Yale Opera and Yale Philharmonia organize joint concert
On Friday, Yale Opera will present a gala concert with the Yale Philharmonic featuring opera music by Bizet, Donizetti, Gounod, Massenet, Mozart, Rossini and Verdi.
Gamze Kazakoglu
Staff reporter
Yale Philharmonia and Yale Opera will perform a joint concert Friday at Woolsey Hall, performing music composed by Verdi, Donizetti, Mozart, Massenet, Rossini, Bizet and Gounod.
The program, which will open and end with music by Verdi, consists of a collection of 14 pieces. The concert will be conducted by Gerald Martin Moore, the director of the Yale Opera, and will feature Louis Lohraseb MUS ’15, assistant conductor at the Los Angeles Opera whose performances have been hailed by Opera News and The Wall Street Journal.
“It’s a short amount of rehearsal time for such an ambitious concert, but we have wonderfully prepared musical singers and an excellent bandleader, so that’s encouraging,” Moore said.
Friday’s performance will be a ‘gala concert’, where singers will present excerpts from various operas to create a full musical evening. For Moore, the program gives opera students the chance to “shine” the orchestra, since each singer gets something to showcase their vocal strengths. According to Lohraseb, the majority of the pieces were arranged by Moore, and they cover a variety of “the most glorious music ever written” – from “fantastic” French operatic pieces to Massenet’s “Thaïs”. to “Romeo and Juliet” by Gounod, which features the couple’s famous bedroom scene.
“They range from pieces that almost everyone who loves opera knows, to pieces that many people may hear for the first time, but fall in love with immediately,” Lohraseb said. “It’s a great selection of pieces, and I think the flow of the concert is very interesting and people will enjoy it very much.”
In accordance with Yale’s COVID-19 safety policies, in-person hearings will be limited to current students, faculty, and staff of the School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music. The opera will be streamed live on the School of Music website.
According to Moore, the masks make singing “extremely” difficult; however it is still “comforting” to have all the singers in the same space for this concert, which marks the first collaboration between Yale Opera and Yale Philharmonia since the start of the pandemic.
“I think [the concert] is kind of a celebration of opera,” Elana Bell told MUS ’23. “There are a lot of really funny bits from very different shows, and I think [the conductors] tried to show off the incredible talent we have at Yale Opera.
According to Lohraseb, an opera singer is trained to produce sounds that acoustically fill an entire room without the aid of a device like a microphone. However, when singers wear a mask, it takes away some of the overtones and other characteristics of a voice that demonstrate its unique quality.
Still, Lohraseb pointed out that Yale’s sound engineers are “fantastic” and that the team finds a way to balance the vocals and present them as closely as possible to what they sound like without face covering.
“We end the concert with “Falstaff”, which I think is a great combination of exactly what we’re trying to present in this concert: great singing, intellectually stimulating music that is, at the same time, really entertaining to listen to,” Lohraseb said.
Woolsey Hall is located at 500 College St.
