Culture Club – Peninsula Arts and Humanities Alliance

When the Peninsula Music Festival (PMF) released its August 2008 season in late fall of 2007, it included something that had never been seen in 56 years – Opera! Why is a professional symphony orchestra performing opera? It all comes down to programming.

April Lancaster

Each year, an intensive process begins to program the next year (and sometimes multiple years) of the Peninsula Music Festival. The standard symphony concert is overture, concerto, symphony. If you are an orchestra that performs five, six, nine or twenty concerts from September through May or June, that formula works quite well. With up to one-month breaks between concerts, the audience does not tire of the formula. If you are the Peninsula Music Festival with nine different concerts in three weeks, the formula can become tedious for the orchestra as well as the audience. With that in mind, Music Director and Conductor Victor Yampolsky decided to “shake things up” this season.

J. Eric Rutherford

That “shake up” became a semi-staged version of Cosi fan tutte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Written one year before his death, the opera is one of the most popular and most performed operas in North America. Cosi was chosen because of its light story line that fits a summer festival and the fact that the opera was recently performed at Northwestern University, giving us access to a director, supertitles and costumes. The story is universal: women are fickle and men are swaggering liars. Additionally, the opera translates well to any time period giving the possibility of new life no matter how many times it is performed.

Keven Keys

Conducted by PMF Associate Conductor Stephen Alltop and directed by Noel Koran, the festival’s production will feature Sarah Lawrence as Fiordiligi; Lindsey Poling as Dorbella; Tamaron Conseur as Guglielmo; April Lancaster Feinberg as Despina; Ferrando will be performed by J. Eric Rutherford and Keven Keys will sing Don Alfonso. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles projected over the stage. By presenting the opera as semi-staged, there will be minimal sets, props and costuming to create the atmosphere, but the music will still be a major focus of the concert.

Lindsey Poling

The setting for the Peninsula Music Festival production of Cosi fan tutte is San Francisco in 1968 during the height of Flower Power and rise of the Hippie generation (Hippies speaking Italian?). In notes from the director about the setting, he writes that Fio (Fiordiligi) and Dora (Dorabella) are two rather spoiled, sheltered and naïve well off sisters who live in the Nob Hill district overlooking the Bay. Google (Guglielmo) and Ferny (Ferrando) are two frat brothers majoring in Pre-Law and Medicine respectively at San Francisco State University. They drive twin convertible Mustangs, are dedicated enlistees of the ROTC program and are both active young Republican volunteers for Richard Nixon. Thus begins this fun romp on stage at the Door Community Auditorium on August 16.

Sarah Lawrence

This is a new experience for the Peninsula Music Festival, but one that is making the preparations for the upcoming August season very exciting. Props are being collected; small set pieces gathered; extra rehearsal space has been secured; and five singers and a director will descend upon Door County four days before the performance of Cosi fan tutte to begin extensive rehearsals. When they arrive and begin rehearsing, it will be the first time that they will all be together to prepare for the opera! They will rehearse two extra days without the orchestra since the orchestra will be busy preparing for the Thursday concert. On Friday, August 15, the orchestra and the singers will come together on stage for the first time. In just one and a half days of full rehearsals, Cosi fan tutte will come to the stage of the Door Community Auditorium as part of the Peninsula Music Festival’s 56th season.

Tamaron Conseur

Opera has the fastest growing audience world wide of any performing art. It seems appropriate that PMF provide an evening for such a large group of the performing arts audience. The hope is to attract people who might not normally attend the festival, and after they hear this amazing orchestra, they will return. Additionally, a semi-stage version of an opera is a great way to introduce this art form to a novice opera audience. Also new to the August 16 Cosi fan tutte concert will be an earlier curtain time of 7:30 pm and a post-concert encore. The post-concert encore will give audience members a 10 to 15 minute time period after the concert to ask questions about the opera production they have just seen. The singers, director and conductor will take part in the encore. There is no charge, just stay after the concert and satisfy your curiosity.

The festival’s production of Cosi fan tutte will bring many new challenges, but the excitement of trying something new, of breaking that traditional symphony mold of overture, concerto, symphony, is an important part of moving forward, generating new audiences and creating a future for the Peninsula Music Festival.