Friday, January 1st, 2010
DES MOINES METRO OPERA
BY LORI ERICKSON
The 1974 production of Madama Butterfly featured Carol Stuart.
THE LEAD SOPRANO SINGS THE LAST TREMULOUS NOTE OF the final aria, and the audience erupts into applause. Once again, the company has staged one of the world’s classic operas, creating an evening filled with elaborate costumes, dramatic sets and some of the nation’s leading vocal talent. Audience members exit into the evening, chattering excitedly among themselves.
Can you guess the scene? New York, maybe? Paris? Vienna? Try Indianola, Iowa (28 minutes from Des Moines).
The Des Moines Metro Opera (www.desmoinesmetroopera.org) has been performing on the campus of Simpson College since 1973. Its mission is twofold: to stage great performances and nurture young operatic talent. The company was founded by Simpson College music professor Dr. Robert Larsen. “I wanted to bring opera to Iowa,” says Larsen, its artistic director. “I thought there was an audience here, even though most people had never had the chance to experience opera before. We first had to educate people about what opera is—that it’s not just beautiful singing, but also sets and costumes and drama.”
Larsen knew that people wouldn’t come back unless they had a good experience. “It may seem counter-intuitive, but I think there’s more tolerance of failure in a place like New York than in Iowa,” he says. “People who are familiar with opera know that sometimes you’re going to see a disappointing performance. But in Iowa, I knew that a bad performance meant that people wouldn’t ever come back.”
Since its founding, the company has staged more than 600 performances of 115 operas. The primary focus is its summer festival, regarded as one of the premier opera festivals in the U.S. Each season comprises three operas—usually one comedy, one tragedy and one rarely performed work—in repertory. Nearly 200 singers, musicians, conductors and staff members are recruited from throughout North America to perform in a 488-seat theater on the Simpson campus.
In addition to its summer festival, the Des Moines Metro Opera sponsors an eight-member touring company, OPERA Iowa, which performs for 10 weeks in schools and community centers across Iowa and its surrounding states. It has reached almost 600,000 people in 22 years.
“For many of the people in our audiences, this is their first exposure not only to opera, but to live theater itself,” Larsen says. “The major reason why we do this is to help train the audiences of tomorrow. In the U.S., we don’t lack for great performers—but we do lack for audiences.
We’re doing our part to change that.” The company’s success is evident in the excited response of schoolchildren. For a generation raised on iPods, hearing a bass-baritone shake the ceiling tiles with an aria from Tosca can be a revelation.
This year’s troupe will perform Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel and A Dream Fulfilled: The Saga of George Washington Carver, a 50-minute children’s opera composed by Michael Patterson. In addition, the troupe provides study guides and educational workshops for students. The tour runs from Jan. 25 to April 9.
The company also nurtures young artists with the James Collier Apprentice Artist Program, which provides training for a career in opera for 40 promising young singers each year. Among those who have gone through the program are Dimitri Pittas, who performed this year with the Deutsche Oper Berlin and The Metropolitan Opera, and Grammy Award-nominated Lauren Flanigan, who has sung with The Metropolitan Opera, Teatro alla Scala, the Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the New York City Opera.
“The company is extremely loyal to its performers, as well as to its audiences,” says Roland Hawkins II, who sings the lead role in A Dream Fulfilled. “There’s a real sense of family among the company, which often isn’t true elsewhere in the opera world.”
It may be this sense of camaraderie, combined with high production standards and a missionary zeal for creating new audiences and nurturing young talent, that gives the Des Moines Metro Opera a unique position in the opera community. But its greatest measure of success may be the fact that Iowans keep coming back for more.
