By Emmaly Wiederholt
Opera is big in New Mexico. Of course, we’re all familiar with summer nights at the Santa Fe Opera, but for those of us who long for opera beyond the heat of July and August, Albuquerque’s Opera Southwest is an exciting smaller opera company producing bold high-quality opera every spring and fall season.
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aestro Anthony Barrese joined Opera Southwest as music director in 2007, and assumed the roles of artistic director and principal conductor in 2011. He has earned many accolades as both a composer and conductor, and is regularly engaged by opera companies throughout North America and Europe.
“For me, the main benefit of being the artistic director of a smaller opera company like Opera Southwest is the artistic control. I choose the repertoire and the singers, thus shaping an artistic vision over a long period of time,” describes Barrese. Opera Southwest generally presents two operas a year: one that’s well-known and another that’s unconventional. “The off-the-beaten-path operas have gotten further off the beaten path in recent years,” says Barrese, explaining how this gives singers roles they aren’t likely to have the opportunity to do elsewhere. “For example, next fall we will be producing Rossini’s Tancredi. In the early 19th century, this was one of the most popular operas. It hasn’t been
done in the United States for years now. Most mezzo sopranos dream of getting to sing Tancredi, but most won’t get the opportunity, so talented singers come work with Opera Southwest because of the opportunity to do a role they wouldn’t otherwise get to do,” Barrese explains. This isn’t the only Rossini opera in Opera Southwest’s repertoire. A number of years ago, Barrese started actively putting on more works by Rossini, both because the Hispanic Cultural Center (where Opera Southwest presents) is approximately the size of the Italian opera houses where many of Rossini’s operas were conceived and premiered, and because Rossini requires a young agile voice, exactly the type of singer a company like Opera Southwest attracts. The original Rossini cycle was such a hit, Barrese conceived a second Rossini cycle. This April, Opera Southwest will present Il Turco, one of Rossini’s early comic operas. “We try to do operas appropriate to our stage size and audience. This is why Rossini’s operas work perfectly. Rossini’s operas were never intended to be heard in large opera houses like the Met. They were intended to
Opera Southwest Productions of: PREVIOUS PAGE Hamlet (Amleto) THIS PAGE TOP Aida LOWER La Boheme BELOW Hamlet (Amleto)
great place to hear singers on the cusp of huge success. We’ve had a number of singers come through Opera Southwest who are now singing at the Met or in Europe.” Sure, summer nights at the Santa Fe Opera are always a treat, but so are spring and fall nights tucked into the Hispanic Cultural Center, sharing in an intimate experience with an opera company that truly could (and indeed does) try just about anything they want. In other words, it’s the little opera company that could.
be heard in a very intimate setting. It’s great for people to hear opera with the intimacy with which it was intended to be heard,” says Barrese. Rossini cycles are only the beginning of the audacity of this little opera company. In 2014, Opera Southwest premiered Amleto, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Over a decade ago, Barrese first learned of an Italian Hamlet libretto written by Arrigo Boito. A publishing house in Milan had an archive of the manuscript. Barrese carefully transcribed the original manuscript, painstakingly piecing together the music and libretto into a readable score. In 2014, Opera Southwest succeeded in bringing this forgotten work back to life. “My biggest hope is it catches on in other places,” confides Barrese. “It’s
being produced at Opera Kentucky and Opera Delaware in May. There’s a festival in Austria, one of the most prestigious opera festivals in the world, and they will be doing a production of Amleto this summer. Hopefully with the opera spreading to the East Coast and Europe, it will start to go places. When we did Amleto in 2014, we had reviewers from all over the world come. It showed us that offthe-beaten-path repertoire puts us on the map. Amleto was by far the most out-there opera we’ve produced, but it also garnered us the most attention.” Music lovers can enjoy the artistic risk-taking a smaller company like Opera Southwest can offer. “As we go forward with bolder repertoire, we are even more emboldened to present operas not being presented elsewhere,” Barrese asserts. “It’s also a