{"id":36321,"date":"2016-04-18T16:39:56","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T20:39:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=36321"},"modified":"2016-04-18T16:39:56","modified_gmt":"2016-04-18T20:39:56","slug":"feature-opera-for-all-a-community-in-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2016\/04\/18\/feature-opera-for-all-a-community-in-concert\/","title":{"rendered":"FEATURE | Opera for All: A Community In Concert"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Opera
Opera For All Community Chorus. Alvaro Lozano Gutierrez (conductor) at Trinity St. Paul\u2019s Centre for the Arts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

S<\/span>unday afternoon, eight weeks after the first rehearsal, the Opera For All Community Chorus<\/a> took their positions on the stage and the risers in the mostly filled 750 seat Jeanne Lamon Hall, trained their eyes on Maestro Alvaro Lozano Gutierrez, took a deep breath and launched into a spirited rendition of The Anvil Chorus. To say that we had moved through a learning curve during those eight weeks would be an understatement: we\u2019d reached the peak of a learning mountain.\u00a0 Many of us, myself included, had never sung in a choir before, let alone performed in a prominent concert venue, and a subsection of people did not read music.\u00a0 It\u2019s safe to say the most of us are not native Italian speakers and had to learn the lyrics phonetically.\u00a0 And for a lot of us, holding onto the harmonic lines as our different sections diverged was a new challenge.<\/p>\n

Yet we confidently performed seven venerable opera choruses, including The Voyager\u2019s Chorus from Mozart\u2019s Idomeneo, Brindisi \u201cLibiamo\u201d from Verdi\u2019s La Traviata, Va Pensiero, from Verdi\u2019s Nabucco and literally ended on a note of triumph with the Triumphal March from Aida, in which we were joined by the delightful Rose Avenue Public School Junior Choir, who substituted as horns by singing through paper cones from the balcony. We came in on cue, paused precisely during the rests, raised our voices to crescendos and dropped our volume to pianissimos, and sang with heartfelt emotion.\u00a0 All these skills were imparted to us over the course of the eight weeks, by Alvaro, whose motto from the outset, even when people were uncertain as to which vocal section to join, what section of the score we were singing, where the lyric sheets were, how to pronounce the words, or whether they were singing on pitch was: Don\u2019t Panic.<\/p>\n

This was one of his most comprehensible dictums, unlike many of his other instructions, because the Spanish-born baritone and conductor\u2019s English is a work in progress.\u00a0 Over time he picked up such phrases as \u201cFrom the Top\u201d, and his English became more sophisticated, but often he had to pantomime what he wanted, or demonstrate by singing so we could just copy him.\u00a0 This made rehearsals perplexing at times, as well as richly entertaining as he acted out the moods and nuances of the music and explained the operas from which they came.\u00a0 While coaching us on La Zingarella from La Traviata, he wanted us to shift rapidly from menacing to light-hearted, so explained that Verdi is \u201c Vipp-oh-la,\u201d which we eventually realized was Bi-Polar. Even though I couldn\u2019t always understand Alvaro\u2019s language, his comedic brilliance, and mimetic skill made his musical intentions crystal clear.<\/p>\n

Having a performance to prepare for added a palpable but beneficial pressure to the program, which, while intended to make singing opera accessible and fun, still had musical ambition. Signing up for a non-auditioned program of tuneful Opera crowd-pleasers, I expected the rehearsals to be something like a rousing singsong. \u00a0When I learned that I was expected to practice at home at least 20 minutes a day I realized that it was wishful thinking to imagine mastering 7 opera choruses in eight 90-minute rehearsals.\u00a0\u00a0 My sense is that many of my fellow singers similarly adapted to reality, and took the challenge seriously.\u00a0 We had the option of a daytime or evening rehearsal, and several people came to both each week.\u00a0 I noticed people after class huddled together, practicing phrases with the focused look of intense listening.\u00a0 One chorister I ran into was carrying her lyrics with her so she could practice on the go and another mentioned that she went to the library to listen to the operas, and rehearsal attendance held steady.<\/p>\n

\"Opera
Opera For All Community Chorus. Alvaro Lozano Gutierrez (conductor) at Trinity St. Paul\u2019s Centre for the Arts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the performance approached Alvaro assured us that what mattered was the rehearsals, not the concert, and though I appreciate this \u201cjourney-not-the-destination\u201d sentiment, I have to say that the performance was not only thrilling, but culminated the entire experience in a transformative way. \u00a0For one thing, for a frequent concertgoer such as myself, it is almost like stepping through the looking glass to be the one facing the audience rather than sitting in it.\u00a0 Being arranged on the stage and risers, and finding myself in the front row, looking out into a darkened auditorium,\u00a0 having a stage light shining in my eye for over an hour,\u00a0 singing steadily through each piece instead of pausing to correct and tweak phrases, even appraising how each of us interpreted the dress code of \u201call black with a splash of colour\u201d , and most of all facing the conductor instead of watching his back, was all novel and fascinating.\u00a0 And the performance itself was a genuine experience of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow\u2014deep immersion and energized focus in a demanding but gratifying project. \u00a0My concern was not to please the audience but to do justice to the music, and to fulfill Alvaro\u2019s goals.\u00a0 Monitoring myself, listening to the voices around me, and watching the Maestro, resulted in a sense of accomplishment that made the audience\u2019s applause welcome but secondary.<\/p>\n

The warm enthusiasm of the audience, mostly consisting of family and friends of the choir, gives no indication of how well we sang, and Musical Toronto\u2019s opera critic, Joseph So is currently making do with the Deutsche Opera in Berlin<\/a> so wasn\u2019t there to appraise us. \u00a0I could certainly detect moments when our diction was foggy, and some sections were out of synch, and I heard the occasional sour note \u2014 usually my own.\u00a0 But overall, we did Alvaro proud, which he registered throughout the performance by rising an approving thumb after we got something right.<\/p>\n

Opera for All 2016 is underwritten by the Miles Nadal JCC Music Scholarship and Innovation Fund.\u00a0 The project lead, and Assistant Executive Director of the MNJCC, Harriet Wichin, informed the audience that in addition to the 100-plus choir members, there were another 500 people involved in the project.\u00a0 Aside from this program, there are about 25,000 hours of musical programming a year taking place at the MNJCC.\u00a0 \u201cWe believe that creativity and wellness can bloom at every stage of life,\u201d Wichin told me. \u00a0This sentiment must be shared by the extensive list of partners in this project: the Canadian Opera Company, The Bloor Street Culture Corridor, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, The Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, The Alliance Francaise, the Al Green Theatre, the Consul General of the Kingdom of Spain, the United Way of Toronto and York Region, and the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. \u00a0Regardless of the caliber of our performance, the collaboration of so many organizations from so many communities is an impressive achievement in itself.<\/p>\n

#LUDWIGVAN<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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“We came in on cue, paused precisely during the rests, raised our voices to crescendos”. Follow along as MT’s Robin Roger learns to sing some of the great opera choruses with Toronto’s Opera For All Community Chorus project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":36322,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5723,4967,43],"tags":[5932,6101,5201],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2016\/04\/IMG_4067.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-9rP","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36321"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36321"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36328,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36321\/revisions\/36328"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36321"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=36321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}