Aliana de la Guardia, co-artistic director of Guerilla Opera with Julia Noulin-Mérat. Timothy Gurczak photograph
This concert was cancelled after this story ran. The ensemble did live-stream the event.
For more than a decade, Guerilla Opera has exclusively presented world premieres. It only makes sense that they should present five more in one evening.
A handful of promising composers preview new works this Saturday evening at Brandeis University in Waltham, thanks to a generous, ambitious project led by Guerilla Opera, Boston’s rock-band opera troupe.
The Emergence Composer program premieres short works—about ten minutes—by Caroline Louise Miller, Daniel Reza Sabzghabaei, Jeremy Rapaport-Stein, Niko Yamamoto, and Leah Reid. The concert, performed by the Guerilla Opera Ensemble, will take place at Slosberg Recital Hall.
The operas are all one act, or selections from what will ultimately be longer works. Miller, Reid, and Rapaport-Stein wrote their own librettos; Reza Sabzghabaei (with Mina Salehpour), and Yamamoto (Athanasia Giannetos) collaborated to create theirs.
Staging an opera is hard; staging the works of five composers in one evening is heroic. The Emergence Composer program was conceived by Guerilla Opera’s co-artistic directors, Aliana de la Guardia and Julia Noulin-Mérat. Both have been part of Opera America’s Women’s Opera Network mentorship program, and Opera America has helped fund this project.
Guerilla Opera began as a resident troupe at Boston Conservatory in 2009, dedicated entirely to new compositions. A core group of eight musicians—singers along with a quirky, virtuosic set of instrumentalists—have premiered operas by Ken Ueno, Andy Vores, Curtis Hughes, Mischa Salkind-Pearl, Nicholas Vines and others.
“We want to go from being the first completely contemporary troupe in Boston, to reach out to an international community,” de la Guardia says. “With this fellowship program, these composers get to practice their art with performers who know what it takes.
“Five years ago we were in residence at Brandeis, working with student composers,” she says. “We used that experience to build a curriculum, and we did an international call.”
More than 140 composers submitted written proposals, along with musical samples. Sorting through that mountain of information—“luckily we had a team doing it,” de la Guardia says—they chose these five projects.
The winners are hardly student composers. Professors themselves, or advance conservatory students, they already boast collaborations with groups like International Contemporary Ensemble, New York Festival of Song, Schauspiel Hannover and Frankfurt, Sound Icon, ECCE Ensemble and other new music troupes.
“We outlined the voices and instrumentation for them,” she says. “Two treble voices, a bass, clarinet, sax and percussion. Electronics are available. We’re really gestating these pieces, and our rehearsals were not traditional in any sense. We want to continue to reach out to a community that’s not just in Boston, that’s international. And for the artists, this gives them resources to begin creating an evening-length work. It takes a lot of resources.”
Guerilla Opera presents Emergence Composer Fellowship winners in concert on Sat., March 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Slosberg Recital Hall at Brandeis University. The program begins an ambitious season for Guerilla Opera: on March 16 the troupe re-stages Marti Epstein’s “Rumpelstiltskin” at Washington’s Kennedy Center, and on April 8 in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts they present a composer spotlight on Anthony Green and Victoria Cheah. Visit guerillaopera.com or call 866 615-2723 x. 3.