POV Part 2: Opera

So in the last post I spoke all about the city of Victoria and what I did in my spare time (of which I had very little). This post will describe the fun, challenge, etc that was my experience with the Pacific Opera Victroia's New Opera Works program (hereafter shortened to POV and NOW). This was the 5th year that POV has run NOW and the first year that they held the sessions and rehearsals in the music building on University of Victoria campus. UVic is quite a distance out of the main city core but it is on beautiful grounds. The Music building is a concrete bunker, quite obviously a leftover from the 70's but it is quite large and well staffed.

The first session held on Monday was an introductory day in which we met the fellow people in the workshop (2 other composers and 3 libretists(lyricists)) as well as the singers who were involved (many of them friends of people I knew at Western, the world of Opera and workshops is quite small). The idea behind the whole program is that 3 newspapers articles from the Sunday NY Times were selected and each composer was paired with a librettist and had to write the 1st scene (a recitative), which was due the following morning at 9am to be performed. This cyclce continue for the next two days so that eveyrbody got to work with every person and on every story. Day 2 was an aria, Day 3 a duet and Day 4, an ensemble piece, which we wrote with our orginal partner. The interetsing part was seeing how the stories developed as each partnership added to it so that when it was over we had 3, 4 scene operas about 3 stories in the headlines.

It was a fantastic experience but it was frantic. It's quite a challenge to leave UVic at 4pm and compose an entire scene for the next morning. It's also impressive to see how fast the singers involved managed to learn the music. We had a concert of everything on Saturday a few hours before I left and soon I will have a CD sent to me in the mail. Having done one workshop I can't wait to hear back from the Aldenburg/Jerwood Opera Workshop as well as the NAC(Nataional Arts Centre) Summer workshop.

In a side note... malls are insane... why don't people do their Christmas shopping earlier?
Another Victoria Picture: