Florentine Opera Reimagines the Arias with ‘Covers’

BY BRENDAN FOX

The Florentine Opera has an artist in residence this year, and it’s the Milwaukee-based alternative electronic duo Immortal Girlfriend. On February 9-10 at The Cooperage, the Florentine will present a production called Covers, featuring opera arias reimagined with Immortal Girlfriend’s soundscapes woven into modified piano reductions.

Immortal Girlfriend’s music is a “cinematic landscape of sound,” says Florentine’s General Director Maggey Oplinger. “There’s so much color and emotional, evocative movement in what they create that I feel you could marry it with almost any sound, in the same way that you could marry it to dialogue.”

This process of musical cross-pollinating began with Florentine reaching out to Immortal Girlfriend’s members, brothers Kevin and William Bush, giving them tickets to performances to get immersed in opera. Later, the core group of Baumgartner Studio Artists sang for them in a private session.

All involved parties collaborated on the final repertoire choices, resulting in an eclectic program that mixes familiar arias with some of the singers’ favorites and some that Immortal Girlfriend tracked down on their own. Director Dimonte Henning then set to work shaping this operatic mixtape into a coherent whole for the purpose of theatrical storytelling.

VERY FAST, VERY BEAUTIFUL

Maggey Oplinger explains, “Everyone’s going to be on stage all the time. The whole thing is high energy, very fast, very beautiful. And [Henning] is creating this overarching story trajectory…within the context of the story Dimonte is building, we might use the text of the piece and the intention of the piece, but we might not use the character from the opera in telling our story.”

In an additional spark of creativity, Covers will be staged at The Cooperage, with unreserved seating and cocktails and food available. With the freedom of leaving a traditional opera space, Florentine and Immortal Girlfriend have a new canvas to let their dreams run wild.

If you’re curious about how the final product turned out, know that Maggey Oplinger is excited: “The first time I got to really hear a couple of the arias in one sitting, I thought ‘Oh my God, this is everything I wanted it to be!’ You just don’t know that until you hear it come together. It’s everything and more. I have a feeling this will be one of those events where if you’re in the room, it’s something we’ll all be talking about for a long time. It’s pretty cool.”

Covers will be performed 7:30 p.m., February 9-10 at The Cooperage, 822 S. Water St.. Runtime 90 minutes. For tickets and more information, visit florentineopera.org.