UNC Opera hosts 'The Orpheus Diaries' Friday

UNC Opera will host a concert Friday that promises to change students’ traditional expectations of opera.

“The Orpheus Diaries” is based on the Greek myth of the musician Orpheus, who attempts to save his wife from the underworld using his supernatural musical abilities. Students will perform scenes from both new and old opera adaptations of this myth.

UNC Opera Director Bobb Robinson said Orpheus has been very important to both theater and opera.

“There have been probably 60 to 70 operas written based on this subject matter, and they speak to a lot of different time periods and a lot of different cultures,” Robinson said.

Proceeds from the show will be donated to scholarship funds awarded to music majors at UNC.

In addition to traditional opera, “The Orpheus Diaries” consists of a variety of art forms, like Bollywood dance and spoken-word poetry.

“There’s such a variety of music,” Robinson said. “We’re doing one of the earliest operas from the early 1600s, a more recent funk pop piece from a pop opera that was written four years ago and a lot of stuff in between.”

Senior music major Allison Thomas, who is performing in the opera, said the variety of music in the show makes it much more interesting for everyone involved.

“I think the audience will really like the variety of music,” Thomas said. “The nice thing about a scene program is that there can be such a variety of style, so even though all of the music is opera, we still are spanning so much of music.”

The show is split into multiple scenes that vary in style, composer and time period. While this presents challenges for the performers, it makes for an entertaining show for the audience.

“It’s difficult because you jump into the end of an opera, into the emotion and climax of that scene, and you still have to portray a developed character and act in the culminating point of the play,” Thomas said.

Students in the Music 211 class, “Core Ensembles,” auditioned for this production and began rehearsing in September.

Senior music major Tyler Simmons, another performer in the opera, said students with non-music majors also participate and bring different interpretations to the production. The Orpheus myth, which has been interpreted and written in diverse ways, lends itself to this style of program.

“One cool thing about is that you don’t have to stay focused on one thing the entire time,” Simmons said.

“Since we’re doing a bunch of different scenes, we have changing ideas, changing actors, changing themes, and that makes it really interesting.”

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