Shepherd School concerts offer win-win combination for students, opera lovers

Shepherd School concerts offer win-win combination for students, opera lovers

BY DAWN DORSEY
Special to the Rice News

A pair of upcoming aria concerts will allow opera students to refine their acting skills while treating the audience to works from operas ranging from the familiar to the lesser known.

The concerts, scheduled for 7:30 p.m. April 13 and 14 in the Wortham Opera Theater at Alice Pratt Brown Hall, will feature a different program each evening. Selections will include arias from “The Magic Flute,” “Don Giovanni,” “The Italian Girl in Algiers,” “La Boheme,” “Werther,” “Marta,” “Der Freischutz,” “Manon,” “Carmen,” “Eugene Onegin” and “Little Women.”

Besides giving the audience an opportunity to sample various operas, Debra Dickinson, artist teacher of opera studies for acting and movement, said the concert is a class project to help students bring more depth to their acting of arias for auditions.

“When voice students audition with arias, they commonly have not done a staged version of the opera that the aria is from,” she said. “In this concert, we are staging these arias so that the singers have contexts to work within, including scene partners.”

Dickinson said the concert will help students later when they perform the arias for auditions because they will be able to better imagine details of scenes. This preparation will bring more vision and strength to their acting. 

Performers are juniors, seniors and graduate students enrolled in the opera workshop class, and they chose the selections they will perform. The arias are pieces the students are working on currently with their voice teachers and coaches that they would like to add to their audition repertoires.

The arias will be sung in the original languages in which they were written, including Italian, French, German, English and Russian. Although there will be no surtitles, introductions will be provided to keep the audience informed about what is being sung.

Admission to both concerts is free and open to the public.