Students’ 1st Taste of Opera Results in Mixed Reviews

A one-act opera based on an episode of “The Simpsons” would have been ideal. But when San Diego Opera education director Roger Pines went searching for a compact, accessible opera to take on tour to area elementary and high schools, his high hopes were compromised. For starters, an opera about “The Simpsons” has yet to be written.

“I searched for a terrific contemporary piece,” Pines explained. “At one point, I had a potential list of 10 American operas. My first choice was Leonard Bernstein’s ‘Trouble in Tahiti,’ but it turned out that the royalties for producing it were too expensive.”

Performing “Trouble in Tahiti,” a 1952 work whose plot is a clever spoof of American suburban life, might have made the task of Pines’ San Diego Opera Ensemble considerably easier. Staying within budget, of course, was only one of the factors that determined Pines’ choice for his six-member troupe of young professional singers. He also needed a fast-paced work that required a single set and used no more than six singers in the vocal ranges appropriate for this season’s vocalists. The length had to be close to an hour, but not longer than a single period in the typical school schedule.

Pines ended up choosing Georges Bizet’s “Dr. Miracle,” a seldom performed comic opera whose frothy music sounds more like Rossini than the sweeping dramatic style of the composer of “Carmen.”

“The goal of our touring one-act is to be our entertainment show--to give the audience a great time,” Pines continued. “ ‘Dr. Miracle’ is very up and light-hearted, and it can be appreciated by a broad spectrum of audiences.”

If this is stretching the definition of education, Pines is acutely aware of how foreign a first-hand experience of opera is to the majority of students. The troupe has two other touring programs with a more pedagogic slant, “Curtain Up” and “Through the Looking Glass,” which consist of operatic excerpts tied together with narration. To make the “Dr. Miracle” production more understandable, Pines and his directorial crew used an English translation and moved the opera’s location to the French Quarter of New Orleans.

“I wasn’t eager to place the action in France, and moving it to the French Quarter allowed us to keep the characters’ French names,” Pines said.

Between Oct. 8 and Dec. 7, the Opera Ensemble will have given about 40 productions of “Dr. Miracle,” from the Calexico High School to the Paul Ecke Elementary School in Encinitas. Last Wednesday, the ensemble produced “Dr. Miracle” before a few hundred students in the Performing Arts Hall of San Diego High School.

Holding the attention of these weaned-on-MTV teen-agers was no easy task. They proved a noisy audience, but not unruly. They picked up on the opera’s obvious comedy, and when soprano Debra McLaren, who played the coy heroine, made her first entrance, she was greeted by a chorus of appreciative whistles from the approving males in the audience. The pace of the opera’s finale increased noticeably as the sound of the final bell sent students scurrying to the exits.

A round table of students from San Diego High’s journalism class, taught by instructor Gary Jimenez, gathered after the performance to discuss their reactions to the opera.

“The opera was not real exciting,” said San Diego High student Hector Gomez. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give it a 5 because it wasn’t something for high school students--maybe if it were about sports or some problem that high school kids would encounter.”

Gomez was not sure he would go to another opera, although he quickly added that he would attend if his girlfriend wanted to go.

Sharmaine Webb was thrown off by the different accents the singers used.

“I’d give it a seven because kids on this campus are not interested in opera. But I thought the guy with the French accent had the best voice.”

Another student, Mesha Stallings, was more favorably impressed.

“It was different than I had pictured,” Stallings said. “The plot was comical, and the music was not as strange as I thought.”

Tabitha Crouch was underwhelmed by the modest proportions of the touring production.

“I like opera, but I guess you couldn’t expect too much for a school performance. I thought an opera would be in a foreign language with lots of singers,” Crouch observed.

Polish connection. Even though the politics and economics of Eastern Europe are in turmoil, its rich cultural identity provides a comforting constant. Especially the cultural identity provided by Frederic Chopin.

Polish pianist Bronislawa Kawalla, professor of piano at the Warsaw Academy of Music, makes it clear why Chopin is her country’s primary musical icon.

“He made use of Polish folk elements in his Mazurkas, for example, and in the Ballades he transposed Polish literature,” she said, adding that these insolences are more understandable to Polish pianists who know the history and the culture behind them.

If performing Chopin is an obligation to Polish pianists, Kawalla affirmed that it is “a magnificent obligation.” And when asked whether there were Polish pianists who did not specialize in Chopin, she frowned. “I think not, although there are many pianists who specialize in contemporary Polish music.”

Kawalla, who is in the midst of her third American performing tour, will further share her insights into Chopin in a Thursday recital and Friday master class at Palomar College in San Marcos.

The pianist first visited North America in 1975 when she won first prize in the Washington, D.C., International Bach Competition. Last week, she performed at Washington’s Catholic University and in New York at the Polish mission to the United Nations.

As a sign of the changing times, Kawalla proudly showed the Polish mission’s official invitation to her U.N. program, in which the “Polish Peoples Republic” had been crossed out and “Republic of Poland” neatly written in. The deeper significance of altered terminology may elude Americans, but other changes in Polish life are easier to appreciate.

“For example, in the music conservatories, the students no longer have to study the required subjects in political economics, and the teachers can choose their own line of teaching. Religious music has come back to the concert halls--not just in churches--and there is a huge explosion of religious compositions. Polish composers who left the country for political reasons are now returning, and it is no longer forbidden to play their music.”