more buzz.
“We’ve done a lot of work trying to make people understand that the Rossini Festival has been produced by Knoxville Opera,” Brackeen says. If visitors make the connection between an enjoyable, diverse and energetic festival and the producers of enjoyable and diverse musical productions, any previous misconceptions they might have about opera could fall away.
“Opera encompasses all your senses,” Brackeen says. “It really does utilize every artform.”
Classical orchestrations, dancing, acting, graphically brilliant sets all combine for a feast of sensory information that can sometimes overwhelm a viewer. One trick for experienced and novice operagoers alike is to familiarize yourself with the opera’s story line before the house lights go down. Since most operas are sung in Italian, German or French, following the story through the lyrics can be a challenge for the monolingual among us. Subtitles, or supertitles, projected above the stage translate the dialogue.
For Knoxville Opera’s current season, however, English rules the day. A new translation of The Magic Flute was performed in October, and the first selection of 2005 is Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, which Brackeen describes as “Monty Python in a kimono.” Much like hundreds of other operas that focus on love stories that are complicated by parents, politics and social injustice, The Mikado is also a silly, slapstick operetta set in Japan. It premiered in 1885 and is now possibly the most popular opera ever. Brackeen is confident that The Mikado, which she also describes as accessible and fresh, will continue Knoxville Opera’s run of successful productions. After the comic opera is performed in the Knoxville Civic Auditorium, the season winds up with a bang in April during Rossini Festival weekend. The Daughter of the Regiment is a full-length opera set in the newly renovated Tennessee Theatre, and Rossini’s The Marriage Bill will be paired with Roman Fever at the Bijou Theatre.
The Marriage Bill was Rossini’s first successful opera. It’s a comedic love story about the struggle that ensues for the hand of Fanny Mill, the daughter of an English merchant, when a mysterious “marriage bill” arrives in the Mill household. After confrontations and confusions worthy of a modern sitcom play themselves out, the conclusion is a happy one.
Roman Fever is Robert Ward’s adaptation of a short story by Edith Warton in which two girlhood friends reunite in Rome with their grown daughters. As they reminisce about their past and the way their lives have played out, some parallels in character are revealed in the young women and old jealousies are reignited. Robert Ward will be the festival’s special guest.
The Rossini Festival’s Italian Street Fair is scheduled for Saturday, April 9, 2005. With a full-length opera and a double-bill of one-acts being performed on Gay Street theater stages, the festival is bound to outperform its previous expectations and transform even more opera-curious folks into opera fans.
December 30, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 53
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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High Art