This trail leads to Hansel, Gretel
Spokane Opera has picked a family-friendly work for its annual spring production: Engelbert Humperdinck’s classic “Hansel and Gretel.”
If you have never been to an opera before, there may be no better place to start than here. Even newbies are guaranteed to recognize one or two of the incredibly famous tunes, and most everyone already knows the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, so there is no impossible story line to follow.
What’s more, the performances this weekend and next at Central Valley High School will be sung in English, not German, so you will not have to guess what is happening on stage.
And if you are afraid that you will be bored watching a bunch of singers just standing around, think again: There is a dance segment (featuring Ballet Spokane) during the famous lullaby when the 14 angels are putting our child protagonists down for the night.
Oh, and the witch is actually going to fly above the stage on a broomstick.
At the next level, opera cognoscenti will get to see a strong cast in a German Romantic classic, with full staging in an attractive theater, accompanied by a live orchestra.
Speaking of that theater, with all of the possible venues available, why would Spokane Opera choose a high school auditorium?
Executive Director Bill Graham thinks the recently constructed CV facility is a great place for theater, with superb sight lines, enough room on the stage for all of the action and the dancers, and a real pit for the orchestra.
He also says audiences have appreciated that there is a lot of free parking and accessibility is not an issue.
“Hansel and Gretel” is something of a chamber opera, and because the cast is not huge, the singers have a greater burden in how much singing they have to do, with some of them cast in multiple parts.
Heather Peterson, a Whitworth College graduate who has a master’s degree from the New England Conservatory in Boston, is covering the roles of both the witch and the mother.
She spoke of her first experience on the flying apparatus in rehearsal, and let’s just say that she is overcoming her fear of heights and is able, now, to sing higher than most mezzo-sopranos.
The cast is rounded out by professional singers with a mountain of opera roles behind them.
Hansel and Gretel, respectively, are mezzo-soprano Jessica Bowers and soprano Heather Holzapfel, making her Spokane Opera debut. Soprano Kimberly Monzon does double duty as the Sandman and Dew Fairy, and baritone Daniel Oakden appears as the father.
Spokane native Bowers, also a graduate of Whitworth and the New England Conservatory, has been invited to audition for New York City’s Metropolitan Opera.
Holzapfel, an Alaska native who received her master of music degree from California State University, Sacramento, recently relocated to the Spokane area.
Monzon was the first-place winner in the professional division of this year’s Coeur d’Alene Symphony Young Artists competition. Oakden, a Ferris High School alum, has performed as an opera soloist throughout Western Washington and with the Seattle Symphony.
As usual, Dean Williamson, an in-demand opera conductor and coach, brings his experience to the production.
Acclaimed by London’s Opera as a virtuoso at the keyboard, he was for 12 years principal coach and pianist for the Seattle Opera. Williamson has also performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe as accompanist with some of the world’s leading singers.
In addition to “Hansel & Gretel,” this year he is conducting three separate productions of “The Barber of Seville” – already at the Washington East Opera in Richland and the Kentucky Opera, and again this summer to open the season at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. In the fall he conducts “The Magic Flute” at Opera Colorado.