The School of Music will host Bernstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rogers & Hammerstein, Mozart, Adamo, Sondheim, Bizet, Humper at the Timashev Recital Hall on Friday 29 October at 8pm and Saturday 30 October at 5pm. Dink.
The School of Music will take the audience through a music therapy session with ‘Love is a Plaintive Song,’ an opera scene show directed by SOM’s new Opera Stage Director, Eric Gibson.
“Love is a Plaintive Song,” featuring vocalist Sophie Longo in her fourth year, tells a new story of love and loss with classic operatic songs. The show takes place Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 5pm in Timashev’s Recital Hall with music by Bernstein, Gilbert & Sullivan, Rogers & Hammerstein, Mozart, Adamo, Sondheim, Bizet and Humperdinck. .
According to Gibson, a typical scene program includes a wide variety of operatic music that doesn’t have a lot of song-to-song cohesion. But in this show, he intended to make it a story.
“I tried to find a theme. Inspired by our new director [Michael Ibrahim] I said when there was a faculty retreat before the students started,” Gibson said. “He said students should come back full force and focus on their mental health in a post-pandemic world.”
In line with this idea, Gibson said he wrote the show as a therapy session. Longo tells a story of relationships and heartbreak to a therapist played by music graduate student Jenna Hunicutt.
“Some stories are fun, some are sad, and there are so many ups and downs. “I like to think that between each scene she asks me a question and the answer is realized by another singer who comes on stage and performs the scene.”
Longo said that playing out scenes from the opera in this way makes the audience more engaged because of the storyline rather than just the collection of songs.
Gibson said “Love Is a Lament” was his first directing job at Ohio State University, but it was in the late ’80s that he began. Gibson entered college early in the fall semester after teaching in Arizona and Texas.
The cast includes majors in vocal, music and performance, enrolled in Gibson’s opera technique classes to learn acting skills and operatic vocabulary. However, Gibson said non-music majors are also encouraged to audition.
“We have music people, we have a lot of theater people. says Mr. “And don’t let people who aren’t vocal majors down. The show was open to anyone who wanted to audition.”
Some of the music on “Love is a Plaintive Song” is in French, German and Italian, so Longo said he had to learn how to sing in other languages while expressing the meaning of the song.
“It’s been a great experience, but it’s also a challenge. One thing I can say about my character is that some of the stories are familiar,” Longo said. I have, so being able to leverage some of those past experiences has improved my performance.”
According to Gibson, “Love in a Plaintive Song” will be shown for free with audience subtitles on stage monitors.
“I think this show will be a great introductory experience for audiences who want to hear opera. I did,” Longo said. “This is an opportunity for audiences to relate and appreciate music in a way that a long, fully staged opera cannot always do.”
