Photo by Brett Coomer

Il Trovatore is filled with all kinds of passions

The set-up:
The singers at Houston Grand Opera, after a bumpy Act I of Giuseppe Verdi's blood-and-guts melodrama Il Trovatore (The Troubadour, 1853), must have gotten their vitamin-B shots during intermission, for they all returned and delivered a thoroughly thrilling conclusion. (I exclude the dramatic Verdian mezzo Dolora Zajick, as crazy gypsy mom Azucena, who can sing this role in her sleep. She is her own force of nature, like Vesuvius or Mt. Etna, and needs no added stimulus whatever to deliver a full-blooded characterization. She is one of the wonders of the operatic world, and any chance to hear and see her is a blessing and cause for celebration.)

The execution:
Verdi's classic, composed immediately after Rigoletto and before La Traviata, floods the stage with juicy, almost overripe, passion. Neither subtle nor stately, this is one of opera's most elemental works. Everything is in capital letters. Its themes are Love, Lust, Revenge, Torture, Superstition, War, Mother Love, Xenophobia. You may not be familiar with the arias' titles, but you know almost all of Trovatore's show-stopping melodies, as they've been overused in commercials, cartoons, or gloriously satirized by the Marx Brothers in A Night At the Opera. The "Anvil Chorus" anyone?

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Photo by Gwen Juarez Photography

Baritone Guido LeBrón sparkles as Falstaff

The set-up:
Falstaff, Giuseppe Verdi's final opera (1893), is like the best champagne. It fizzes with life, sparkly and clean, and sets one to smile at first sip. Everyone at the time thought Otello (1887), regarded then as his crowning achievement, would be his last work for the stage, but the maestro had a wonderful surprise in store -- a work so different in tone and style from anything he had previously written, and, as a topper, an opera that is laugh out-loud funny. Comedy wasn't Verdi's strong suit, it's not opera's strong suit, either, but here is one as effervescent as anything by Rossini. Opera in the Heights closes its Shakespeare-inspired season with a stunning production of this masterpiece.

The execution:
OH has had a remarkable string of good productions lately, certainly due to the leadership under artistic director/conductor Enrique Carreón-Robledo, and Falstaff is no exception. Thrillingly sung, conducted with buoyant humor, directed with a lively comic touch by David Ward, simply designed by Rachel Smith (sets), Dena Scheh (costumes), and Kevin Taylor (lighting) to fit snugly into the Globe-like setting that's been used for all four productions this season, Verdi's intimate look at Shakespeare's earthy, most human character pleases without qualification.

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Artist Justin Garcia explores every aspect of his art, from its message to the way the human eye sees colors he uses. "Color is a viewable energy, if you will, that the eye can see. When you think about it, color is really made up of wavelengths and frequencies that the eye can detect. It's interesting to know exactly what you're looking at, instead of just accepting it and not bothering to understand it, which is what we mainly do in life."

He was still a teen when he got his first commissions for murals. To be clear, they were unpaid commissions, but commissions nonetheless. "My mother was a faux painter and designer. She would tell clients that if they wanted a mural, her son could paint one. I wasn't getting paid, but I didn't care because I was having fun."

The days of Garcia's working for free have long been over. Art is about creativity, Garcia tells us, but it's also about business. "I don't think a lot of artists like to accept that there's more than just expressing yourself. You have to know how things are and how they work in order to make sure your work gets out there. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good you are if nobody knows your name and nobody's seen your work. The business side is extremely important. I get that from my father, who was very into business and also very street smart. "

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Photo courtesy of Houston Grand Opera. Photo by Brett Coomer.

Marco Berti as Gabriele Adorno in Simon Boccanegra in 2006

When he was four years old, Marco Berti's mother took him to his first opera. "I liked the first act," the Italian tenor recalls. But by the second he wanted a Coke. Still, he remembered the atmosphere, the lights and the feeling of magic. And he continued to go.

So what did he grow up to be? "An electrician," he says with a laugh.

Fate (how appropriate for an opera singer) intervened in the form of a cousin who asked him to fill in at a wedding and sing Ave Maria. People liked what they heard, Berti found himself a teacher and ended up in a conservancy before launching his career.

Now Berti is back in Houston to sing the role of the troubadour Manrico in the Houston Grand Opera's production of Giuseppe Verdi's Il trovatore.

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Photo by Felix Sanchez

Ryan McKinny as Collatinus in HGO's production of Rape of Lucretia, 2012

How does a person get from Pasadena City College to Juilliard to become a Houston Grand Opera Studio Artist, go on to the Met in New York City as Lieutenant Ratcliffe in Billy Budd and then return to Houston to sing in one of the toughest operas in history?

For bass-baritone Ryan McKinny who had never even thought about becoming an opera singer, it was because a professor in that California city college told him he should seriously think about making it a career. And because once McKinny was introduced to opera, he fell in love with the art form.

He ended up transferring to Julliard, was a studio artist with HGO, lived in Germany and now after several roles around the country, he's back in Houston to sing the part of Kurwenal in Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. He's been studying the part for years.

It's an effort that has sometimes defeated other good singers. When Wagner wrote this opera (it usually clocks in at around five hours), based on a well-known legend of the time, others thought it couldn't actually be staged because of its length and difficulty of the roles. And legend has it, it killed the first tenor who sang the Tristan role.

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Matthew Ozawa, a freelance stage director based in Chicago, had heard wonderful things from his director friends about Houston Grand Opera's practice of commissioning operettas to encourage new talent and to reach out to the community.

So he wrote Evan Wildstein, director of programs for HGOCo, the opera's outreach arm, and was told they had something that he might be perfect for in their next East + West program offering -- a work about two Japanese-American women in Houston in the days after the tsunami hit Japan in 2011. Ozawa, a fourth-generation Japanese-American, was immediately intrigued.

The Memory Stone is set at Houston's Japanese Garden at Hermann Park. As Ozawa explains it, actual memory stones are set along a beach after a natural disaster to show where the storm struck, and where rebuilding should not occur. But as history shows, of course, it does.

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Robin Kachantones

Don Giovanni

Opera in the Heights (Oh!) brings four of the most popular operas ever to its stage. Winners of a MasterMind 2013 Award, Oh! is led by Artistic Director Enrique Carreón-Robledo. Verdi's La Traviata, a passionate story of love and sacrifice, opens the season in October. The last installment in the group's bicentennial celebration of of the composer's birth, the run includes a performance on October 13, Verdi's birthday.

Oh! is casting age-appropriate singers/actors in the roles, so Houston audiences will see several up-and-comers onstage.

Donizetti's comedy Don Pasquale is on the schedule for November. Don Pasquale, an elderly bachelor, thinks he's a fine catch for some young, beautiful woman. He gets more than he bargined for when he marries the headstrong Norina.

See our 2013 MasterMind Award winners, including Opera in the Heights.

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Photo by Felix Sanchez., Courtesy of Houston Grand Opera

Saul Avalos (Chucho) and Octavio Moreno (Laurentino) leave their families behind in Mexico to work in the United States

Check out our interview with baritone Octavio Moreno.

The setup:
Houston Grand Opera can call Jose Martinez (music/lyrics) and Leonard Foglia's (book/co-lyricist) pleasant little musical an "opera" if they desire, but they might as well call my Aunt Mary the Queen of Romania. Saying it often and loud does not make it so.

This "mariachi opera" is not an opera. Cruzar la Cara de la Luna/To Cross the Face of the Moon is, however, a lovely chamber piece that uses mariachi music as its spine. But an opera? -- forget about it!

The execution:
Opera traffics in big emotions. Opera is sung through. Opera is artificial: Do you know anyone who sings on his deathbed? Do you know anyone who sings when happy? Or sad? Or when doing the laundry? Me neither. But that's what they do in opera. That's the purpose of opera. That's what they're supposed to do. Everybody sings, no matter what they're doing, no matter how they feel, no matter where they are or who's watching.

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Photo courtesy UH

Ashly Neumann in rehearsal for Rigoletto

Never let it be said that Buck Ross and the University of Houston's Moores Opera Center hesitate to think big. Not when they're getting ready to roll out their production of Giuseppe Verdi 's Rigoletto, a tragic tale like so many in opera that gives its singers a real opportunity to shine.

It is also, by all accounts, rarely performed at the collegiate level, but according to soprano Ashly Neumann, a second-year grad student getting a degree in applied music performance, director Ross believes he has the collection of talent right now to pull it off.

"I'm playing Gilda, the daughter of Rigoletto, the court jester. Gilda has been seeing this duke at church. He bribes her nurse so they can have an encounter.," Neumann says. What follows is love on her part and lust and abandonment on his. All overlaid with a curse that had been placed on her father and the duke by the father of a young woman previously wronged by the duke, with the assistance of Rigoletto.

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Photo by Felix Sanchez

Octavio Moreno (Laurentino) and Cruzar-Celia Duarte (Renata) perform Cruzar la Cara de la Luna

Growing up in Hermonsillo , Mexico, Octavio Moreno entered a couple mariachi contests when he was in junior high and high school, and even made it to the regionals one year. But he never thought of singing as a career - he was going to be a physicist or poet.

Yet when he returned from his first day of registration at his college, had had signed up as a music major. Eventually, with the urging of one of his music teachers, he made the switch to opera from mariachi music and in 2008-10 was a Houston Grand Opera Studio Artist.

Now he's back at Houston's Wortham Theater to once again to sing the lead role in Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon), returning once again to his mariachi roots with the entire original cast after previous performances here and in Paris. Jose "Pepe" Martinez the music director of the esteemed Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics.

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