Tracy Cox stars in Victory Hall Opera’s Fat Pig, an original opera based on a play
by Neil LaBute that champions body justice and positivity. Supplied photo
There might be a few local residents who haven’t yet heard of Victory Hall Opera. But rest assured that opera aficionados nationwide—from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest—have begun to take notice of the Charlottesville-based company.
Victory Hall is turning heads thanks to its embrace of cutting-edge productions, like its latest, a world premiere of the original opera Fat Pig.
“A big part of our mission when we started was to take the usual structure of opera and reinvent it,” says Miriam Gordon-Stewart, Victory Hall’s co-founder and artistic director. “Rather than singers being slotted in, the productions are based around the cast and our ensemble. It functions like a troupe. It’s the kind of model you might have seen…at some major theater companies.”
Now entering its seventh year, Victory Hall has put on 26 original productions, more than most similar opera companies stage in a six-year stretch. Five of them have been world premieres; several have been Virginia and U.S. premieres.
The company’s mission and production schedule have drawn the attention of critical U.S. opera onlookers. The Music Academy of the West has given VHO two national Alumni Enterprise Awards for putting on “revolutionary” shows. And The Washington Post called it “the future of the field.”
Now, Victory Hall has attracted a major national talent to star alongside its ensemble in Fat Pig, which premieres on January 22 and will be reprised on January 27.
Tracy Cox, a Dallas native and current Los Angeles resident, has become an in-demand soprano around the world. In addition to performing on some of the biggest stages—she’ll travel to New York to perform at the Metropolitan Opera for a to-be-determined run later this season—she’s also a prominent voice in the body positive movement, with more than 17,000 followers on her fat activism-focused social media platforms.
Cox’s combination of singing talent and activism came together to make her the ideal choice for Fat Pig. The subject of the opera convinced her to add two shows at a small, young opera company in central Virginia to her performing schedule. The show is “a story that we felt has never been represented in the opera—the story of a fat person’s experience,” Gordon-Stewart says.
For the lay opera observer, the notion is odd. Stereotypical opera singers are often big-bodied—“the fat woman with the horns,” Cox suggests. And the ability to sing at length without tiring goes hand in glove with body size, Gordon-Stewart admits. But bigger players are often cast in farcical roles and openly pilloried—never before, the Victory Hall artistic director says, has a lead operatic role been given to a fat person who is celebrated as such on stage. “Often, larger singers are asked to appear thin while playing their roles, or they are dressed to minimize their body and ignore the fact that they are fat,” Gordon-Stewart says.
Fat Pig is based on a play of the same name by Neil LaBute, with its original libretto written by Gordon-Stewart and music by Matt Boehler. The adaptation is Gordon-Stewart and singer/composer Boehler’s first opera, which will be performed at the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College with a small cast and chamber orchestra.
Cox, who had heard of Victory Hall and its repertory through her professional and personal network, believes Fat Pig is an important production for both the opera industry and body justice.
“I was instantly floored by the concept of the project,” she says. “Because there really has never been anything like this. Never has there been a piece where the romantic lead is cast as a fat woman.”
The LaBute play itself has drawn plenty of attention, winning multiple Off-Broadway awards while courting controversy. “He’s been accused of being misogynistic, but we both view his work as presenting misogyny as something you just have to deal with,” Cox says. “The piece presents a fat person who I feel like I understand but is not necessarily me.”
Gordon-Stewart says she and her team approached LaBute about turning Fat Pig into an opera because “we loved this play—it is controversial, and it is relevant.” LaBute, she says, gave them free rein to do what they would with the piece.
Gordon-Stewart says her own perspective as a singer afforded her a unique perspective when adapting Fat Pig to the opera. She found herself cutting significant text and adding new material while attempting to preserve LaBute’s voice. For Cox, the resulting adaptation was a revelation.
“For the first time in my career, I wasn’t worried about my body when I showed up on day one,” she says.
Phoning in the overture: When Victory Hall Opera’s production of Verdi’s La Traviata was canceled, the cast turned to their iPhones—but not for pandemic-induced doom scrolling. Instead, they collaborated on filming UNSUNG, the first feature film made by and about opera singers. In it, the cast navigates the challenges of life during a pandemic, and searches for ways to remain connected to the music they love. The result is a testament to artistic courage in the face of unprecedented obstacles. “It is crucial that these stories be heard; the stories of singers whose calling and life’s work has been banned in the time of COVID, with singing suddenly feared as a virus-spreading danger,” says VHO’s Miriam Gordon-Stewart. The film premieres on-demand, with a live recording of a chamber version of the opera soundtrack available through iTunes.
Saturday 2/27, $10 to stream. victoryhallopera.org.
Victory Hall Opera offers a fresh spin on Haydn's 1784 opera, Armida, at Belmont Arts Collaborative through November 5. Publicity photo
Tale spin: Miriam Gordon-Stewart and Victory Hall Opera take on Hadyn’s 1784 opera Armida with a fresh perspective. The original is a love story of a crusader and enchantress, and Armida’s mission is to seduce, while the soldier’s is to resist. Gordon-Stewart’s version tells the story of an opera troupe “through the lens of a love triangle between colleagues on a tour…that threatens to derail their lives.” Acclaimed soprano Emma McNairy plays opposite expert tenor Victor Ryan Robertson. The director hosts a pre-show talk before each performance.
Through Tuesday, November 5. $14-65, 7:30pm. Belmont Arts Collaborative, 221 Carlton Rd. victoryhallopera.org.
Soprano Alyson Cambridge prepares to tell the story of Sally Hemings’ brief time living on West Main Street in Victory Hall Opera’s Sally on West Main. Photo by Eze Amos
The word “opera” sometimes comes with some preconceived notions attached. It might bring to mind complex stories fraught with drama and murder, created by long-dead composers. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the art form, it may also seem less than relevant to modern society, a type of entertainment that belongs to previous generations.
Such an assumption, however, would overlook Victory Hall Opera. Now in its fourth season, the Charlottesville-based company produces startlingly modern and experimental work, and productions that are locally resonant, as exemplified by the upcoming Sally on West Main, named for Sally Hemings, who was enslaved by—and likely mistress to—Thomas Jefferson.
VHO’s artistic director, Miriam Gordon- Stewart, says opera is generally “a very international industry,” but Victory Hall is determined to make it local. “All of our productions have some kind of tie to Charlottesville, and to some degree, to Charlottesville history.” Sally on West Main, which focuses on an “underexplored moment in Sally Hemings’ story, in which she left Monticello and moved downtown to West Main Street,” is no exception.
Gordon-Stewart says the work is told “through the lens of the people who have experienced its legacy—mainly black women in this country, and in this case, African American artists.” Although Hemings has recently come into the limelight, most of her story was not recorded. Historians are left to fill in the gaps, while artists are left to imagine what sort of person Hemings might have been. Gordon-Stewart says the African American artists in question “have, in some ways, the best chance of illuminating this character.”
One such artist is librettist and playwright Sandra Seaton, whose song cycle From theDiary of Sally Hemings—created nearly 20 years ago with composer William Bolcom—is a piece of the collage that is Sally on West Main.
The original libretto, essentially a musical exploration of Hemings’ life, was supposed to be no longer than 12 minutes, but it grew into a 45-minute song cycle—and that was just the start of Seaton’s unforeseen preoccupation with Hemings. After From the Diary of Sally Hemings was put to music by Bolcom and premiered in 2001, Seaton continued to research the enslaved woman’s largely forgotten life. “I just had a problem letting her go once I started thinking about her,” she says.
Two plays also resulted from Seaton’s research—Sally and A Bed Made in Heaven—both focusing on Hemings and both addressing the emergence of Jefferson and his mistress into public consideration and debate. Seaton says this relationship is largely what continues to draw her to Hemings, although she stresses that her work is as historically accurate as possible. “One thing I did not want to write was a bodice-ripper.”
Considering the renown Seaton’s work has received, it’s safe to say she’s avoided bodice-ripping status. Alyson Cambridge, a soprano opera singer and the star of Sally on West Main, would certainly agree. She first assumed the musical role of Hemings in 2009, when she recorded a performance of Seaton’s song cycle. After the album premiered in 2010, Cambridge reprised her role eight years later in Victory Hall’s pastiche opera Monticello Overheard. During this show, Gordon-Stewart approached Cambridge with the idea that would become Sally on West Main.
Assuming Hemings’ persona is no easy feat, but Cambridge says she feels such a performance is vital. “Race relations are still very much an issue…and I think that looking back at our history, examining it, having healthy and insightful dialogue about it, is really the only way to get to a way forward,” she says. “I think that’s a really wonderful thing to do, and I think doing it through music and a presentation of this nature is a great thing for Charlottesville.”
While Cambridge dives into the history of her role, Sally on West Main’s multimedia components provide a modern twist. Portions of Chris Farina’s locally renowned documentary West Main Street will be screened along with various projects by Marisa Williamson, another artist whose creations have been heavily influenced by what she calls the “spectral figure” of Hemings.
Williamson works largely with film, both behind the scenes and as an actor. Like Cambridge, she has also taken on the persona of Hemings—in 2013, Williamson visited Monticello dressed as Hemings and staged a “mock reenactment,” in which Hemings sang karaoke and dashed through the grounds. “I was doing unusual things and trying to raise the question of what it means to reclaim the space as someone who used to live there,” she says.
Some of these “reenactments” will be among her video contributions, but Williamson also plans to include unseen material—she says she has a wealth of unreleased footage. As she’s been for Seaton, Hemings has proven a continually fascinating and troubling artistic subject for the filmmaker. “I’m trying to make visible a past that has been suppressed,” Williamson says.
Although it’s difficult to imagine what exactly Sally on West Main will resemble, it’s seems certain that every artist involved shares Williamson’s mission statement. “I’m trying to make sense of what it means for Sally Hemings to live on in the present,” she says. “In the same way that Jefferson is so powerfully evoked or embodied everywhere you look in Charlottesville, I want to figure out what that looks like for Sally Hemings.”
SeeSally on West Main at the LeRoi Moore Performance Hall at the Music Resource Center May 25.
The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia performed the second of two annual holiday concerts at Old Cabell Hall on Sunday, December 2. Photo by Martyn Kyle
As Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture.
When Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach began transforming the sounds we were used to hearing, 250 years ago, people said it was the death of classical music,” says Benjamin Rous, music director of the Charlottesville Symphony. “And they have been saying that, for one reason or another, ever since. But classical music is still very much alive.”
Classical music is easy to find around Charlottesville, especially during the holidays. In fact, for classical music devotees, Charlottesville is an all-year-round kind of town, with choices from instrumental to vocal, large-scale to chamber, medieval to modern. “Whether for performers or audience members, this broad category of music we refer to by the sometimes narrow term ‘classical music’ has something for everyone,” says Michael Slon, music director of The Oratorio Society of Virginia and associate professor and director of choral music at the University of Virginia. “And for a town our size, there’s a tremendous array of offerings.”
A symphony orchestra, an opera company, and a large-scale symphonic chorus—Charlottesville has had all of them for decades. Being a university town helps, but as Charlottesville’s character has broadened, so has its classical music scene, which is now largely driven by community efforts to build the culture.
Major players
The Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia, while based at UVA, has been run by the nonprofit Charlottesville Symphony Society since 1976. Fifteen of the orchestra’s 16 principals teach music in some capacity. The rest of the musicians are other faculty, UVA students, and members of the Charlottesville community; Executive Director Janet Kaltenbach notes “most of our musicians are well qualified to play in any professional orchestra in the country.” The Symphony presents five concerts a year, scheduled around the academic calendar—and around home football games, which shut down access and parking around UVA’s Old Cabell Hall, one of its two performance venues.
Janet Kaltenbach is the executive director of the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia. Photo by Martyn Kyle
The Charlottesville Opera began 40 years ago as the Ash Lawn Opera, offering summer open-air performances at James Monroe’s home. In 2009, the company moved its base of operations to the Paramount Theater, where it could offer larger-scale productions and draw bigger audiences. Two years ago, the company became the Charlottesville Opera. Martha Redinger, a current board member active with the organization since 2004, is proud of the Opera’s record of showcasing young singers who have gone on to become top-notch opera stars; its recent fundraiser featured nationally known bass-baritone Eric Owens, whose first paid professional gig was at Ash Lawn in 1992.
The Oratorio Society of Virginia celebrated its 50th anniversary last year with a commissioned choral work by Virginia composer Adolphus Hailstork, based on a poem by UVA professor and Pulitzer Prize-winner Rita Dove. The chorus is made up of about 90 auditioned amateurs who range from recent UVA voice majors to retirees. (Full disclosure: this writer is a member.) The Oratorio Society is affiliated with UVA’s McIntire School of Music (music director Slon also leads UVA’s choral groups), but its driving force is community volunteers.
The Virginia Consort, now in its 29th season, grew out of the Oratorio Society; building on the first group of 25 singers, Consort founder and music director/conductor Judith Gary has created a constellation of chorales. The Chamber Ensemble, about 40 voices, performs twice a year; additional singers are auditioned each year to create the larger Festival Chorus, which presents one large choral work with orchestra. The Youth Chorale program includes the High School Chorus and the Treble Chorus (both directed by Gary) and the Prelude and First Step Choirs (directed by local music and vocal teacher Donna Rehorn).
The Virginia Consort’s Festival Chorus performs a large choral work with an orchestra each season. Photo courtesy Virginia Consort
Chamber music and more
Charlottesville also has a long-standing and rich chamber music scene. The two major players, the Tuesday Evening Concert Series (called TECS, and started in 1948) and the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival (begun in 1999), are by design complementary: from October through April, TECS offers a season featuring touring national and international stars, while the Festival’s September performances highlight emerging artists and edgier works. “We push the boundary of what chamber music is,” says Festival founder and board member Elsie Thompson, “and our audiences are willing to come along.” (All the classical groups in Charlottesville agree the audiences here are knowledgeable, enthusiastic and loyal; “the ecosystem here is exceptional,” says Rous, who took up the Symphony’s leadership in 2017.)
For chamber music fans willing to travel a bit, Staunton presents a top-notch music festival in August; Wintergreen stages a music festival in July-August; and Harrisonburg hosts the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival every June (not to be confused with the non-classical Shenandoah Music Festival held in Orkney Springs).
Bringing the Paramount Theater back to life—an effort which Thompson helped steer—has given the Chamber Music Festival and other classical groups a larger performance space (in addition to popular venues Old Cabell Hall, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center at Charlottesville High School, and First Presbyterian Church). The Oratorio Society holds its annual December concert at the Paramount, performing large-scale choral works with orchestra members. The Opera holds its two annual performances there (one a classical opera, the other a musical theater work), hiring local players for its orchestra and building its own sets. Fingers are crossed for spring 2019, with music supporters hoping that the UVA working group on university-community relationships might include the building of a top-class performing arts venue in its recommendations to President Jim Ryan. “We’re the only state university in Virginia that doesn’t have one,” says Kaltenbach.
Trevor Scheunemann (right), who has sung with the San Francisco Opera, the Washington National Opera, and the Opéra National de Bordeaux, rehearses for last summer’s production of Charlottesville Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro. Photo by Amy Jackson Smith
Victory Hall Opera, on the other hand, believes small is beautiful. This newcomer was launched three years ago by international opera singers Brenda Patterson and Miriam Gordon-Stewart, along with opera director and Charlottesville resident Maggie Bell. Patterson says, “We saw Charlottesville as a place that would support a newer, more innovative concept of opera, led by singers and based around singers.” Rather than the opera industry’s model of freelancing a production’s star roles, Victory Hall’s troupe of 12 singers fashions a season of small works—some classic, some contemporary, some original. The group has staged productions in PVCC’s Dickinson Theater, Alderman Library, Vinegar Hill Theatre, and (a groundbreaker) Monticello.
The money problem
Large or small, every organization faces the issue of funding—calling on volunteer board members, staff, and members to seek grant money and work on fundraising, in addition to selling tickets (which cover only around 25 percent of costs). Common grant sources are the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Maurice Amado Foundation, the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, and the Bama Works Fund of the Dave Matthews Band. Charlottesville isn’t home to many large corporations (i.e., potential donors), but local banks—Union Bank, Virginia National Bank, and Wells Fargo—are frequent contributors. In addition, each group has its base of loyal individual donors who love classical music, want to see it performed, and believe in its value for the community.
Every classical music group makes an effort to keep ticket prices reasonable, and offers subscriber discounts as well as cut-price or free student tickets. “We’re a university town, and people who live here—or move here, or retire here—expect a vital cultural scene,” says Karen Pellón, long-time executive director of TECS. “But people here also expect the concerts to be affordable, even though we are often bringing in the same artists they would pay far more to hear at Washington’s Kennedy Center.”
The Paramount’s director of operations and programming, Matthew Simon, faces the same challenge. The Paramount can bring in national names like this season’s big star, world-renowned pianist Murray Perahia. But top artists charge top fees, so Simon has to balance that cost with what he feels the Charlottesville audience will bear. In the meantime, the Paramount’s broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” programs offers a higher-quality screen and space than most of the Met’s national network—“a better Met Live experience than you’d get in most big cities,” Simon notes.
Three Notch’d Road’s Simon Martyn-Ellis plays the theorbo during the baroque ensemble’s recording session at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Greenwood. Photo by Mathias Reed
Early music
The smaller groups, which often perform more intimate works, rely on the area’s churches, which make wonderful settings for the early music (medieval, Renaissance and baroque) that Charlottesville is particularly rich in.
Three Notch’d Road, founded in 2011 by local musicians Fiona Hughes, Anne Timberlake, and David McCormick, presents baroque music played on instruments of the period. Concerts have included “Bach Comes to America,” and a recent program on Polish baroque music that was inspired by a sonata found in violinist Thomas Jefferson’s collection. The ensemble’s 20 professional musicians live and perform around the country. Hughes, now the group’s artistic director as well as a baroque violinist, says one of her goals is “introducing the music of the past in ways that overcome our assumptions about the past—for example, people are often surprised at how bright and active medieval music can be.”
Since 1991, Zephyrus has presented works of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods, primarily vocal, although their performances will occasionally include professional instrumentalists. Its 16 to 20 singers are all local and nonprofessional. Megan Sharp, the group’s music director, says its music is well-suited to a church space such as St. Paul’s Memorial, Holy Comforter, or Emmanuel in Greenwood. Zephyrus has “quite a committed following” for the three or four performances it gives each season, says Sharp; the group is increasingly drawing young people and, especially this time of year, “people who want something that’s not the commercial stuff.”
Members of Zephyrus, which performs primarily vocal works of the medieval, Renaissance, and baroque periods, rehearse for their December 7 concert. Photo by Martyn Kyle
MIRA was begun in 2005 by local singer Raven Hunter, with an informal group singing Renaissance polyphonic vocal music that grew into an ensemble of 12 to 18 performers. “Our singers are professional, or semi-professional, or could be,” says Hunter. “I audition to keep the group small; the music we perform is usually six to eight voices [choral parts], and their sound has to blend well.” MIRA’s repertoire may extend back to medieval works, or forward into the 20th century for composers like Benjamin Britten who incorporate earlier styles.
The newest addition, Fire, is a small women’s a cappella group started by retired church musician and singer Linda Hanson as “a birthday present to myself.” Fire’s repertoire is sacred music from medieval to modern, “from what you would hear in a worship service to broadly spiritual,” says Hanson. Its public performances, held on the fourth Sunday in October and on Mother’s Day each year, benefit PACEM, a local organization that coordinates space and volunteers to provide shelter to the homeless.
Making it happen
“If you love music, make it happen” is a recurring theme. All of Charlottesville’s classical music groups are community-driven, from boards to donors to performers. Thompson—who, in addition to sitting on the board of the Chamber Music Festival, is also on the boards of the Oratorio Society and the Opera—says, “I’m not a musician, I can’t sing or play an instrument,” but she believes “music is a gathering place for the community.” Most small cities don’t have their own baroque ensemble, says Three Notch’d Road’s Hughes, but “I live here, and I really wanted to bring this wonderful music to our area.” The Consort’s Gary recalls that when her small group began meeting to sing together, “We didn’t intend to perform, but we had so much fun we incorporated.”
Karen Pellón, executive director of the Tuesday Evening Concert Series, says “we’re a university town, and people who live here expect a vital cultural scene.” Photo by Eze Amos
Another success factor: synergy. The groups informally network to avoid performing the same works, or on the same dates. Each group has its own niche, so they aren’t competing for audiences (or donors). And the groups cross-fertilize, which expands their offerings and audiences. The Symphony performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Oratorio Society and UVA’s leading choral group, the University Singers. The Opera has staged concert performances with the Oratorio Society as chorus. The Oratorio Society has appeared with the Wintergreen Music Festival and the Roanoke Symphony, and included the University Singers as well as local church and high school ensembles in its concerts. Both the Symphony and Three Notch’d Road have performed with UVA’s Chamber Singers, its smaller chorus.
To misquote Mark Twain, it seems recent reports of the death of classical music are greatly exaggerated. “It’s a wonderful thing for people to be making and experiencing music on a regular basis,” says Slon. “The Oratorio Society’s programming is geared to the singers, to our audiences, to possibilities for creative collaborations, and to a belief in the music itself.That’s part of our role, to be an advocate for the music.”
Now hear this
As you can see from our roundup of upcoming performances, there’s something for every music-lover this month, from performances to WTJU’s Classical Marathon.
Victory Hall Opera’s The Forgotten merges two scary operas into a modern fairy tale of
cultural exploration. Photo by Celena Cox, courtesy Victory Hall Opera
The story of “Hansel and Gretel” is a familiar one: the hungry children of a poor woodcutter are lost in the woods when they stumble upon a house made of gingerbread and sweets, enticing to their eyes and empty bellies.
The house belongs to a witch who lures the children inside and captures them, intending to fatten them up so she can roast and eat them later. But Hansel and Gretel outwit the witch (who perishes in her own fiery oven), and the children stuff their pockets with the witch’s jewels and treasure before finding their way home.
Like most folklore and fairy tales, “Hansel and Gretel” has been adapted many times, in many languages, each version differing slightly from the next. This week at Light House Studio, the Charlottesville-based Victory Hall Opera adapts Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 opera Hänsel und Gretel into an experimental version of the story, one that considers modern anxieties about the self and the other, about innocence lost and awareness found.
Inspired by the Halloween zeitgeist that captures imaginations at this time of year, VHO wanted to stage an opera with “genuinely scary material” for its fall production, says VHO artistic director Miriam Gordon-Stewart. Hänsel und Gretel was one choice. Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium is another.
Written and set in the wake of World War II, The Medium is a two-act tragic opera about a fraudulent psychic (Baba) who ropes her daughter (Monica) and a mute servant (Toby) into leading grieving clients through fake séances. During one séance, Baba has an experience she cannot explain; it terrifies her and drives her mad.
Gordon-Stewart and Brenda Patterson, VHO director of music, noticed similarities between the two operas: Both are fairy tales with a boy and a girl as lead characters. “A fairy tale has never really been about ghosts or witches. It’s always been about the ‘other,’” says Gordon-Stewart. Another point of convergence: Both could be set in the woods—in our woods.
Gordon-Stewart and Patterson weave strands of each opera together into a single production called The Forgotten, drawing the first part from Hänsel und Gretel and the second from The Medium. The actors who sing Hansel and Gretel (Patterson, a mezzo-soprano, and Nancy Allen Lundy, a soprano based in New York state) also sing Toby and Monica, respectively, and other actors double up on roles as well.
In The Forgotten, Hansel and Gretel are overprotected, privileged, smartphone-obsessed private school kids living in a luxury housing development on the outskirts of Charlottesville. When they’re sent into the nearby woods, it’s the first time they’re out of their highly-controlled environment: They are “completely mystified” by being in nature and being unsupervised, says Gordon-Stewart.
In the production, the woods serves as a meeting place for two seemingly disparate worlds. The idea is that if you walk through the woods of Charlottesville, you might end up in the county, and possibly meet someone who has a very different experience of living in Virginia, says Gordon-Stewart. “I think we’re all aware of the fact that Charlottesville is a bubble within a very different culture…and I think there are a lot of fears, from both sides of the border, about that,” she says.
Lundy, who sings Gretel and Monica, appreciates the “very, very creative” approach VHO has taken in exploring this theme that has both immediate and global implications. She relishes the depth the narrative gives to her characters, particularly Monica, who, Lundy says can come off as “trite, girly, and silly.” In The Forgotten, Lundy feels Monica’s devastating arias so deeply she says she barely has to do any acting.
VHO has also incorporated elements of the Charlottesville area’s own (and true) fraudulent psychic story into The Forgotten. For a while, Sandra Stevenson Marks claimed to be a psychic and offered “Readings by Catherine,” including palm, tarot, astrological, and spiritual readings, from a rented house on Route 29. She knowingly stole more than $2 million from five people, pleaded guilty to the charges brought against her, and in November 2016 was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
Gordon-Stewart wanted to add a bit of “genuine magic” and a truly supernatural atmosphere to The Forgotten, and so VHO asked Light House Studio filmmakers—who are about the same age as the Hansel, Gretel, Monica, and Toby characters—to create films about the woods that are part of the production, along with the score from the live chamber orchestra.
Just as The Forgotten explores fears of difference, the unfamiliar and the unknown, so does VHO. The company does not deliver expected opera performances, says Gordon-Stewart, and that’s the point. “In order for audiences to really engage, to really genuinely feel something in the theater, they have to be disarmed,” she says. “They have to experience something unexpected, and if I’m giving them what they expect, then there is part of them that is not awake.”
Composer Matt Boehler combed through the notes from UVA’s Book Traces project to create Marginalia for Victory Hall Opera. The song cycle will be performed in the McGregor Room of Alderman Library on February 18. Publicity photo
Imagine the thousands of hands that have held the spine of a library book, the fingers that have turned the pages. Imagine the moments in history that have intersected with the text through the lives of its readers.
Beginning in 2015 and ending in June of 2017, a project called Book Traces @ UVA sought to catalog minutia in 19th- and 20th-century library books that may have been overlooked—notes that readers wrote in the margins, and objects, such as pressed flowers, they left tucked between the leaves.
Now, composer Matt Boehler has sifted through their findings and written a song cycle about them called Marginalia, to be performed by Victory Hall Opera. If you’re not familiar with song cycles, Boehler describes them as “a collection of songs that are linked thematically,” and adds, “The concept album is the modern version.” Running about 50 minutes long and scored for three vocalists and three instrumentalists, Marginalia is a dialogue among readers throughout the shelf lives of various books.
In one such dialogue, Boehler draws on marginalia documented from two separate books. In Poems and Ballads by Henry Wads- worth Longfellow, a reader named Jane Chapman Slaughter wrote to a lost former lover, “Our readings together were in this book.” And in a Dutch translation of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, an inscription by one James R. reminds the recipient, Thomas Randolph Price, they “read it together” in the original English. Boehler was amazed by the parallel. “It’s something that is really beautiful and coincidental,” he says.
Kristin Jensen, project manager at the UVA Library, writes in an email, “In a way, Book Traces is a reaction to the mass digitization of print materials, which is one of the most important developments in the library world in recent years. Digital collections are great for sharing and searching texts, but Book Traces is all about taking a deep dive into physical books and bringing out these hidden histories of how people in the past interacted with their reading material.”
Book Traces has, in turn, been digitized, and this digital collection gave Boehler, who does not live in Charlottesville, access to the material. “It was a long process of sifting through information and deciding what needed to be said,” he says. Most of the marginalia Jensen and co-principal investigator Andrew Stouffer found, Boehler likens to “tiny shards and scraps. It’s like this landscape covered in glass and it’s my job to make a narrative mosaic out of it,” he says.
One of the challenges was finding material that could stand on its own, without the context of the book in which it was written. “I wanted things that leapt off the page of their own accord and didn’t need something outside to reference them,” he says.
The books that make up the Book Traces project generally date from 1820-1923. They aren’t rare enough to be physically protected copies and aren’t new enough to be part of the general collection. Due to this designation, many of the books in Book Traces happen to overlap with the Civil War.
“Especially where we are now in our history at this very moment, looking at this marginalia is an interesting experience,” Boehler says. “You feel almost like you’re in an in-between space, seeing something at once nostalgic and horrifying. Part of the legacy of the University of Virginia and its library are the collections of wealthy white slave-owners. To not acknowledge that at this point in time would be at best tone-deaf,” says Boehler.
In line with all VHO performances, the song cycle will be performed in an unconventional space. In this case, the elegant McGregor Room at the Alderman Library provides the perfect backdrop. “It is my hope that people will experience this piece as if voices are coming out of the stacks and out of the books, that it is immersive in that way,” says Boehler. “I hope it gives the audience the feeling of being between the past and the present.”
Boehler credits the work of the Book Traces team in documenting and preserving the marginalia that inspired his composition. “The Book Traces project finds that the book is more than just its text,” he says. “It also gains meaning from the hands that held it. And metaphorically that extends to the lives of individuals. Our lives are enriched with meaning through the presence of those around us.” He hopes that this is something the audience will garner from the performance: “to have enough presence to listen and to bear witness.”
Victory Hall Opera’s Sympathy, based on Jean-Philippe Rameau’s La Sympathie, took more than 250 years to come to the stage. L to R: Ted Schmitz (Acante), Rachelle Durkin (Céphise), Sarah Wolfson (Zirphile) and Jorell Williams (Génie) are surrounded by Michael Golez, Valdon Daniel and Ana Lorenza, members of the Forte Dance Crew. Photo by Martyn Kyle
I’ll be honest: I’m not really an opera person.
Until this weekend, I assumed opera consisted of people in fancy outfits belting overwrought, angst-ridden songs in foreign languages before dying on stage. And while I’m terribly impressed by the skill and talent required to fine-tune the operatic “instrument,” I am not the most qualified person to write a review of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Sympathy, the latest production by Victory Hall Opera.
But Charlottesville-based VHO is a company for people who don’t go to the opera. Actually, it’s for newbies and veterans alike, which explains how I wound up having this conversation with a stranger during intermission: “French Baroque shows are very unusual. You rarely see them performed,” said a bespectacled man who stood next to me. “I drove all the way down from Maryland to see this.”
Sympathy The Haven November 3
Though it may be lost on certain locals (cough), VHO is an anomaly in the opera world, drawing top talent from across the planet with its distinctive model of ensemble-led “indie opera for the people.” Miriam Gordon-Stewart, the director of Sympathy, is not only a co-founder and artistic director of the opera, but an internationally recognized singer as well.
Sympathy itself is a remarkable show. As Brenda Patterson, VHO’s director of music, writes in the playbill, “we believe these are the first professionally staged performances of [Jean-Philippe Rameau’s La Sympathie] since it was written in 1751.”
Can you imagine? A Baroque opera writer composes a whimsical story to celebrate the birth of a duke…and it pops up in Charlottesville, 266 years later.
“You rarely see this period on stage,” explained my compatriot, “because 18th- century French is difficult. It requires specialized singers. You know, ones who can make the words sound like clouds floating across the sky.”
Though cumulus aesthetic is lost on me, I was aware that the singers are excellent, and the entire show feels relevant, interesting and—dare I say it?—entertaining.
Sympathy tells the story of Céphise, the female half of a picture-perfect couple, who doubles down on her commitment to her partner, Acante, after realizing she’s attracted to their neighbor, Génie. Céphise and Acante seek the help of Zirphile, a celebrity therapist and relationship healer, who casts a spell that causes each to feel the emotions, and echo the movements, of the other. Hilarity, frustration and self-realization ensue.
In VHO’s clever retelling, Céphise and Acante wear matching footie pajamas and trot around town in unison, locked in their devotion to farmers markets, mindful eating and each other. But when Acante isn’t looking, Céphise dives outside for a cigarette. Clearly, she’s stifled and ready for sin. Then her neighbor offers her a handful of potato chips and all bets are off.
The show itself is short, which was a welcome surprise for this impatient viewer. Though plot twists didn’t unfold as quickly as I hoped, the pacing allowed me to slow down and appreciate art constructed for audiences more than 250 years ago.
Gordon-Stewart’s direction uses physical comedy to fill in the blanks between and during songs. Even the translation of Rameau’s lyrics, cast on a projection screen, are brief and quippy. (I doubt that Génie’s prayers literally translate to “I’m a son of God like you, I know how to man up,” but that’s what VHO gives us.)
Clever props, contemporary costumes and colorful murals paint an ultra-modern picture of guru worship, romantic obsession and a Whole Foods-fueled quest for moral purity that strangles authentic happiness.
I especially liked the ensemble—all talented singers in their own right—acting as vocal observers of the central love triangle. Some even wore Acante and Génie shirts. Watching both sides cheer its respective hero, I was reminded of shows like “The Bachelor” and “The Voice,” where the intimate passion of strangers becomes a spectator sport. Hilarious yet disturbing, no?
Rachelle Durkin, who plays Céphise, walks a wonderful line between independent lady and guilt-ridden, empathic lover.
Though I struggled to hear him consistently, Ted Schmitz’s Acante nailed the look and energy of That Well-Meaning Yet Navel-Gazing Boyfriend Who Loves You But Refuses to Ask Directions When You’re Clearly Lost.
Jorell Williams, who plays Génie, has a voice and presence that’s powerful and truly moving. (I was Team Génie, obviously.)
Sarah Wolfson, playing self-aware sexpot-slash-relationship coach Zirphile, relishes her rising fame with polished expectation and enough gusto.
And I really loved the comedic timing of Patterson, who used her few lines as The Grand Priestess to enliven a lagging second act.
Throughout Sympathy, a chorus of hip-hop dancers—the Forte Dance Crew—appear in casual street clothes to underscore emotional turbulence between characters. Not only did Maria Daniel’s choreography expand the storytelling (and my brain), it gave me a chance to soak up the beauty of the music, performed by ensemble-in-residence the Early Music Access Project, and expertly conducted by Christine Brandes.
I walked away from Sympathy feeling a little confused. Not just because the end surprised me, or because I kept wondering what Rameau’s lyrics actually said, but because when you’re a goldfish peering outside the bowl, you become dimly aware that an entire world exists beyond what you can see. I may never become a hardcore opera fan, but VHO has officially opened my eyes—and allowed me to enjoy the experience.
Drugsong’s nurse offers a special potion that leads to a transcendent, operatic scene within the play. Photo courtesy of the artist.
A mysterious woman named Iz arrives at a sanatorium-cum-medical spa, completely mute. She’s brought in by her husband who explains that one night, while putting their son down to sleep, Iz stopped singing mid-lullaby and hasn’t uttered a word since. Everyone at the sanatorium/spa finds Iz—and her silence—compelling.
So begins Drugsong, theater and performance artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell’s latest work, an opera within a play created in collaboration with Victory Hall Opera.
Drugsong
Brooks Hall, UVA
June 16, 18, 22 and 24
Drugsong was inspired by Thomas Mann’s 1903 novella Tristan—which references Richard Wagner’s classic 1859 opera Tristan und Isolde—and is meant, like all VHO productions, “to give people new avenues, new doorways into opera,” says the group’s co-founder, artistic director and soprano Miriam Gordon-Stewart, who plays the role of Iz.
“It’s not very often that opera is featured in literature in a…way that seems to hint at its power,” says Gordon-Stewart, and that idea was something that the opera wanted to explore on stage.
Gordon-Stewart and Victory Hall music director Brenda Patterson saw Hoyt Tidwell’s NO WAKE last spring and were captivated by the play’s surreal world and operatic nature (despite the fact that the actors were silent, Gordon-Stewart notes). The Victory Hall team commissioned a Mann-inspired piece from Hoyt Tidwell with a single parameter: Include a specific, 35-minute extended scene from Wagner’s opera.
Hoyt Tidwell built Drugsong around the opera scene, which is the second of the play’s three acts, and says she relied heavily on Mann’s story while also incorporating elements of the Celtic legend that originated the story centuries ago. She also gave more depth to some of the more secondary characters.
Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell teamed up with Miriam Gordon-Stewart’s Victory Hall Opera for Drugsong, an original creative work that offers an opera within a play. Photo by Ashley Florence.
In Drugsong, a poet named Tristan (played by internationally known heldentenor Corey Bix) is completely taken with Iz, writing verse for her despite the fact that she’s married. One day, while left alone, Tristan and Iz discover Wagner’s score to Tristan und Isolde and have what Gordon-Stewart describes as “a transcendent experience” while singing the score.
That entire experience is orchestrated by the Nurse (Kara McLane-Burke) who arranges for both Tristan and Iz to drink a concoction that, in the Celtic legend and the Wagner opera, is a love potion the two characters take accidentally. In older versions of the story, the nurse character feels guilt over what inadvertently happens between Tristan and Isolde, but in Drugsong, the nurse is directly responsible for the interaction between Tristan and Iz and her feelings about the whole thing are quite complex.
What happens after Tristan and Iz take the concoction and enter into the extended opera scene, we won’t say. But many of the themes at work in those canonical versions of the story hold relevance today, says Hoyt Tidwell, like “the unending conundrum for women who want to be mothers, wives, artists or who decide they won’t want to be one of those things, and what that means.” Drugsong also explores addiction and escapism, how modern addictions make it difficult “to face discomfort, to take action, to know what action to take,” Hoyt Tidwell says. And it looks closely at the artist’s role in society—is the artist genius? Indulgent? How can we know the difference?
“These people are trying to get out of a very deteriorating world,” says Hoyt Tidwell, a world that is “only about a hair more absurd than our own world” right now.
Hoyt Tidwell and Gordon-Stewart aren’t sure there’s been anything like Drugsong before now—there are occurrences of plays within plays, plays within operas, and even operas within operas. But an opera within a play is something new, and it’s unusual to have opera singers act in the play as well as sing in the opera—Gordon-Stewart is “pretty sure” that’s a first.
Audiences should arrive to Drugsong with an open and curious mind—you don’t need to have read Mann’s novel or seen Wagner’s opera to know what’s going on. Just be willing to give yourself over to a sort of intoxication that only performance can provide.
William Ferguson and Brenda Patterson and tackle traditional opera from a gay perspective in Ghost House, an updated version of Robert Schumann’s song cycles. Publicity photo
At Juilliard, up-and-coming opera singers learn the art of method acting: channeling their personal experience into the emotions they express on stage. But for mezzo-soprano Brenda Patterson, the acting never stopped. “As a gay person, that’s sort of what you feel like you are doing a lot of the time in real life. You are translating the culture around you into something that speaks to you. After a while, it becomes just sort of wearying,” she says.
Unfortunately, traditional opera doubles this onus on its performers. “We were taught [at Juilliard] you change the gender of pronouns in songs. If I’m a woman, I have to always be singing to a man, and vice versa,” she says. “There are extremely few actual gay characters in opera or song. Really. Like, count them on one finger or so.” But Victory Hall Opera is changing the numbers with Ghost House, a reimagining of Robert Schumann’s famous song cycles.
“I’ve never played a lesbian on stage. I’ve never openly sung to a woman. I’ve been out my whole life, but to come out as a singer—to just fully be yourself without any sort of protective shield of any kind—it’s a very good thing. It is also a little bit scary.” Brenda Patterson
As tenor William Ferguson, accompanied by pianist Renate Rohlfing, performs Schumann’s Dichterliebe (“Poet Love”), actors will recreate seminal moments from the singer’s childhood and adolescence—when he was a boy coming to terms with his gayness in a conservative Southern household.
In the second song cycle of Ghost House, Patterson will accompany herself on piano and perform Schumann’s classic Frauenliebe und -leben (“A Woman’s Love and Life”) set with new texts by contemporary lesbian poet Emily Moore. Ferguson and Patterson graduated from Juilliard, and both won the prestigious Alice Tully Debut Recital competition. Now, 15 years later, their paths have crossed at VHO.
“Will Ferguson is like the Ellen of opera,” Patterson says, “because he was the first singer I knew to sort of come out on stage. At his Alice Tully debut recital, he sang these contemporary love songs, and they were to a man. I had never heard any other singer do that up till that point.”
Though the single performance of Ghost House is currently sold out, you can see Victory Hall Opera’s newest show, Oracle, on April 12 at Old Metropolitan Hall.
For her part, Patterson says “I’ve never played a lesbian on stage. I’ve never openly sung to a woman. I’ve been out my whole life, but to come out as a singer—to just fully be yourself without any sort of protective shield of any kind—it’s a very good thing. It is also a little bit scary.”
Adding to the intimacy of the performance, Ghost House will debut in a private home. “It’s like the house is the singer and the ghosts are the singer’s memories, or the singer’s subconscious,” Patterson says. “So when an audience member comes into this home, it’s almost like you’re entering the singer’s subconscious.”
This invitation to a visceral audience experience is highly intentional.“[At Victory Hall Opera], we are always looking for ways to not just present the audience with something but to really invite people into the process and the singer’s perspective,” Patterson says. “So that they feel like they are experiencing the spark of creation in that moment.” In fact, she says, Ghost House is less about upending the gay and lesbian experience and more about “finding your inner truth as an artist, and channeling that and openly sharing that with an audience.”
Such reading, she says, shows contemporary audiences that “this music can be fully embodied into a modern person, and into the modern world. It’s not some period piece.”
Though both of her song cycles were written in 1840, Patterson believes the music transcends its time. The only roadblock to contemporary appreciation is the “maudlin poetry” of the original. Schumann’s original German version, she says, is “something even straight women don’t enjoy singing now, because there are lines in it like, ‘Oh I bow down to you, my husband, and serve you in humility.’ You know what I mean?” she adds. “It’s kind of horrible.”
Rather than bow down to that particular tradition, Patterson decided to give the composer’s transcendent music new text. “I thought, ‘Okay, what is my story as a contemporary lesbian woman? What story would I want to tell about my life and love?’” She turned to her friend and accomplished lyrical poet Moore, who writes rhythmic poetry about the lesbian experience, for inspiration.
“[Moore] gave me poems she had already written, and I fit them to the music,” says Patterson. “They fit remarkably well. I’m now convinced that this is actually the original version, the real version of the song cycle. It feels much truer to me.”
