While most Boston University students are preparing for final exams, members of the College of Fine Arts Opera Institute are focusing their energy on celebrating the Institute’s 20th anniversary with an opera production that includes “the complete operatic singing actor,” as its music director described it.
La Boheme, which premiered last night, will run until Sunday and is the second opera production this year to mark the Institute’s 20th anniversary. A presentation of Postcard From Morocco, an opera by Dominick Argento, began the celebrations earlier in February.
For students and coordinators, choosing La Boheme as the anniversary premier last night was a “no-brainer,” said College of Fine Arts freshman Deanna Cirino, who worked on Postcard From Morocco as a production assistant. La Boheme is the second-most performed opera to date, according to a Jan. 12 CFA press release.
“It is an opera that students and professors both love to perform and see preformed,” said Opera Programs Director Sharon Daniels.
The Institute, founded in 1987 by former CFA dean Phyllis Curtain, has been under Daniels’s direction since 1995. It is a two-year, non-degree operatic training program for advanced singers preparing for operatic careers, said CFA Public Relations representative Jean Connaughton.
La Boheme Music Director and Conductor William Lumpkin said this year’s performance is “a testament to the vision of Phyllis Curtain.” La Boheme, a well-known opera comprised of unrelated sketches of interactions between characters, formed the basis for Rent.
The Institute helps aspiring opera singers improve their performance skills, Lumpkin said.
“Over the two years of their residency in the Institute, it is the goal to give them the freedom to grow in all areas that will make them viable artists for the operatic stage,” Lumpkin said in an email. “We want to put particular emphasis on an integration of good vocal technique, savvy stage movement and superb musicianship.”
With the Institute’s selective nature, the quality of the opera performances is always impressive, Cirino said.
“The prestige of the program attracts a lot of beautiful singers who go on to have really good careers,” she said. “This year, the singers are really on point.”
Lumpkin said the opera’s success directly correlates to the Institute’s curriculum.
“The Institute’s emphasis on training the ‘complete operatic singing actor’ has seen marked success in the past few years,” he said. “As the [opera] business has changed from an emphasis on pure vocalism to the insistence that a singer be able to move and act convincingly on stage, we want to train our students to do that.”
In addition to vocal performers within the Institute, the program works with other departments in CFA, said CFA interim dean Walt Meissner.
“The Institute also enriches the experiences of non-music students through a number of collaborations with the School of Theatre,” Meissner said.
Besides training up-and-coming singers, the Institute also hosts guest artists who star in its productions. Well-known opera singers Renee Fleming and Denyce Grave will perform in La Boheme.
“This performance should be one of the best,” Daniels said. “The entire Institute is looking forward to celebrating. This is the first time that we as a company have been able to look back at our roots and decided to celebrate our success.”