UM’s Frost Opera Theater program trains students for the
ever-changing world of opera
More than a night at the opera

he 60 students who filled every seat in the University of Miami’s Fillmore Hall sat silently, focusing their attention directly ahead as Philip Glass, one of America’s foremost composers of opera and other musical genres, shared with them how he got his start in the business.

Glass’s informal discussion would last for only an hour. But for the students, their interest in opera would endure.

Many of them were students in the Frost School of Music’s opera theater program, which is training and teaching them the skills they will need to become the Glasses, Pavarottis, and Brueggergosmans of tomorrow.

“We want to let our students know how expansive the world of opera really is,” says Alan Johnson, an assistant professor in the Frost School’s Department of Vocal Performance and program director of the Frost Opera Theater. “There are so many elements to it. It is no longer just a traditional opera form but a combination of all art forms—theater, dance, visual art, costumes, and lighting.”

The Frost Opera Theater is one of two programs within the Department of Vocal Performance and one of about 30 performing ensembles at the Frost School. Each academic year, the program’s 35 students—25 of whom are vocal performance majors—present opera scenes and perform in full-length opera productions accompanied by orchestra. Five faculty members, including Johnson, work with the students.

Last November, the program kicked off its 2007-08 season with Menotti ReMixed, in which undergraduate and graduate students presented traditional and rarely heard works by the Italian-born American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, an opera theater maverick and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who died in February 2007.

This past February, it was the works of Glass, as Frost Opera Theater students, faculty, and alumni performed excerpts of the famous composer’s operas.

Students will perform two full-production operas, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne, this month.

Opera, says Johnson, is different from what it was 25 years ago, and the opera theater program is preparing students for its ever-changing form.

“It has evolved from a singer’s art form to a director’s art form,” he says. “When actors are presenting stories to us on a stage, we expect to see reality and great theater, and opera must rise to that occasion. For students of opera today, it no longer suffices to just be a singer; they must be actors and skilled in movement.”

Through its Performance Articulation Laboratory for Singers (PALS), freshmen entering the program learn the many elements of opera that are now staples of the art form. A skills training program for singers who act, PALS encompasses character study and movement. “It teaches them how to portray emotion through vocal utterance, how to react to someone else’s actions, how to improvise in rehearsals,” Johnson says.

A 1982 graduate of UM, where he majored in piano performance, Johnson became interested in opera when he was a student and was regularly asked by composition majors to play their music. “I was getting a lot of information and collaborating, and that’s what opera is all about—everything coming together,” he says.

He studied under John Wustman, the “dean of American accompanists,” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

He worked for 20 years in New York, opening a vocal coaching studio where young, rising singers would come to practice their repertoire.

While working for the Houston Grand Opera in 1988, Johnson was able to meet Glass. “We hit it off immediately,” he says. And since then, the two have collaborated consistently.

Johnson organized Glass’s recent UM visit as part of the Stamps Family Charitable Foundation Distinguished Visitors Series.

Opera, Johnson says, will continue to change. “For the next generation and the generation after that, it will be completely different.”

UM students of the Frost Opera Theater will be ready. “Before they graduate, they will have the skills and the knowledge to be able to handle the widest range of repertoire, from a Baroque opera of the 17th century to classical, romantic, modern and new opera,” he says. “We want them to be versatile.”