By Lidia Semrau
When opera singer George Valettas first sang at the Glebe Montessori School 11 years ago as a favour to his children’s head director, he wasn’t expecting the performance to turn into a full-fledged operatic production, let alone the starting point for his opera company.
This month, Valetta’s company Ooh La La…Opera! celebrates its first year on the Ottawa entertainment scene, and intends to come full circle by giving back to local elementary schools.
A tradition of sorts, Valettas and his colleagues have put on an opera concert for the Glebe Montessori School’s students and their parents every year.
“They love it, it’s lots of fun,” says Sylvie Rankin, Glebe Montessori School head director. “It’s nice because it introduces them to a form of music that maybe they don’t know so well or that they normally wouldn’t listen to.”
Last year the troupe performed an adaptation of Engelbert Humperdinck’s children’s classic, Hansel and Gretel, and a production of Little Red Riding Hood is expected in the spring of next year.
The show is only one aspect of Ooh La La’s involvement with the school. Prior to each performance, several of the troupe’s members visit the school’s preschool to senior elementary students, ranging from ages three to 12, to give them opera workshops for several hours.
The children are introduced to the history of opera and various types of opera voices, such as soprano and tenor; which describe, respectively a higher and lower singing voice. With the accompaniment of a pianist, the artists teach the children how to sing from their diaphragm and project their voices by having them perform operatic pieces and acting out scenes.
“The idea is to get them involved as much as possible and learn something in the process,” says Valettas.
“The more we educate, the more we’ll have future patrons of the opera,” says Laura Dziubaniuk, one of Ooh La La’s founding members.
In the near future, Valettas hopes to visit other schools in the local community to perform and have the children participate in the same type of workshops.
“Pop music has become sort of the scourge of the 20th century,” says Valettas. “It’s important to keep fine music in the ears of younger kids.”
When the troupe is not performing at the Glebe Montessori School, they can be found on the Fourth Stage at the National Arts Centre (NAC).
Unique to Ottawa, the company prides itself on showcasing an unconventional blend of opera and theatre.
They take highlights from various known operas and incorporate those operatic scenes into their theatrical script.
Their latest show, Love and Ashes, depicts a soldier, played by tenor Valettas, and his fiancée, played by soprano Shawne Elizabeth, separated by war.
In their correspondence with one another, they reminisce about love and happier times, and contemplate the nature of heroism, and the finality of death. The performance is balanced with spoken dialogue and music by Verdi, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, and others.
“I think people really like the idea,” says Valettas. “There are a lot of people who like opera but aren’t necessarily prepared to sit through the whole thing. So, we give them a highlights show, and the response so far has been very, very good.”
The performance location for the opera is also quite unconventional.
Instead of an elaborate opera hall, the NAC’s Fourth Stage is an intimate cabaret setting, where audience members sit around candle-lit tables with an immediate proximity to the performers.
“When you watch an opera in a bigger hall, you don’t get the finer points of a performance,” says Valettas. “You’ll hear the music and singing, but I don’t think that you can feel as close and connected to the performers as you do in a small intimate hall. That kind of intimacy is generally very exciting for people.”
Valettas hopes all of these features will make opera more accessible to the community.
“When it comes to classical music, songs, orchestral music, whatever it is, there are a lot of greying heads in the halls; there’s no new blood!” says Valettas. “I don’t want people to think that opera is some stodgy thing for old people. Ooh La La is trying to change that.”