Opera51 will make magical Mozart music in concert production
“The Magic Flute” will be performed December 20 and 21 at the 51 Walden Performing Arts Center.
What could be more inspiring this season than a musical performance about love, light, and wisdom overcoming darkness?
Opera51 will present “The Magic Flute” on December 20 and 21 at the 51 Walden Performing Arts Center. First performed in 1791 and one of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s more popular operas, it is a fairy tale that features “spirits helping guide the characters who experience tests and trials” and offers a triumphant ending, says Siri Smedvig, Opera51’s concertmaster.
“Friendship, freedom, forgiveness, love, and enlightenment are highlighted with some of the most magical and beautiful music,” she says.
Music Director Alan Yost of North Andover is a freelance percussionist who has conducted Opera51 for 18 years. He is also the conductor of the Carlisle Chamber Orchestra. The 51Walden event will be a “concert production,” he says, with the cast singing in the original German with projected titles providing English translation, and spoken dialogue in English.
There will be limited costumes and two separate casts, “so as to open it up to more singers,” Yost adds. Opera51’s next show will be a fully staged production of Verdi’s only comic opera, “Falstaff,” in June.
Members of the cast and orchestra live in the Boston area. Many of the musicians, including Concordians Smedvig, a violinist; Cameron Owen, who plays the French horn; and Margaret Romero, a trumpeter, are from the Acton Orchestra, Acton Band, and Carlisle Chamber Orchestra.
For “The Magic Flute,” James Liu of Cambridge will sing one of the lead roles, Papageno the bird-catcher, a character “beloved for his goofiness, his naivete, his earthiness, and his impish charm,” he says. Liu has performed in more than a dozen shows with Opera51 and has been singing classical repertoire for four decades.
Opera51 started as a fundraising project in 2004 to improve the stage after a structural engineer determined it could no longer support the weight it bore and needed replacing.
Yost volunteered to conduct a performance of “The Pirates of Penzance,” a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, which raised about $3,000 in one night, according to Carole Wayland, 51 Walden’s executive director. Yost directed another operetta the following year, and Opera51 was born. The group has raised over $100,000 since its first production, he says.
Members of the Acton Players assist Opera51 with lighting, sound, and costumes. Besides raising funds to maintain the facility, Opera51’s goals are to offer “an opportunity for up-and-coming singers in the area to perform fully staged operas with an orchestra and an outlet for local folks who like opera and don’t like to travel to Boston or New York to see it,” says Yost, a retired air traffic controller, pilot, and IT specialist.
Smedvig, who is also concertmaster of the Acton Orchestra, says she believes Mozart is “one of the most challenging composers to play as the music is divinely inspired and truly perfect.” She says that hearing and playing his music always makes her feel “spiritually uplifted.”
Performances at 51 Walden Street of “The Magic Flute” are 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, December 20, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 21. Tickets are $35 and can be reserved at opera51.org or by calling (978) 369-7911.
