Des Moines Metro Opera 50th Anniversary/Summer Festival Program 2022

Sustaining

CONTENTS

5 FESTIVAL CALENDAR 7 FROM THE GENERAL DIRECTOR 9 FROM THE PRESIDENT 11 BOARD OF DIRECTORS 13 ADMINISTRATIVE STAFF 14 SEASON IN REVIEW 16 ACRES UNEARTHED 17 SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE 18 OPERA IOWA 20 GUILD 32 PIONEERING A VISION 40 50 NEXT CAMPAIGN AND CONTRIBUTORS 42 SPOTLIGHT ON... 56 PORGY AND BESS 64 SIMON ESTES

68 A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM 76 A THOUSAND ACRES 84 AMERICAN APOLLO 88 CREATORS 90 ARTIST BIOS 98 FESTIVAL STAFF 100 FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA 102 APPRENTICE ARTIST PROGRAM 102 INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS 108 IN MEMORIAM 110 THE ENCORE SOCIETY 112 INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT 114 ANNUAL FUND, SPONSORS, ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 122 PRODUCTION HISTORY 124 ADVERTISER AND PHOTOGRAPHER INDEX

MISSION

THE LAURIDSEN FAMILY FOUNDATION IS THE PRESENTING SPONSOR OF THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON The Linda Koehn General and Artistic Director MICHAEL EGEL The Marshall and Judy Flapan Music Director and Principal Conductor DAVID NEELY Create distinctive theatrical experiences and inspirational learning opportunities for artists and audiences of the 21st century. INSPIRE diverse audiences through statewide educational programs and unique community collaborations. ENCOURAGE established and emerging artists and administrators to produce their best work through a creative, inclusive environment. CURATE innovative repertory from four centuries of composition presented at the highest levels of artistic and vocal achievement. IMPACT the economic vitality of the Greater Des Moines region through programming that generates national and international tourism.

Des Moines Metro Opera’s Summer Festival performances take place on and our offices occupy the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Ioway, Sauk and Meskwaki, and Sioux. We recognize that our presence here is the result of ongoing Colonialism and the forced removal of Indigenous peoples. We honor the people of these tribes and other Indigenous caretakers of these lands, the elders who lived here before, the Indigenous people today, and the generations to come. Through this acknowledgment, Des Moines Metro Opera seeks to affirm the ties and rights these Nations continue to have and will forever have to this land. You can learn more about Native lands and find links to information about the Ioway, Sauk and Meskwaki, and Sioux at native-land.ca/.

bring your meeting home to place on earth!

50TH ANNIVERSARY EVENT CALENDAR

denotes an ACRES UNEARTHED event denotes a SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE event OPERA SHUTTLE DINING WITH DMMO

JUNE 2

7PM, THEN AND NOW: PORGY AND BESS IN 2022 Turner Jazz Center, Drake University, Free

JUNE 4

2PM, A THOUSAND ACRES SNEAK PEEK | Des Moines Central Library

6:30PM, APPRENTICE SPOTLIGHT | BPAC Lobby, Free

JUNE 9

10AM, PICNIC & PUCCINI FAMILY OPERA ADVENTURE | BPAC

JUNE 11

10AM, PICNIC & PUCCINI FAMILY OPERA ADVENTURE | BPAC

5:30PM, GOLDEN GALA | Krause Gateway Center

JUNE 14

10AM, TALK OF IOWA BOOK CLUB ON IOWA PUBLIC RADIO

JUNE 15

2PM, APPRENTICE SCENES PROGRAM | ARMC, Free

JUNE 18

11:30AM, THREADS & TRILLS | Wakonda Club

JUNE 29

6:30PM, THE SEA BENEATH OUR FEET OPENING RECEPTION Polk County Heritage Gallery, Free

JULY 1

7:30PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC

JULY 2

2PM, APPRENTICE SCENES PROGRAM | ARMC, Free

7:30PM, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM | BPAC

JULY 3

2:00PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC (PICNIC ONLY)

JULY 8

2PM, APPRENTICE SCENES PROGRAM | ARMC, Free

5:45PM, YOUNG FRIENDS AT THE OPERA: PORGY AND BESS

7:30PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC

JULY 9

1:30PM, CREATORS IN CONVERSATION: AN AFTERNOON WITH JANE SMILEY | Sheslow Auditiorium, Drake University, Free

7:30PM, A THOUSAND ACRES | BPAC

JULY 10

2PM, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM | BPAC (PICNIC ONLY)

JULY 13

7:30PM, A THOUSAND ACRES | BPAC

JULY 14

7:30PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC

JULY 15

7:30PM, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM | BPAC

JULY 16

2PM, SINGING BLACK STORIES: APPRENTICE SCENES PROGRAM

Franklin Jr. High Event Center, Free 7:30PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC POST-SHOW, GOLDEN REUNION RECEPTION | BPAC, Free

JULY 17

11AM-1PM, GOLDEN REUNION OPEN HOUSE | LOC, Free 2PM, A THOUSAND ACRES | BPAC (PICNIC ONLY)

7:30PM, STARS OF TOMORROW | Sheslow Auditorium, Drake University, Free

JULY 19

7:30PM, A THOUSAND ACRES | BPAC

JULY 20

2PM, APPRENTICE SCENES PROGRAM | ARMC, Free 7:30PM, AMERICAN APOLLO + TALKBACKS | Des Moines Art Center

JULY 21

2PM, AMERICAN APOLLO + TALKBACKS | Des Moines Art Center

7:30PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC

JULY 22

5:45PM, YOUNG FRIENDS AT THE OPERA: A THOUSAND ACRES 7:30PM, A THOUSAND ACRES | BPAC

JULY 23

10:30AM, CONDUCTORS IN CONVERSATION | LOC, Free 2PM, AMERICAN APOLLO + TALKBACKS | Des Moines Art Center

7:30PM, A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM | BPAC

JULY 24

2PM, PORGY AND BESS | BPAC (PICNIC ONLY)

TIMES SUBJECT TO CHANGE | ALL TIMES ARE CDT

ARMC Amy Robertson Music Center, 519 N. Buxton St.

BPAC Blank Performing Arts Center, 513 N. D St.

LOC Lauridsen Opera Center, 106 West Boston Ave.

From the GENERAL DIRECTOR

“The Des Moines Metro Summer Festival of Opera is dedicated to furthering the cause of the arts in America by bringing quality repertory performances to opera lovers in the Middle West and to new audiences for it as well, and to providing professional experience for the next generation of American singers. May this be the beginning of a great tradition.”

That was the founding dedication inside our first program in 1973. The cover of the ticket brochure read: “Opera is Summer Fun In Iowa” and advertised ticket prices at $3, $4 and $5! Some words in that dedication stand out to me: quality, dedication, professional, tradition and fun. They stand out because these are the values that launched a seemingly impossible dream, and they have also sustained it now over 50 seasons.

In May 1973 more than 50 students, artists, board members and local musicians walked into the newly constructed Blank Performing Art Center to create something out of nothing. Leading the charge was Artistic Director and visionary Robert L. Larsen. At his side was Douglas Duncan, who was called Robert’s assistant in the program but who went on to be a brilliant Managing Director until 1988. A full listing of that 1973 company can be found on page 39. Today it seems appropriate to thank individuals like Doris Salsbury, Larry and Dorothy Ely, Don and Marian Easter, Carol Stuart, Anne Larson, Maria DiPalma, Michael Patterson, Margot Burnham and John Hancock. And where would we be without the remarkable work of Jerilee M. Mace, our Executive Director for over 30 years and one of the first women in America to hold a leadership position in the opera field. Today, we enjoy the fruits of that founding strength, effort and vision.

first season in 1973,

gave the company its first glowing review in OPERA News. In it she couldn’t

which was Puccini’s La Rondine (translated “the swallow”). Feldman likened the experience of

a “fledgling company taking to the air for the first time.” Please take note of artist Molly Spain’s art installation in the atrium of our theatre which plays on the theme of a flight of swallows ascending upward.

It is an honor for me to have been involved here since 1994 and to have been at the helm since 2011. These last 10 years have seen tremendous growth since our 40th: David Neely as Music Director and Principal Conductor and his work with the Festival Orchestra; 103 artists have debuted at DMMO in principal roles; an emphasis on the strength of our unique stage layout to showcase imaginative, entirely new scenic, costume, lighting and video design; a new strategic investment in community partnership through the 2nd Stages Series; the $4 million renovation and expansion of the Lauridsen Opera Center; and a major expansion of the repertory to include 26 new works that represent a span of years from 1745 to 2022!

Now in 2022 we mark our Golden Anniversary Season—50 years. And today, different words in that original dedication stand out: new, next generation and furthering the cause. This summer, as we reflect on this remarkable legacy and celebrate the company’s current health, we consider the future as we work to secure a sound artistic and financial footing for the next generation. In these uncertain times, we knew we had an obligation and opportunity to take on a rigorous $15 million endowment building campaign in order to sustain our growth and to imagine our future from a position of strength.

In addition to a world-class, year-round staff of remarkable individuals who work at a very high level (see the listing on page 13), I’d like to offer my personal thanks to those who have helped me chart the second generation of the company: David Neely, Kristine McIntyre, Chas Rader-Shieber, Jim Lile, Lisa Hasson, Jacob A. Climer, Jonathan Knipscher, Chris Brusberg, Eliot Heaton, Judy Blank, Ben Easter and R. Keith Brumley, who marks 33 years as our resident Scenic Designer, along with former staff members Ellen Diehl, Dennis Hendrickson, Sam Carroll, McB McManus and Nick Renkoski. In addition, artists such as Joyce Castle, Elise Quagliata, Sara Gartland, John Moore, Michael Mayes, Brenda Harris, Sydney Mancasola, Alexandra LoBianco, Taylor Stayton, Jon Burton, John Holiday and Zach James have each delivered numerous incredible performances in recent years. I’d like to also thank recent Board Presidents Adrienne McFarland, Nancy Main, Craig Shadur, Susan Voss and Virginia Lauridsen.

It’s summer again, the 50th one this time, and Des Moines Metro Opera—that once-fledging company—soars upward again and ever higher, sustained steadily on course by the work and dedication of so many people who have come to love what it has meant to them, what it has become and what it will become 50 seasons from now! Today, a national music festival and a local treasure have taken firm root in the Iowa landscape. Thank you for helping to make that happen and for believing in this dream.

Happy 50th Anniversary!

Michael Egel The Linda Koehn General and Artistic Director

That

renowned critic Mary Ann Feldman

resist a clever reference to our first opera

attending the first festival season to a witnessing

We love what you do, too.

From the PRESIDENT

Welcome back to the theatre for the fiftieth anniversary season of Des Moines Metro Opera. This is indeed a cause for celebration! Who could have imagined that a small regional company in central Iowa could become one of the world’s most highly acclaimed summer opera festivals? During the past five decades we have presented operas from four different centuries, by 55 composers, in seven different languages, at more than a dozen different venues. We have mounted productions from the standard repertoire, enjoyed unique operatic gems, and presented cutting-edge works that address relevant, and sometimes unsettling, topics for modern audiences. This is perhaps what has made Des Moines Metro Opera so special—our ability to offer a wide spectrum of artistically stimulating works in intimate settings.

This season we continue on that path of excellence. We opened the season with Barrie Kosky’s revolutionary production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Audiences were awed by this innovative presentation at the Civic Center. It also marked our first collaboration with the Des Moines Symphony. This summer we offer four more exciting works; our first production of The Gershwins’ quintessential American opera Porgy and Bess, in honor of the renowned Iowa bass-baritone Simon Estes; the world premiere of A Thousand Acres, based on Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; a frolic into the enchanted realm of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a glimpse at early twentieth-century cultural norms regarding race and sexuality, in our 2nd Stages Series production of American Apollo. Quite an ambitious effort! We hope you will enjoy every note.

We are also looking to the future, with a highly successful endowment campaign underway and plans for our 2023 season in the works. If you haven’t already done so, I hope you will consider joining our list of donors to the 50 Next Campaign. This will help ensure the financial health of Des Moines Metro Opera in years to come.

As my term as president of the board comes to a close, I would like to thank our visionary General and Artistic Director, Michael Egel, the industrious and gifted DMMO staff, our insightful and cooperative boards, our brilliant creative teams, and the outstanding artists. Most importantly, on behalf of the entire Board of Directors, I offer our heartfelt gratitude to our loyal audience members and patrons. No production comes alive without the audience, and no opera company can survive without the generosity of patrons. I am humbled to have worked with such a talented team in this open-minded and appreciative community. THANK YOU for your continued support. Let’s raise a glass to the next 50 years!

Sincerely,

Virginia Croskery Lauridsen President of the Board

Des Moines Metro Opera LEADERSHIP

OFFICERS BOARD of DIRECTORS

President VIRGINIA CROSKERY LAURIDSEN

President-elect EMILY PONTIUS Immediate Past President SUSAN E. VOSS * Vice-president DARREN R. JIRSA

DIRECTORS

TONY BRAIDA

ELIZABETH CARTER CARRIE CLOGG ELIZABETH FREESE BRYAN HALL SCOTT HARRINGTON RUSTY HUBBELL JOSHUA KIMELMAN DYLAN LAMPE

LIZ LIDGETT NANCY MAIN *

Treasurer KAREN SHINN

Secretary ANN J. MICHELSON At-large MOLLIE BAKER At-large TIMOTHY J. KRUMM

ADRIENNE MCFARLAND * SCOTT NAIG CRAIG PORTER CRAIG SHADUR * CHÉRIE SHRECK * STEPHEN STEPHENSON JACQUELINE THOMPSON SHEILA TIPTON * JOHN WILD PAXTON WILLIAMS JULIA HAGEN (EX-OFFICIO)

FOUNDATION BOARD of TRUSTEES

OFFICERS

President SUSAN E. VOSS *

President-elect VIRGINIA CROSKERY LAURIDSEN

Treasurer DENISE WIELAND Secretary BARBARA CAPPAERT

TRUSTEES

HARRY BOOKEY AUSTIN FISHER DIANE MORAIN COLIN PENNYCOOKE EMILY PONTIUS JOHN SCHMIDT CRAIG SHADUR *

HONORARY DIRECTORS

PAMELA BASS-BOOKEY MARY BEH SUE RUTLEDGE BRENTON PAT BROWN FRANK R. BROWNELL III JAMES M. COLLIER PATTY COWNIE*

ARDENE DOWNING MARSHALL FLAPAN BARBARA GARTNER* JO GHRIST BRYAN HALL CHARLOTTE HUBBELL*

* Past President of the Board

SHIRLIE KATZENBERGER MARY KELLY* LINDA KOEHN* JERILEE MACE NANCY MAIN* ELVIN MCDONALD JAMES O’HALLORAN* SUNNIE RICHER KAY RILEY JANIS RUAN MARY SEIDLER* CHERIE SHRECK* JUDY WATSON

Administrative STAFF

The Linda Koehn General and Artistic Director MICHAEL EGEL

The Marshall and Judy Flapan Music Director and Principal Conductor DAVID NEELY

Director of Advancement TIM MCMILLIN

Director of Business and Finance ELAINE RALEIGH

Creative Director KIM DRAGELEVICH

Director of Artistic Administration ALLEN PERRIELLO

Director of Production J. BEARCLAW HART

Director of Marketing and Public Relations SCOTT ARENS

Guest Services and Education Manager KAYLAH RUDE

Communications and Donor Engagement Manager BLAKE CARLSON

Development Manager ELYSE MORRIS

Administrative Assistant CHARI KRUSE

Assistant Production Manager BRIDGET ANDERSON

Orchestra Personnel and Operations Manager MARK DORR

The Irene Graether Chorus Director and Director of the Apprentice Artist Program LISA HASSON

Assistant to the General Director MICHAEL PATTERSON

Company Coordinator JOVON EBORN

Covid Compliance Officer TANNER STRIEGEL

Acres Unearthed Series Consultant BRIANNE SANCHEZ

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force KEYAH LEVY CLEMENTÉ LOVE JACQUELINE THOMPSON* PAXTON WILLIAMS*

Licensed Mental Health Counselors SHANTILA CASTON STEPHANIE ENNEN

* Board Member

A PROUD MEMBER OF WITH PUBLIC FUNDING FROM & GOVERNOR KIM REYNOLDS

WARREN COUNTY BOARD OF SUPERVISORS

DES MOINES METRO OPERA IS SUPPORTED IN PART BY AN AMERICAN RESCUE PLAN ACT GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS TO SUPPORT GENERAL OPERATING EXPENSES IN RESPONSE TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.

50th Anniversary Season IN REVIEW

Mozart The Magic Flute March 5-6, Des Moines Civic Center

Des Moines Metro Opera kicked off its 50th Anniversary Season in March with Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade’s revolutionary and visually stunning production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The production saw the company’s long-awaited return to the main stage of the Des Moines Civic Center after Puccini’s Tosca in 2001, over two decades ago. The Magic Flute also featured the first-ever partnership between DMMO and the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra.

Thanks to a leadership gift from the Lauridsen Family Foundation, Des Moines Metro Opera invited hundreds of area middle and high school students to a special Monday morning performance of the first act as part of Des Moines Performing Arts’ Applause Series. Prior to the performance, teachers and parents received an interactive Inquiry Guide that provided educational lessons about the opera, music history, and cross-curricular connections.

A Thousand Acres Workshops July 2021 - March 2022

In preparation for this summer’s world premiere of Kristin Kuster and Mark Campbell’s A Thousand Acres, the composer, librettist, creative team, and cast participated in piano/vocal workshops in June, October and January, and were then joined by the full orchestra for a final workshop in March.

An Evening with Joyce and David March 27, Plymouth Church

Acclaimed mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle presented an evening program of opera, art song, jazz and musical theatre favorites with Maestro David Neely at the piano (and ukelele!). The program was held at Plymouth Church in Des Moines as part of the Des Moines Chapter of the DMMO Guild’s 2022 event lineup.

Wine, Food and Beer Showcase

April 28, Downtown Des Moines Marriott

This signature fundraiser made its triumphant return to downtown Des Moines featuring over 40 of the finest restaurants, caterers, wineries, breweries and distilleries in the area. Guests sampled the night away while enjoying pop-up arias throughout the evening.

Golden Gala

June 11, Krause Gateway Center

DMMO celebrated 50 years with golden glamor in one of downtown Des Moines’ most distinguished recent additions the Krause Gateway Center. The evening featured an elegant dinner by the Des Moines Embassy Club and Chef Michael LaValle with shimmering vocal fireworks delivered by 50th anniversary mainstage artists and a major update on the 50 Next endowment campaign. The festivities moved onto the dance floor with the Diamond Empire Band, who were joined by the vocal stylings of countertenor John Holiday.

ACRES UNEARTHED SERIES

Inspired by the world premiere of A Thousand Acres, artists, scholars, and authors have created a series of events exploring the themes and connections presented by Jane Smiley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Themes such as family, patriarchy, the passing of land through generations and the strength and fragility of the ties that bind us together provide fertile ground for exploration. This series of photographic exhibits, discussions, plays, book clubs, and site-specific events feature opportunities to preview the new opera and to connect live performance and literature with the Iowa landscape.

The Sea Beneath Our Feet

October 23, Moberg Gallery

July 2022, Polk County Heritage Gallery

Photographer Amee Ellis’ work explores stories embodied in the landscape. The title of this exhibit is drawn from the novel and reflects the text and characters from A Thousand Acres to explore our relationship to the land around us. The Sea Beneath Our Feet is in exhibition at the Polk County Heritage Gallery as well as on the upper level of the Blank Performing Arts Center lobby throughout the summer.

DSM Book Festival March 26, Capital Square

DMMO connected with Des Moines area bibliophiles and led an erasure poetry workshop in celebration of the 30th Anniversary of A Thousand Acres’ Pulitzer Prize win at this annual community event.

Library Sneak Peeks

May 21, Franklin Library June 4, Central Library

In a series of two public previews in partnership with the Des Moines Public Library, attendees heard presentations about the creation of A Thousand Acres from Michael Egel and Stage Director Kristine McIntyre as well as a sneak peek at selections from the opera from members of the 50th Anniversary company. Community resources around the themes presented in the opera were also available.

The Land in Transition: Hills and Valleys

May 22, Whiterock Conservancy

Whiterock Conservancy is a 5,500-acre non-profit land trust that balances sustainable agriculture, conservation and public recreation on the landscape. It was the perfect natural backdrop for an exploration of the subject of land transition and its many outcomes. Programming featured Beth Hoffman, author of the book Bet the Farm, Mary Swander’s one-woman play Map of My Kingdom, a performance of “River House on the Prairie” by hornist Annie Chapman Brewer as well as selections from A Thousand Acres

SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE SERIES

DR. NAOMI ANDRÉ Scholar-in-Residence

Des Moines Metro Opera is thrilled to welcome Dr. Naomi André as our Scholar-in-Residence for the 50th anniversary season. Dr. André is Professor in Women’s Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and the Residential College Arts and Ideas in the Humanities program at the University of Michigan. She received her BA in music from Barnard College and MA and PhD in musicology from Harvard University. She is the author of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement which has quickly become a leading work in the opera field. She is also author of Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early-Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera and coeditor of Blackness in Opera. During her residency she will create and participate in a series of podcasts and previews for DMMO patrons as well as a series of public events focused on her research on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race.

Then and Now: Porgy and Bess in 2022 June 2, Turner Jazz Center, Drake University

Dr. André led a courageous conversation with Director Tazewell Thompson and Conductor Michael Ellis Ingram at Drake University’s Turner Jazz Center as they discussed topics central to why Porgy and Bess has been a challenging opera since it first opened in 1935. The panel provided perspective on the role of Porgy and Bess today, and how it might assist the opera community in its efforts to make the artform more inclusive. Selections from the opera were also performed.

Creators in Conversation: An Afternoon with Jane Smiley July 9, Sheslow Auditorium, Drake University

Only hours before the opening night and world premiere of A Thousand Acres, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley reflects on the novel 30 years after its publication. She joins members of the creative team in conversation with Dr. André to reflect on the musical and dramatic setting of her book.

Singing Black Stories: A Concert of Selected Scenes

July 16, Franklin Jr. High

In a specially curated performance, Dr. Naomi André and members of the DMMO Apprentice Artist Program come together for a lecture and performance of selected works by Black composers including Terence Blanchard, William Grant Still, Shawn Okpebholo and Nkeiru Okoye. Selections presented represent historic importance, contemporary compositions and personal significance for the performing artists.

OPERA IOWA Presented by The Coons Foundation

EACH YEAR, Des Moines Metro Opera cultivates the next generation of musicians and music lovers through programs like OPERA Iowa, offering public performances, workshops, and access to cultural experiences for youth in both urban and rural schools across the state. This year, we were pleased to return to an in-person model following a fully virtual OPERA Iowa season in 2021.

The 2022 OPERA Iowa troupe members arrived in Indianola at the end of January to prepare for the educational tour with rehearsals, coachings, tech work and more. The seven-member troupe began their tour on March 20 and crisscrossed the state of Iowa throughout the spring, performing the children’s opera Rusalka: The Littlest Mermaid, holding educational workshops, and performing arias concerts in schools and communities across the state.

From March 20 to May 3, the troupe held 45 performances and 125 workshops at 66 schools, including 31 residencies (locations where artists spent extended periods in the community they were visiting). OPERA Iowa educational activities begin with training materials that support teachers as they prepare for the troupe’s time at the school, continue with classroom workshops conducted by the troupe, and culminate with a live performance of the year’s opera. After their performances, teachers receive follow-up activities to enhance student

learning and solidify concepts introduced during the troupe’s workshops. As Alice Kenel, a music teacher at Holy Trinity Elementary School in Des Moines shared, “We still talk about the concepts we learned about in this unit. I think it has made a lasting impression with my students.”

Offering young people opportunities to experience and interact with live performance is vital to the future of the arts and is an important part of DMMO’s mission. For many schools, OPERA Iowa’s visit represents the only live professional arts performance their students experienced this year. This year, students in school districts as small as Lynnville-Sully, with 40 students in a graduating class, and as large as Des Moines Public Schools, with over 2,500 students in a graduating class, got to experience the joy and exhilaration of live performance during OPERA Iowa’s visit to their school, many for the first time. Franchesca Richter, the music teacher at Lynnville-Sully Elementary School, remarked that her students “absolutely loved” the OPERA Iowa visit. “Most of my students would never experience opera on their own. This opened their eyes to a whole world of live performance, and the performers made opera something they could relate and connect to.”

In total, almost 12,000 students under the guidance of around 450 music teachers benefited from the program in 2022. In addition to the in-person tour, 34 teachers in five states and

Australia utilized the free OPERA Iowa Virtual Curriculum to introduce their students to professional opera through carefully crafted video lectures, worksheets and a recording of the fully staged opera.

In addition to providing critical exposure to the performing arts for school-aged children, the OPERA Iowa program also plays in an important role in helping DMMO fulfill its commitment to developing the next generation of singers. Over the course of their residency with DMMO, the OPERA Iowa Troupe gains valuable experience advocating for the arts and live performance as well as developing their skills as performers and music educators.

For the singers, though, their experience with OPERA Iowa all comes back to the kids. Soprano Gabrielle Clutter, who sang Rusalka in Rusalka: The Littlest Mermaid, reflected on her time with OPERA Iowa, sharing, “OPERA Iowa has been a magical experience… I have never heard a more involved audience— screaming, cheering and celebrating the characters. This experience has reminded me that creating the magic, memories, and music for these schools is why I love opera!” Alyssa Barnes, a soprano who sang the roles of Rusalka’s and the Prince’s sisters, agrees. “Singing with OPERA Iowa reminded me what we give to our audiences. The kids have such huge reactions to the show—laugher, frustration, anger. It’s incredibly gratifying to give so much energy and then to receive their reactions in return.”

Next year’s troupe will continue the proud tradition of OPERA Iowa with performances of the beloved classic Sid the Serpent Who Wanted to Sing and a new adaptation of Beauty and the Beast for school and community audiences all around the Midwest. As Iowa’s largest and most expansive program in arts education and one of the most innovative programs of its kind, OPERA Iowa has introduced live performance to over one million people across its 36-year history. That’s a lot of future music-lovers!

This year, the troupe returned to school classrooms for the workshops which have been a hallmark of the OPERA Iowa program from its inception!

2022 OPERA Iowa Troupe: (left to right) Nicholas Mayhugh, Alyssa Barnes, Ariana Warren, Robert Gerold, Nate Stone; (seated) David Mamedov, Gabrielle Clutter

Des Moines Metro Opera GUILD

Comprised of over 275 opera enthusiasts, the Des Moines Metro Opera Guild provides the company with invaluable volunteer, educational and financial support—both during and in preparation for the festival season. With chapters in Ames, Des Moines, Indianola, and Newton, Des Moines Metro Opera enjoys a volunteer reach that spans over an 80-mile radius from its home office.

Together, these four chapters make up a corps of volunteers that work tirelessly all year to assist the opera in many ways— acting as official greeters during events, offering valuable adult learning events, sponsoring arias concerts for communities during the OPERA Iowa season, assembling welcome baskets for our festival artists, and much more. This year the chapters hosted many events that enriched and enlightened members as well as the broader public, including several digital presentations by stage directors Kristine McIntyre, Chas RaderShieber, Tazewell Thompson, wig and makeup artist Sarah Hatten, scenic designer R. Keith Brumley, and two informative

and entertaining presentations by opera scholar Mark Tiarks about opera’s history in cartoons and the movies.

In 2022 fundraising by the Guild Council and its four remarkable chapters broke records. At the Threads & Trills Costume Show & Luncheon event on June 18, the Guild presented DMMO General and Artistic Director Michael Egel with a $50,000 donation in honor of Des Moines Metro Opera’s 50th Anniversary Season.

At the event the Guild Chapters also recognized the recipients of its Volunteer of the Year award from the past three seasons: Nancy Main (2020 recipient), Matt Huth (2021 recipient), and Dennis Hendrickson (2022 recipient).

To learn more about the Des Moines Metro Opera Guild and how to become a member, visit dmmo.org/guild/ or call the DMMO office at (515) 961-6221.

VOLUNTEER OF THE YEAR

2020 Recipient NANCY MAIN

2021 Recipient MATT HUTH

2022 Recipient DENNIS HENDRICKSON

The 32nd year of the Ames Chapter began with a program of selections from Kurt Weill’s Street Scene presented by the ISU Opera Studio. The monthly lectures on various opera-related themes included “Opera Love Songs” by John Hill, “Composing during Covid” by Michael Ching, “Composing for the Voice” by Jodi Goble, a program by Drake University Opera students, a fascinating presentation about the human voice by Joy Hesse, and a preview of A Thousand Acres by Michael Egel. Additionally, the Chapter was thrilled to host the return of Arias in Ames, OPERA Iowa’s popular community concert. Finally, the Chapter once again secured a grant from the City of Ames Commission on the Arts for an opera shuttle, enabling opera lovers from the Ames area to ride a shuttle to the five operas presented during DMMO’s 50th Season.

The Des Moines Chapter held many community events reaching a wide variety of audiences this season. They kicked off the fall with the Opera Trivia Night with Nick Renkoski at Noce jazz club. In December baritone Brandon Hendrickson and jazz pianist Willis Delony presented “Jazz and Jingles” to an appreciative crowd at Plymouth Church. The annual holiday party brought more people together to celebrate the world of opera. The return of 28 Days of Sharing the Love raised a record-breaking $10,000 in February. Back by popular demand was the Wine Tasting 101 event held at the home of Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton. Acclaimed mezzo-soprano and Maestro David Neely presented a spectacular program at Plymouth Church in late March. In April the Chapter hosted the Arias in Des Moines recital featuring the OPERA Iowa troupe.

Indianola Chapter

The Indianola Chapter’s events continue to cultivate the community’s relationship with DMMO. The Chapter kicked off the season with a wine and cheese meet and greet at the historic home of the late DMMO founder, Robert Larsen. Members got to meet DMMO’s new Director of Production, Bearclaw Hart, at a program in November. Four of the monthly meetings included opera previews of the upcoming season by members of the DMMO staff. Picnic & Puccini provided children and families with a behind-the-scenes peek at live theater. The annual Champagne Brunch and Bingo Benefit in October was followed by 31 Days of Delights in December, both successful fundraisers. A wonderful crowd enjoyed the OPERA Iowa Arias Concert and reception in April. The Chapter also provided welcome dinners and gift bags for the OPERA Iowa troupe and the apprentice artists. Chapter members helped with mailings in the opera office and setting up artist living quarters.

Newton Chapter

The Newton Chapter thoroughly enjoyed participating in the various digital presentations offered by the Guild Council throughout the year, including conversations with Kristine McIntyre, Tazewell Thompson, Chas Rader-Shieber, and Mark Tiarks. Additionally, the Chapter members were active in the preparations for Threads & Trills and very much look forward to the return of in-person events at the Park Centre community in the 2023 season.

Des Moines Chapter

Ames Chapter

Des Moines Metro Opera GUILD MEMBERS

GUILD COUNCIL

President

JULIA HAGEN

Treasurer

CHRIS URWIN

Council Members

MELODY CLUTTER

DARLENE FETT

JOHN AND FAY HILL MATT HUTH

JOAN TYLER

AMES CHAPTER

Co-Presidents

JOHN AND FAY HILL Programs

CAROL WEBER, JAIME REYES Secretary

BARBARA BROWN Treasurer SUE RAVENSCROFT Publicity

CONNIE RINGLEE Membership

JANE FARRELL-BECK Refreshments

HANNA GRADWOHL, MARTHA MILES

Members

Roberta Abraham

Victoria Albright

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris

Betty Barton

Jane Farrell-Beck and Marvin Beck

Kay and Roger Berger

Barbara Brown

Pat Brown

James Cornette

Peggy Faden

Douglas Finnemore

Katherine (Kitty) Fisher

Jodi Goble

Marge Gowdy

Hanna Gradwohl

Barbara Gurganus

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Marcia Imsande

Marilyn Johnson Margaret (Marg) Junkhan

Berne Ketchum

Jane W. Lohnes

Jean E. Lory

Jean and David Meek

Paul and Martha Miles

John B. and Kathryn Miller

Margie Schaefer Moore and Terry B. Moore

Marilu and V.V. Raman

Sue and Al Ravenscroft

Justin Remes

Daphne and Jaime Reyes

Shirley M. Riney

Stephen and Connie Ringlee

Wallace W. Sanders

Shirley and Ken Shaw

Doris Snyers

Chad Sonka

Jan Tibbetts

Skip Walter Carol and Eric Weber

Marlene Weisshaar

Linda and Bernie White Maureen Wilt

Anna Wolc

Kay and Don Zytowski

DES MOINES CHAPTER

Co-Presidents

MATT HUTH, DARLENE FETT

Treasurer WENDY SAMUELSON

Membership DENNIS AND MELINDA HENDRICKSON

At-Large MARCIA AND BOB AUERBACH MEGHAN KLINKENBORG EMMA KRULL NANCY MAIN SARA SPEAKS CHRIS URWIN

Members

Brandon Akamine

Bob and Jill Anderson

Marcia I. and Robert Auerbach

Patricia Barry and Bryan Hall Nita and Ty Beal

Catherine and Gary Broadston

Jan Broers

Joan Burke

Eric Burmeister and Casey Smith

Margot Burnham

Richard and Anita Calkins

Blake Carlson

Todd Carroll and Meredith McLean

Emily Chafa

Janine Clark

Thomas and Sharon Clarke

R. Keith Cranston

Scott and Janene Schaefer Denhart Bonnie and David Dickson

Michael Egel

Michael Esser

Lori Fenton Darlene Fett

James C. and Martha Fifield

Marshall Flapan

Kay Grother

Rosa Gude

Frederic Hayer

Dennis and Melinda Hendrickson

Arthur and Kris Hill

Andrew Hill

Frank Hoffmeister

Marianne Howard Rusty Hubbell

Bruce Hughes and Randall Hamilton

Trudy Holman Hurd

Darren Jirsa

Jennifer Johnston

Kevin and Debra Jones

Mary Kelly

Susie and Josh Kimelman Meghan Klinkenborg

Linda and Tom Koehn

Emma LeValley Krull

Larry Ladd and Shirley Hanson Brett Logsdon

Juanita Lovejoy

Jerilee Mace

Nancy and Bill Main Katherine and Matthew McClure Adrienne McFarland and Joe Clamon

Michelle McGovern

Paul Meginnis II and Jo Sloan

Sheila A. Meginnis

Ann and Brent Michelson

Joan Middleton

Diane Morain

Luke Most Devon Murphy-Petersen

Becky Nash

Bill and Pauline Niebur

Janelle Nielsen

Bob Oberbillig

Nancy O’Connell

Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran

La-Tica D. Paige

Brandon Paulsen

Muriel A. Pemble

Melanie Porter

James and Rita Pray

Nick Renkoski and Liz Lidgett Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Sherry Robinson

Ana and Mario Rodriguez

Wendy Samuelson

Lorenzo Sandoval and Robin Heineman

Kelly and Kurt Schall

Kellen Schrimper

Ken and Leslie Schrimper

Craig and Kimberly Shadur

Kay Shapiro

Elizabeth Shonts

Chérie and Bob Shreck

Sue Slater

Jane Sondall

Sarah Speaks

Elizabeth and Michael Stamper

Stephen and Martha Stephenson

Kayla and Jeff Stratton

Theresa (Terry) Taylor

Jacqueline Thompson Dr. Beth Triebel

Chris Urwin and Matt Huth

Linda Vanderpool

Charlene and Jackson VerSteeg

Susan Voss

Katherine and Wesley White John and Peggy Wild

Delores “Dee” Willemsen

Robert H. and Eleanor Zeff

INDIANOLA CHAPTER

President

MELODY CLUTTER

Vice-President/Program Chair

BECKY HASTIE Treasurer

ARLEN SCHRUM

Membership

CHARI KRUSE

Members

Patti Abild

Kerry Anderson

Betty Augspurger

Nancy Baethke

Katherine Bendon

Karey Bishop

Martha Bivens

Daniel Burden and Beth Mack

Christine Clogg

Melody and Jeffrey Clutter

Ann Comeaux

Denise Core John Crouch

Mary Lou Davenport

Ardene and Bob Downing

Amy Duncan and Mark Davitt

Michael Egel

Kathie and Al Farris

Betsy and Bob Freese

Caroline Freese

Joyce Godwin

Marylin Gorham

Janella Guilford

Julia Hagen

Melissa Hanson

Becky Hastie

Dr. Gary and Kamie Haynes

Jan Hereid

Debra Johnson

Kiersten and Nick Johnson

Annette and Richard Kerr

Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball Bob and Susie Kling Matt and Chari Kruse

Karen Langstraat

Bill Larson

Nancy and Hugh Lickiss Diana Ludovici

Dru McLuen

Peg and Jim Mikulanec

David and Rita Moeller Hannah and Carsten Moeller Christine Neumeier

Jean Newman

Lisa Parker and Rod Hanze Dr. Michael R. Patterson

Marcia Peeler

Jenn Pfeifer-Malaney

Mary Donaghy Richards

Jill Rossiter and Dennis Lamport

Dolly Ruther

Leila and Mark Schlenker

Gwen Schroder

Jean and Arlen Schrum

Paula Schultz

Ray Songayllo

Rene and Mike Staudacher

Vickie and Darrell Till

William Tomlinson

Judy and Phil Watson

Gaye Wiekierak

Tim Wilson and Heidi Levine Elizabeth and Craig Winjum Janet Wood

NEWTON CHAPTER

President

JOAN TYLER

Vice-president

VIRGINIA BENNETT

Secretary JANE ANN COTTON

Treasurer

KAY FISHER

Members

Scott Arens

Mary Jo Bennett

Virginia Bennett

Linda Blatt

Cathy Brandt

Mellisa Brandt

Margaret and Randy Caldwell

Linda Campbell

Ty and Colleen Chan

Jan Corey

Jane Ann Cotton

Catherine Deutsch-Anderson

Carol Farver

Steve Farver

Jean Ferguson

Joseph and Kay Fisher Jon and Kate Fudge Jody Gooch

Kay Hesse Joanne Lami Eric Lindberg Judy Manusos Robert and Joan Matheson

Sharon Mayers

Cathy Rickers

Dave and Jeannette Shannon Nancy Shields Joan Tyler Carl and Barbara Zacheis

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Pioneering A Vision

BY MARK TIARKS

IN THE EARLY 1960S, Robert L. Larsen faced an important decision. The Iowa native and Simpson College graduate had been offered an associate conductor job at the Metropolitan Opera, but he was also the chairman of Simpson’s music department, having just finished his doctorate in opera conducting and directing at Indiana University.

The department wasn’t large, but it had a growing opera program, thanks to his leadership, where he could emulate one of his mentors—Boris Goldovsky, who believed that opera should have dynamic theatrical values and often served as both conductor and stage director for his productions. The combination of teaching, which Larsen loved, and the possibility of founding an opera company in Iowa, where he could put his own artistic vision into play, won out over the lascivious charms of New York and the Met.

Larsen’s interest in opera began at age eight or nine, when he discovered the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts. “The music cast a mesmeric spell,” he later wrote, “but I was equally enamored by the creation of the scenes as they evolved in my mind. I dreamed of seeing it all on the stage.” His parents arranged for him to take piano lessons and, at age 10, took him to see his first live opera performance.

It was Carmen, given in Omaha on a tour by Fortune T. Gallo’s barnstorming, 100-member San Carlo Opera Company. Gallo was famous as the man who produced opera “for the masses and not the classes,” and his company included some first-rate talent, like Coe Glade as Carmen. “From the downbeat of the overture I was enthralled,” Larsen later recalled.

Having decided to stay in Iowa, Larsen’s first go at building a homegrown company was the Des Moines Civic Opera, a two-year, two-production effort during 1964 (La Traviata) and 1965 (La Bohème). He later wrote that the attempt taught him “everything about how not to organize a company and a board.”

During the mid-1960s Simpson College also developed plans for a new theater to serve its music and drama departments. It opened in 1971 and the theater’s size and unusual stage configuration gave Larsen the chance to rethink his concept for a professional company. It would now be a summer festival with a more wide-ranging repertory and a performance style based on acting that was believable from an “up close and personal” perspective.

The fledgling Des Moines Metropolitan Summer Festival of Opera, as it was first known, could rely on the Simpson College voice faculty for two very strong performers—soprano Carol Stuart and mezzo-soprano Anne Larson —and on a recent graduate, character tenor Douglas Duncan, then doing graduate work in Philadelphia, who was also interested in opera administration.

Over the fall and winter of 1972, Larsen and Duncan drew up plans for an eight-performance season the following summer, based on a $22,000 budget. It sounds laughably small now, but the

budget still required a lot of fundraising, given the small seating capacity and the $3, $4, and $5 ticket prices.

Very little progress was made on fundraising until the spring of 1973, when Larsen and Duncan went to visit Doris and John Salsbury in Clear Lake. The Salsburys knew Duncan, who worked at a meat market they patronized when he was in high school, and Larsen, whose Simpson madrigal singers had performed at their family business. Larsen later recalled that John called the idea “pretty crazy” but left the decision to Doris, who agreed to contribute $5,000 to the venture.

“We thought we’d hung the moon,” Larsen wrote, and on the drive back to Indianola he and Duncan invested a small portion of their windfall in a round of beer for the local patrons in a tavern in Dows, Iowa, where they stopped to celebrate.

The company’s first season, in 1973, was its most iconoclastic, boasting four 20th century works, none of which would have been considered part of the core repertory at the time. The closest to it was Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium, a one-act opera which had a 212-performance run on Broadway during 1947 and was frequently staged for several decades afterwards. The farthest away was undoubtedly Arthur Benjamin’s Prima Donna, a British one-act comedy from

the same era that was paired with the Menotti. (It has since vanished from sight.)

Puccini’s near-operetta La Rondine was also part of the 1973 season and was very much a rarity at the time; Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring was a bit more familiar and more frequently performed, but still not exactly a meat-and-potatoes piece. The latter starred Duncan (pictured below) as Albert, repeating a role he had performed as a Simpson student in 1970. Everything was sung in English, a common practice at the time, especially with companies that emphasized theatrical values, since supertitles were a couple of decades away.

Larsen conducted and directed all the productions, as he was to do for the next 40 years. With large helpings of applied charm and persuasion, he and Duncan convinced 15 soloists, a 45-player orchestra, and 40 stalwarts who doubled as choristers and technical crew to work for very modest wages in getting the company off the ground. Almost all the other work was done by volunteers.

Intrigued by the rarity of the repertory and perhaps by the unusual-sounding

concept of opera in Iowa, the first season attracted widespread press attention, with coverage in Opera News and Opera Canada, as well as many newspapers. Emboldened by their success, Larsen, Duncan, and the fledgling board enthusiastically planned for a 1974 season, which would bring one major change to the company’s direction.

1974 continued the inaugural year’s three-production season, but with a new approach to repertory selection. Madama Butterfly, Falstaff, and Robert Ward’s The Crucible (based on Arthur Miller’s play of the same name and winner of the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Music) were the second season’s offerings. The blend of two works by major names from the 18th or 19th centuries and a 20th-century piece, often by a living American composer, became the company’s signature style over the next four decades. To be sure, DMMO wasn’t bound to the formula—some years had three operas from the Classic and Romantic eras—but it gave the company a reliable approach to balancing box office appeal with the cachet of new and unusual works.

Larsen’s penchant for conducting and directing every opera brought with it challenges—especially since they all opened within an eight-day period—and opportunities, especially for the early-career assistant conductors and assistant directors, who were given much more responsibility than they would get at other companies in the same functions.

Their contributions weren’t obvious to audience members, but many went on to have important careers, including Stewart Robertson, future music director of Glimmerglass Opera and artistic director of Florida Grand Opera; Dugg McDonough, who won the 2019 American Prize for Stage Directing and co-led the Des Moines apprentice program for 20 years; Victor DeRenzi, artistic director of Sarasota Opera; Raymond Harvey; Vincent Liotta; Bill Farlow; and more recently, Susanne Sheston, chorus master of the Santa Fe Opera; and

1975 saw the creation of the company’s Apprentice Artist Program, which brings 40 or so young singers to Indianola every summer for training and performance opportunities, including repertoire coachings; seminars in acting, diction, languages, audition techniques, stage combat, and vocal wellness; appearing as choristers and in supporting roles; understudying major roles; and performing in a special concert with the festival orchestra.

The most ambitious undertaking during the first decade was Verdi’s Otello in 1982; rarities included Puccini’s Il Trittico and Jules Massenet’s Manon Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (subject of a complete filming by Iowa PBS), Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe, and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah were some of the high-profile 20th-century pieces.

In 1987 the company took to the road for the first season with the OPERA Iowa educational touring troupe. This youth initiative has been tremendously popular and has helped raise the visibility of the company and the art form statewide and even internationally through tours to Japan in 1992 and China in 2000. OPERA Iowa has performed operas written specifically for young people, like Sid the Serpent Who Wanted to Sing (above), as well as reworked standard operatic works such as The Barber of Seville and The Magic Flute

Each year the group presents nearly 100 performances for approximately 25,000 to 35,000 people each year. This program has provided fertile artistic ground for the commissioning of new operas including Stephen Paulus’s Harmoonia, Amy Tate Williams’s Rumplestiltskin and two works by Michael Patterson, The Tale of Peter Rabbit and A Dream Fulfilled: The Saga of George Washington Carver.

Three disparate events were especially noteworthy during DMMO’s second decade. The company gave its first and, until this year, only world premiere in 1986 with Lee Hoiby’s The Tempest (below), which opened during a torrential summer downpour. It received generally positive reviews, but Larsen, Duncan, and the board of directors clearly felt their resources were better deployed somewhere other than on commissioned world premieres.

David Neely, DMMO Music Director and Principal Conductor.

The second was underground—a 1987 orchestra pit expansion. It allowed for a corresponding expansion of the repertory with pieces as The Flying Dutchman (1987,), Turandot (1988), Boris Godonov (1990), Der Rosenkavalier (1992) and Salome (2002) added to the mix.

at the Pote Theater for Il Trovatore, the foreign-language staging in the summer festival, and they were soon used for all operas.

The end of the decade also saw the return to Indianola of Michael Egel, an Algona, Iowa, native and Simpson College alum who had been pursuing a graduate degree in vocal performance at the University of Memphis. Although he was that rare operatic commodity, a tenor, Egel found himself increasingly attracted to administration and production work during his time in Tennessee, spending more time moving scenery, building props, and selling tickets than he did in the practice room. He began with DMMO as a summer intern in 1994 and returned to the company for several summers as company coordinator. He then joined the year-round staff in 1999 in a dual role as its artistic administrator and director of education, where he oversaw the Apprentice Artist Program, OPERA Iowa and a myriad of details related to the summer festival season.

The operas of Benjamin Britten have held a special place in DMMO history, from its first season’s Albert Herring to multiple A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its touchstone work. The large-scale tragedies of Peter Grimes (2013) and Billy Budd (2017) joined the repertory after the orchestra pit expansion, and in 2005 the company cracked the toughest nut of all, his Gloriana (below). Written for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation celebration in 1953, the opera focused on the troubled relationship between the first Elizabeth and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and its initial staging earned Britten some of his few critical brickbats. Not so in its DMMO presentation, with Opera News saying, “The season’s triumph was a stunning presentation of Britten’s Gloriana. . . Seen now at a distance of fifty years from its notoriously unsuccessful premiere, it really emerges as a piece of modern bel canto.”

The third was the sudden, early death of Doug Duncan in 1988 at age 37. Fortunately, Jerilee Mace (above), the company’s first paid, year-round employee, was on hand and she stepped into the executive director role, serving with great success through 2005. Mace started with the company in 1976 and her organizational ability led a hard-working and loyal staff, tireless in their efforts on behalf of DMMO. During her tenure, Jeri staked out the importance of DMMO’s educational programs, oversaw the establishment and significant growth of the endowment fund and ably guided the maverick company from one with an annual budget of $100,000 to a mature organization with an annual budget of almost $2,000,000 and eight yearround employees.

During the 1990s, crossover works that blend aspects of opera and music theater also started to appear, beginning with Sweeney Todd in 1995 and Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’ Street Scene in 1999. That same year also brought the debut of supertitles

Unusual repertory continued to provide many of the company’s most notable achievements as it entered the 21st century, starting with Norma in 2000. Bellini and bel canto may seem lightyears from the company’s traditional strengths, but it was a resounding triumph, with Caroline Whisnant and Gwendolyn Jones earning special praise as Norma and Adalgisa, respectively.

The decade closed with another rarely performed and famously challenging work to stage successfully, Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz. A pinnacle of German Romanticism, its folk storyorigins and extensive dialogue have kept most American companies at a respectful distance. Opera News offered high praise for the 2009 production, calling it “the artistic highlight of the season” and spotlighting Robert Larsen for “his stunning leadership of Der Freischütz, a score he obviously loves passionately.”

It was also Larsen’s last production as a conductor and stage director. In his mid-70s and in failing health, he stepped down from both roles and worked with Michael Egel, who was appointed artistic director in 2010, to plan the 2011 season. “It was not obvious to me—nor to Robert Larsen—that I would succeed him,” Egel told Opera News in a recent interview. But in fact he was the ideal candidate, bringing the perfect combination of respect for Larsen’s accomplishments, awareness that his predecessor would still be highly visible around the company, and knowledge that DMMO still had important artistic ground yet to cover.

Three areas of the repertory drew his attention. One was the dearth of works from the Slavic traditions, with Boris Godunov in 1990 the only prior representative. Two great Czech works joined the roster with Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa in 2015 and Antonín Dvořák’s Rusalka in 2018; and two works sung in Russian with Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in 2012 (above) and The Queen of Spades in 2021. A fourth Russian opera is slated for 2023—Sergei Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges.

The roster of contemporary composers performed at DMMO hadn’t changed much over the years, focusing on those who had achieved their greatest successes in the 1950s and 1960s. Egel added newer voices with Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2014) and Three Decembers (2015), with Jonathan Dove’s Flight in 2018, and with Kristin Kuster’s A Thousand Acres

this year, the first festival season production composed by a woman.

The most surprising repertory omission was at the other end of the timeline. Larsen was never particularly attracted to the Baroque repertory, although he professed to liking Monteverdi, so the company’s first foray into preMozart territory came in 2021, with Jean-Philippe Rameau’s outrageous comedy Platée

The appointment of David Neely as music director and principal conductor in 2012 ensured dependable quality on the podium, and Egel developed relationships with several stage directors, most notably Kristine McIntyre and Chas Rader-Shieber, who bring varied and imaginative visual sensibilities to new productions, utilizing entirely original costume and scenic designs.

As the final step in the DMMO leadership transition, “general director” was added to Egel’s title in 2013.

A major new initiative—the 2nd Stages Series—is an Egel hallmark. The series is one through which smaller-scale contemporary operas are staged in venues throughout the region in order to engage new audiences, develop community-based collaborations and explore current-day social issues. Soldier Songs (2017) and Glory Denied (2019) were collaborations with the Iowa National Guard and were staged at Camp Dodge, its home base. Both operas addressed the challenges faced by returning war veterans. DMMO will return to Camp Dodge in 2023.

Other 2nd Stages productions have also been produced at venues with a specific relationship to their content. These include Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land (left), about a Midwestern farm family in the 1930s, at the Maytag Dairy Farms, Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appetit!, in which Julia Child bakes a chocolate cake, at the Iowa Culinary Institute, and Philip Glass’s Galileo Galilei, at the Science Center of Iowa.

“In terms of moving the company forward,” Egel says, “2018’s As One, which features two voices sharing the part of a sole transgender protagonist and was performed in partnership with Transformations Iowa and One Iowa, was a definite highlight.” Egel also cites Fellow Travelers as another move-the-needle event for which DMMO partnered with One Iowa and Capital City Pride for its 2021 production. “Hoyt Sherman Place was filled with so many new people.”

Iowa PBS has been just as much a pioneer in broadcasting opera as the Des Moines Metro Opera has been in producing it. After a feature on La Bohème in 1978, broadcasts of complete operas began a year later with the filming of Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Resuming the tradition was a high priority for Egel. Working with Iowa PBS producer/editor Judy Blank, DMMO was back on the air in 2013 with Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, and the series has continued with the annual broadcasting of a less-familiar work, including Rossini’s Le Comte Ory (2014), Janáček’s Jenůfa (2015), Dvořák’s Rusalka (2018) and Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades (2021).

Upper Midwest Emmy Awards for best arts and entertainment program have been bestowed on three of the opera telecasts: Massenet’s Manon (2016), Britten’s Billy Budd (2017) and Hoiby’s Bon Appétit! (2019).

The last decade has also featured a relentless cascade of good news on the financial front. To cite just three items, the operating budget and contributed income have doubled since 2012, the company’s Carnegie Library became the Lauridsen Opera

Center (above) through a $4 million renovation and expansion, and Egel has overseen a doubling of the company’s endowment through the current $15 million 50 NEXT campaign. See page 40.

The obvious question is, “What’s next, Michael Egel?”

“Having now completed my first decade from years 40 to 50, I’m thinking about the next decade between 50 and 60. We can imagine the future from a position of strength on all fronts. Sustaining our growth for the future was what

the our last decade had to be about. We’ve achieved that,” Egel says. “I still feel that I have much more to say artistically to propel us forward into the future. There’s much fertile ground to explore.” That’s good news for the company and its patrons, given the successes of the past 10 years.

“There are important pieces that we’ve never done; in fact, I have a sizable list. It’s exciting to dream about company premieres such as Don Carlos, Pelléas et Mélisande and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. We’d like to come back to Wagner, to explore more Massenet and lesserknown works of Mozart. And I’d like to introduce Mr. Handel to our audiences. There are works by contemporary composers and the opportunity to feature works by diverse and underrepresented composers that we can bring to the spotlight. There will also be a continued emphasis on new pieces and possibly commissioning on a more frequent basis than in the past. And then at last, there are some repertory standards that should be revisited, works that have withstood the passage of time and hold up to the scrutiny of a modern lens.”

Thoughts about theatrical venues are also very much on Egel’s mind. “We really have to examine the future of our performing home. We push our current theater to its limits every season. We need to be thinking about the possibilities, benefits and challenges of our now 52-year-old theatre, about the planning and resources it will take to support the current operation and to secure a future-focused venue for tomorrow. That is the crux of the next decade. I’m excited to tackle this challenge.”

So let’s all plan to meet again in 2032 to celebrate another glorious decade in the history of the Des Moines Metro Opera!

Mark Tiarks began his professional opera career as a stage manager and stage director in DMMO’s 1978 season. Since then he has been Artistic Administrator for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Producing Director of Court Theatre, General Director of Chicago Opera Theater, and Director of Planning and Marketing for the Santa Fe Opera.

CO-FOUNDERS

Douglas Duncan and Robert L. Larsen

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Lawrence O. Ely, President; Don Easter, Vice-President; Clara Mann, Secretary; Doyle L. Woods, Treasurer Beth Black, Curtis Lamb, Robert L. Larsen, A.M. Rockwell

OPERA GUILD

Martha Alberding, Nancy Buxton, Lujean Cole, Luella Heskett, Mildred Lekberg, Gladys Shaw

SOLOISTS

Nadine Asher, Robert Benton, Leslie Brelsford, Cherie Carl, Douglas Duncan, Cheryl Hinman, Gregory Isaacs, Robert Jones, Edward Kingins, Anne Larson, Mary Joyce Lind, Carmen Peterson, Jean Reese, Reid Stringer, Carol Stuart, Kirk Stuart, Victoria Villamil

CHORISTERS, DANCERS, AND SUPERNUMERARIES

Albert Henry Adams II, Tom Arand, Lynne Arand, Lennie Belas, Sue Bloom, Richard Bowlsby, Linda Brown, Virginia Cotta, Barry Crees, Mark Fuller, Marla German, Peg Golden, Richard Harper, Cary Hartin, Cherie Horel, Steve Isaacs, Roberta Kerr, Ann Kuyper, Don Mariano, Diane McLain, Cindy Melson, Lu Ann Mitchell, Bill Nelson, Gayletha Nichols, Nita Ott, Michael Patterson, Frank Patterson, Marilyn Pierce, Jane Poston, Beth Reed, Judd Reed, Janet Reese, Tom Roberts, Cherie Runciman, Shirley Starr, Peggy Strauel, Reid Stringer, John Strovers, Kirk Stuart, Kathy Symons, Timothy Thomas, John Thomson, Robbin Williams, Caryn Wilson, Debbie Wilson, Sue Wiser, Waller Wiser, Kent Wood

ORCHESTRA

Bob Allen, Karl Bargen, James Brauninger, Eve Brauninger, Christine Carlsten, Sally Cline, Darwin Dasher, Bruce Degen, Toby deLaubenfels, Ruth Dreier, Gaile Gallatin, Richard Gerstenberger, Julie Graham, Mary Jo Green, Barbara Haines, John Hancock, Craig Hancock, Betty Hendrickson, Edwin Holcomb, April Kaskey, Gene Kubli, Rebecca Landwehr, Jay Light, James Luke, David Majors, Cindy Melson, Anita Michick, Sandra Moore, Beth Munsen, Bill Nelson, Elizabeth Paquette, Mark Rasko, Martha Robbins, Marcia Romback, Florence Roskamp, Jill Rowley, Barbara Smart, Connie Solomon, Jacquelyn Stanek, Pat Stephenson, Steve Swenson, Kathy Worster, Lynnea Young

We salute the pioneering members of the “Des Moines Metro Summer Festival of Opera” for their participation in the company’s 1973 inaugural season.

GIVING VOICE TO THE FUTURE

Arriving at our golden anniversary in 2022 is an accomplishment worthy of celebration. As we reflect on past successes and toast to the vibrant company of today, we have the opportunity to honor those who have contributed to our growth and the obligation to secure a sound financial footing for its future.

Our greatest strength has been our pursuit of ambitious endeavors. From our modest and improbable beginnings in 1973—when a singer or orchestra musician might double as a scenic painter—to today with a summer staff of over 200 professional craftspeople, artists and administrators, Des Moines Metro Opera continues to grow, evolve and innovate. Our success has been our people—people who believe in the value the performing arts bring to our communities. People who believe that the greatest performances shouldn’t only be found in a handful of America’s largest cities, but should be accessible to all of us. People who have risen to support the vision for professional opera in Iowa.

The past 10 years have been ones of tremendous growth and innovation at DMMO. But this renewed energy and evolution comes with a cost. The annual operating budget has increased from $2.2 million in 2012 to over $4 million in 2022. Annual fundraising needs have grown from $904,000 in 2012 to $2.2 million in 2022.

And so, the 50 NEXT Campaign on the occasion of the company’s 50th anniversary serves to secure the financial future at Des Moines Metro Opera, sustaining funding for innovation and continued work to be an opera company that responds to the needs of the 21st century.

The 50 NEXT Campaign’s goal to raise $15 million to advance DMMO’s artistic legacy and build our capacity to serve a growing and diverse population has been met and exceeded due to the generosity of our community. As of June 10, the campaign has secured funding in the amount of $18,120,000. We are grateful to the nearly 200 families and friends who participated in the 50 NEXT Campaign. Because of their belief in the mission and work at Des Moines Metro Opera, we look with optimism to the NEXT 50 years.

Thank you to everyone who has contributed to make the campaign a success!

CAMPAIGN CABINET

Honorary Chairs

LINDA AND TOM KOEHN

Cabinet Members

MOLLIE BAKER

VIRGINIA CROSKERY LAURIDSEN

NANCY MAIN

CRAIG SHADUR

CHERIE SHRECK

SUSAN E. VOSS

$2,000,000 & above

Robert L. Larsen Estate

Nix and Virginia Lauridsen*/ Lauridsen Family Foundation

$1,500,000-$1,999,999

Linda and Thomas K. Koehn*

$1,000,000-$1,499,999

Frank R. Brownell III

$500,000-$999,999

Charlotte and Fred Hubbell* Nancy J. Main*

Principal Foundation Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur*

$250,000-$499,999

The Pamela Bass-Bookey and Harry Bookey Charitable Foundation

Patty and Jim Cownie Charitable Fund Ruan Foundation

Stan and Mary Seidler*/ The Seidler Foundation Chérie and Bob Shreck*

$100,000-$249,999

Kate and Tom Carey

Dr. John Graether in memory of Irene Graether

Daniel M. and Mary Kelly*

Daniel J. and Ann L. Krumm Charitable Trust

Christine Lauridsen Sand and Rob Sand/ The Lauridsen Sand Fund Cove Point Foundation

$50,000-$99,999

Mollie and Britt Baker

BRAVO Greater Des Moines

Roger Brooks and Sunnie Richer

Barbara and Fred Brown

William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton* Selma Duvick Trust

Easter Family Foundation in memory of Don Easter* Betty Lewis Ehlert Estate

In memory of sisters Nancy Garst and Mary Garst by Liz Garst, Dr. Sarah Garst, Tim Lee, Andrew Garst, Hannah Davis, Sam Garst and Robin Kohles, Home State Bank, Raccoon Valley Bank

Barbara and Michael Gartner* The Graham Group

Paul J. Meginnis, II and Jo Sloan Sarah and Sam O’Brien

Prairie Meadows

Dr. James J. Pullen Estate

Riley Family Foundation

Susan E. and Carl B. Voss*

Warren County Board of Supervisors

John K. and Denise A. Wieland

Carleton and Barbara Zacheis

$25,000-$49,999

Sue Rutledge Brenton and J.C. (Buz) Brenton

C. Dean and Sandra Carlson

W.T. and Edna M. Dahl Trust

Bob and Ardene Downing EMC Insurance Companies

Jo Ghrist

Julia Hagen

Edward R. and Cora Hayes Estate

Rusty Hubbell Family Fund

Darren R. Jirsa, D.D.S.

Jerilee M. Mace and T. J. Johnsrud

Edward and Elizabeth Mansfield

Brent and Ann Michelson

Alan and Linda Shapiro

Robert L. and Sandra Tatge

Phil and Judy Watson

Krenio Wright in honor of David Wright*

$10,000-$24,999

Bobbie Adelman Trust

Dr. Barbara Beatty

Roger and Kay Berger

Mary Lou Detwiler in memory of Thomas Detwiler

Marshall Flapan

Robert L. Gomez Estate

Allison and Jim Fleming

Mark L. Hill and Amy M. Anderson in memory of Sara Hill*

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Trudy Holman Hurd

Rev. Barbara J. Jackman

Carol and Lee Johnson Family Trust Joshua and Susie Kimelman

Martha Kroese

Marla Lacey and Steve Znerold in honor of Wendy Carlson*

The Laverty Foundation

Tom and Marsha Mann

Diane Morain

Steve and Erna Morain

Scott D. Naig and Dana Quick-Naig

John and Mary Pappajohn

Joan and David Paulsrud

Marilu and V.V. Raman

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

John Schmidt and Deb Wiley

Lily Smith and Leonid Sirotkin

Mary Stuart and David Yepsen

Thomas D. Turnbull and Darrell Smith

Chris and Denise Vernon

Marilyn Vernon Family*

Fred and Emily Weitz

John and Peggy Wild

$5,000-$9,999

Michael Egel Catherine and James Erickson*

Charles Farr*

Bob and Betsy Freese Rosalie Gallagher Ann and Michael Gersie Joel and Debra Hade Joe and Carrie Hall

Scott Harrington and Katherine Riley Harrington

Virginia L. Hauke Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton* Annette Isaacson* Adrienne McFarland and Joe Clamon * William and Pauline Niebur * Jim and Jeanne O'Halloran * Michael Patterson Bernie and Linda White

Additional Support

Anonymous (2) Betty Augspurger

Brian August Patricia Barry and Bryan Hall Linda and Jerry Beatty Mary Beh

Virginia Bennett in memory of E. James Bennett*

Pat Brown in memory of Doug Brown Elizabeth and Jared Carter Janine M. Clark

Carrie Clogg and Josh Barlage

Carolyn Ely Coffman in memory of Lawrence Ely*

Don and Pat Dagenais Durbin-Zheng Family Dr. and Mrs. Ronald D. Eckoff Charles Edwards, Jr.* Bennett and Leisa Ely in memory of Lawrence Ely

Dorothy J. Ely in memory of Lawrence Ely Larry and Cheryl Ely in memory of Lawrence Ely Stephen Ely in memory of Lawrence Ely Thomas and Rita Fisher*

Gary G. Gerlach and Karen A. Conner* Hanna Gradwohl

Myrna and Arnold Hershman Nick and Kiersten Johnson

Joanne L. and David J. Kolenda Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball

Dylan Lampe

Nancy and Hugh Lickiss

Liz Lidgett and Nick Renkoski

Kurt and Rose Bollin Loth

Patricia and Charles Matteson in memory of Lawrence Ely Murray and Elizabeth McKee Mary McKinley

Thomas and Nancy McKlveen*

Dru McLuen

Sheila A. Meginnis

The Mikulanecs

Jeffrey Morgan*

Elyse D. and Kyle W. Morris

Donald Newsom

Colin Pennycooke

The Petrie/White Higher Education and Performing Arts Fund

Jason and Emily Pontius

Craig and Susan Porter

Tamara Jo Prenosil and Frank Potter

Michael and Traci Schaefer

Arlen and Jean Schrum

Karen and Gordon Shinn

Howard and Margaret Soroos

Dr. Stephen and Martha Stephenson

Rev. Dr. Jacqueline Thompson

Marianne Whitman

Paxton Williams

The following have made an estate gift known to Des Moines Metro Opera Foundation in support of the 50 NEXT Campaign, securing their legacy of support

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris

Frank R. Brownell III

Ellen and Jim Diehl

Michael Egel

Julia Hagen

Lawrence and Carolyn Hejtmanek

Darren R. Jirsa, D.D.S.

Mary Keithahn

Robert L. Larsen Estate

Middleton Family

Susan B. Moore

Stanley Ransom

Lois F. Roets Estate

Arnold Samuel

John Schmidt and Deb Wiley Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur*

Larsen Artist Legacy Circle

Evelyn de la Rosa

Michael Egel

Donald and Connie Gray

Gwendolyn Jones

Kimm Julian Matthew Lau

Sue Malmberg Drs. Kyle and Jane Marrero Dugg McDonough

Tim McMillin

Matt Oltman

Michael Patterson

Sylvia Richards in memory of Rich Richards

David Small Beverly Thiele Caroline Whisnant

* Past President of the Board

Spotlight on THE EASTER FAMILY

BY BLAKE CARLSON

Jane Easter Bahls met her husband Steve on a camping trip in the early 1970s—but it wasn’t love at first sight. Jane’s parents, Don and Marian Easter (pictured left), were in a dancing club and played bridge with Steve’s parents—and both couples were certain their children were destined to be together.

Jane’s father Don was part of a small group of visionaries involved with a new venture led by Dr. Robert Larsen, the Des Moines Metro Summer Festival of Opera. And it was in the second season in 1974 that Don Easter suggested to his daughter Jane and Steve Bahls, both 19-years-old, that they become ushers for the festival so they could see the operas for free. The perfect date night.

Jane had never seen an opera before her father became involved with the endeavor. The Easter family appreciated the arts but didn’t have a wide knowledge of classical music. As the child of a board member, she’d helped paint sets for the first season in 1973. And by the summer of 1974, the impact of the Des Moines Summer Festival of Opera on the Easter family and Steve and Jane’s blossoming relationship was certain.

Jane and Steve (pictured right) were married in 1977 and would spend the next nearly 40 years with their three children living in locales across the United States. They always made time to return to Indianola with Jane’s parents to attend productions at Des Moines Metro Opera, as this was one of the places where their story began.

Don Easter passed away in 2011 and his wife Marian passed in 2015. The Easters provided ongoing leadership and support from the founding of the company throughout the end of their lives. Jane says her father believed he was blessed with wealth to give back to his community—to be involved and inspire others to be involved and give back as well. Jane and her siblings continue her parents’ legacy through financial support for Des Moines Metro Opera through the Easter Family Foundation.

50 years later, Jane and Steve—now proud grandparents of five grandchildren, are new residents of Missoula, Montana upon Steve’s recent retirement. They are also season subscribers at Des Moines Metro Opera and continue to make an annual trip to Indianola in memory of Jane’s parents’ love for the organization, and in honor of that fateful summer in 1974 where two young ushers solidified a lifelong love and revealed the magic in the dream of professional opera in the heartland.

Lawrence O. Ely (left), First President of the Board, and Don Easter (right), First Vice-President of the Board

INDIANOLA WELCOMES YOU!

KRAUSE GROUP IS PROUD TO SUPPORT ARTS AND CULTURE IN THE COMMUNITY.

A Standing Ovation

Faegre Drinker applauds our friends at Des Moines Metro Opera for 50 years of innovative performances. Thank you for enhancing our cultural community and making Des Moines a great place to live and work!

SOARING SOPRANOS DRAMATIC DUETS

The attorneys of Fredrikson & Byron are extraordinarily proud to support the 50th Anniversary Season of Des Moines Metro Opera.

Since 1985,

Practical Farmers of Iowa

has been bringing farmers together to learn from and support one another. Today, we’re a diverse group of farmers, landowners and other supporters who believe that sharing knowledge can help us all build resilient farms and communities.

Dr. Yogesh & Deval Shah

THE GERSHWINS®'

Porgy and Bess®

By GEORGE GERSHWIN, DUBOSE and DOROTHY HEYWARD and IRA GERSHWIN

July 1 7:30 PM

July 3 2:00 PM

July 8 7:30 PM

July 14 7:30 PM

July 16 7:30 PM July 21 7:30 PM July 24 2:00 PM

First performance: Colonial Theatre, Boston; September 30, 1935 Company Premiere Performed in English with English supertitles

Featuring international opera star Simon Estes as Lawyer Frazier in a performance dedicated to Arthur Woodley A new production made possible by a production gift from the Lauridsen Family Foundation The chorus for this production was made possible by a gift from Linda and Tom Koehn Projected titles design by Kelley Rourke originally for The Glimmerglass Festival

PORGY AND BESS is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on behalf of Tams-Witmark LLC

The worldwide copyrights in the music of George and Ira Gershwin® are licensed by the Gershwin Family. GERSHWIN is a registered trademark and service mark of Gershwin Enterprises.

PORGY AND BESS is a registered trademark and service mark of Porgy and Bess Enterprises.

PART I

The inhabitants of Catfish Row relax after a hard day’s work. Clara sings a lullaby to her baby. Sportin’ Life, Clara’s husband Jake, and the men are playing craps under the disapproving eye of the religious Serena. Jake sings a lullaby of his own to the baby. The disabled beggar Porgy arrives to join the game when Crown and his partner Bess appear. Crown loses the dice game, starts a fight, and kills Robbins. He runs off to hide, telling Bess he’ll be back for her. The community shuns Bess. Sportin’ Life offers to take her to New York, but she refuses. Only Porgy is sympathetic: He offers her shelter and protection, she accepts. In a meeting room, Robbins’s widow, Serena, leads the mourners at his funeral. A collection is taken to meet the cost of the burial. Bess, through Porgy, offers Serena a contribution. The Detective and officers arrive and accuse Peter, the Honeyman, of the murder, and despite protestations, he is arrested. Serena convinces the undertaker to bury Robbins for less than his fee. Bess leads everyone in an exultant spiritual. Jake and the other fishermen are mending nets. Porgy compares his life to theirs. Sportin’ Life enters, but before he can peddle any of his “happy dust,” Maria, the matriarch of Catfish Row, chases him away. “Lawyer” Frazier sells Bess a divorce, though she and Crown were never married. Everyone prepares to leave for a church picnic on Kittiwah Island. Sportin’ Life asks Bess again to come to New York with him and tries to give her more dope; she refuses. Porgy chases him off. They reflect on their newfound happiness. He insists that Bess should go to the picnic without him and is content for the first time to have the love of a woman.

INTERMISSION

PART II

On Kittiwah Island, Sportin’ Life describes his cynical view of religion to the revelers. Serena chastises them for being taken in by his stories. The steamboat whistle blows, and everyone starts to pack. Bess hurries along until Crown, who has been hiding on the island since the murder, calls out to her. He

wants Bess to come with him, but she explains that she now has a life with Porgy. Crown forces her to stay with him. In Catfish Row, fishermen leave for a day’s work at sea despite a storm warning. Bess is heard talking deliriously from Porgy’s room, feverish and ill since returning from Kittiwah Island. Peter, released from police custody that morning, advises Porgy to take her to hospital. Serena prays for her recovery and is answered: Bess emerges, free of the fever. Bess wants to stay with Porgy but when Crown returns, she’ll be forced to go back to him. Porgy tells her that she doesn’t have to go with Crown. He and Bess reaffirm their love for each other.

The winds rise and the hurricane bell sounds. The community cowers in the meeting room and prays for deliverance. Crown arrives, seeking shelter and looking for Bess. She insists that she belongs to Porgy alone. He mocks Porgy and the frightened townspeople and counters their prayers with a vulgar song. Clara sees Jake’s boat overturned and rushes out to save her husband. Bess calls for one of the men to go after her. Crown is the only one to respond.

The denizens grieve for those who have been lost: Jake, Clara and, possibly, Crown. Sportin’ Life mocks their weeping, and hints that Crown is still alive. Bess lulls Clara’s baby to sleep. That night, Crown steals in and approaches Porgy’s door. Porgy is ready and strikes the first blow. He kills Crown. The detective returns to Catfish Row, accompanied by the coroner, to investigate Crown’s murder. They go to Porgy’s room and order him to come in to identify Crown’s body. Porgy refuses and has to be dragged. In Porgy’s absence, Sportin’ Life tries to convince Bess that Porgy will be locked up for certain, and attempts to lure her away to a new life. When Bess spurns him, he forces some dope on her and leaves more outside her door.

A week later, the inhabitants of Catfish Row greet each other. Porgy returns from jail in a jubilant mood. He is unaware of his friends’ discomfort as he calls out for Bess. Heartbroken, thinking Bess is dead, he soon discovers she is alive and has gone to New York with Sportin’ Life. Porgy decides to follow: He cannot live without Bess.

Director

The times are uncertain and forbidden on many levels for most of us these days. A rise of all kinds of “isms.” We are challenged, during this divisive atmosphere, to stay close and supportive. Here’s hoping that America will have the wisdom and ferocity to plow under its recent oversights and commit to building another kind of world—a world of intentionality and wholeness and beauty and reverence and respect for the differences among peoples that add richness, variety and diversity to our lives.

Here’s hoping that in our 21st century, each of us will open ourselves a little further into awareness, into the capacity to attend, to listen, to see and feel what is going on inside and outside of ourselves: to become part of the “others,” those that are immediately around us, and those who are further off; lost, ignored, forgotten.

Within the heart of this threatened darkness, Des Moines Metro Opera—this great structure of unrelenting affirmation and inclusion, year after year for 50 seasons!—through fierce determination, their courage and positive energy; through their immeasurable ability to attract the finest vocal talents, DMMO has provided memorable moments of illumination, joy, synthesis, catharsis, human exploration, and celebration.

Let us never undervalue what our vocal artists do for us, for they are the alchemists who alter material things into things of the spirit; tug and shake our hearts and minds; transform us into the lives, into the shoes of others so that we may more clearly see ourselves. With the insightful choice of Porgy and Bess, the 50-year DMMO mission-journey for truth and beauty (let us not forget entertainment) continues. The outrageously spectacular voices of the assembled Porgy and Bess company representing the denizens of Catfish Row explodes the intimacy of the Blank theatre with a compelling story of indelible individuals and a hard scrabble tight-knit community that finds strength in shared spirituality, compassion and interdependence.

Supported by Gershwin’s magnificent jazz-infused score, radiant chorales, blues, spirituals, Tin Pan Alley, prayers, dirges, love ballads, chants, wails, shouts and cries of street vendors—songs of pain, outrage, confusion and courage, Iowans will witness, close-up, the kaleidoscopic life experiences of Catfish Row.

Porgy and Bess reminds us that we are bound together in community, by membership in our species: human. The human that wants America moving forward to the inclusive, enlightened, empathetic and compassionate human. The human who is hungry for peace and love.

THE STORY Catfish Row, a neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina

DIRECTOR'S NOTES by Tazewell Thompson, Stage

†

PRODUCTION

Conductor

MICHAEL ELLIS INGRAM *

Stage Director

TAZEWELL THOMPSON *

Scenic Designer

R. KEITH BRUMLEY

Costume Designer

HARRY NADAL *

Lighting Designer

ROBERT WIERZEL *

Make-Up/Hair Designer

KELLEN M. EASON *

Chorus Director

LISA HASSON

Associate Conductor and Diction Coach

RICHARD CORDOVA

Musical Preparation

TESSA HARTLE

Second Associate Conductor DONALD LEE III *

Assistant Stage Director CINDY C. OXBERRY *

Fight Director

RON PIRETTI *

Chorus Pianist

TAYLOR BURKHARDT *

Stage Managers

FRANCESCA MACBETH *

LAUREN WICKETT *

CAST in order of vocal appearance

Clara

JACQUELINE ECHOLS *

Mingo

DAVID MORGANS SANCHEZ *‡

Sportin’ Life

JERMAINE SMITH *

Jake

BLAKE DENSON *

Serena

LEAH HAWKINS *

Robbins

ERRIN DUANE BROOKS *

Jim BRANDON BELL ‡

Peter

ROLAND HAWKINS, II † Maria LUCIA BRADFORD *

Porgy KEVIN DEAS *

Crown NORMAN GARRETT

Bess

MICHELLE JOHNSON *

Detective RICHARD CORDOVA

Lily IMARA MILES *‡

Policeman JONATHAN PATTON *‡

Undertaker PATRICK BLACKWELL *

Annie GEDEANE GRAHAM *‡

Chorus

PAULE ABOITE *

DIMERY ALEXIS *‡

ANTHONY D. ANDERSON *‡

ALYSSA BARNES ‡

BRANDON BELL ‡

JIHANNA CHARLTON-DAVIS †

LYNNESHA CRUMP *

BRIAN L. FENDERSON *

DARIUS A. GILLARD *‡

VIVANA AURELIA GOODWIN *‡ GEDEANE GRAHAM *‡

CHANTELLE GRANT *

MAKEDA D. HAMPTON *

SANKARA HAROUNA *‡

TANYA HARRIS *‡

DARELL HAYNES *

MAURIO HINES *

DENIQUE ISAAC *‡

MARGUERITE JONES *

ELARY MEDE *‡

IMARA MILES *

TIMOTHY D. PARROTT * ISABEL RANDALL *‡

NAMAREA RANDOLPH-YOSEA *‡

OLIVIA ROMINIYI *‡

DEMETRIOUS SAMPSON, JR. *‡

DAVID MORGANS SANCHEZ *‡

JEREMIAH SANDERS *‡

ROCKY EUGENIO SELLERS *

JAIME SHARP *‡

JOSHUA THOMAS *‡

VINCE WALLACE *

ALAN WILLIAMS *‡

CHARLES WILLIAMSON * ARTEGA WRIGHT *‡

* DMMO mainstage debut

Former DMMO Apprentice Artist

‡ Current DMMO Apprentice Artist or Ensemble Artist

Lawyer Frazier SIMON ESTES *

Nelson

SANKARA HAROUNA *‡

Strawberry Woman LYNNESHA CRUMP *

Crab Man

DEMETRIOUS SAMPSON, JR. *‡

Coroner

THADDEUS ENNEN ‡

Second Policeman KELLEN SCHRIMPER ‡

Supernumerary Children

KAITLYN GIPSON *

CRUZE LOVE * GEORGE LOVE, III * MICHAEL MCPHERSON * DEMERRIA RAMBO *

KEVIN DEAS

MICHELLE JOHNSON JACQUELINE ECHOLS

JERMAINE SMITH

NORMAN GARRETT

LEAH HAWKINS BLAKE DENSON

LUCIA BRADFORD SIMON ESTES

“I LOVES YOU, PORGY”

REFLECTIONS ON THE COMPLEXITIES BEHIND LOVING PORGY AND BESS

BY DR. NAOMI ANDRÉ, SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE

THERE ARE MANY THINGS to love about the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. Most of the tunes are already familiar through jazz standards (“Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now”) and George Gershwin’s music has that perfect combination of an undulating Puccini-esque lyricism with catchy syncopations that capture the rhythms of the English language.

The music achieves many things at once: it involves full-out operatic singing, yet still has moments that feel like spontaneous outpourings of emotion. Serena’s “My Man’s Gone Now” at the funeral of her husband in Act I showcases the singer’s virtuosity and brings on the chills of a new widow’s wail. At the same time, the “Six Simultaneous Prayers” chorus during the hurricane in Act II makes you feel like you have walked into a Black church vigil.

The creators’ insistence on a Black cast makes going to Porgy and Bess a unique experience, and one especially exciting for Black audiences, for it is still very rare to have the chance to see so many Black people on the operatic stage—and in the audience. Yet Porgy and Bess is also deeply troubling. The most disheartening part of the opera is the hopelessness of the characters’ fates. It is distressing to see the drinking, gambling, murder, and sexual assault that take place. Even more devastating is that the characters we cheer for—the

young loving family of Clara and Jake, the rehabilitated Bess—end up dead or broken by the end. In the finale, when Porgy sings “Oh Lawd, I’m On My Way,” we know that he—a poor, disabled Black man—will never make it to New York. Although the residents of Catfish Row sing about the “Heav’nly Lan’” of promise and opportunity, we know they will most likely not see it in their lifetimes.

Porgy and Bess was written in a historical moment that saw significant hope as well as deep racial conflict. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction and beyond, Jim Crow practices developed into laws, and lynching became a regular threat. With the Great Migration of poor southern Blacks to the north and west for jobs and better prospects, Harlem along with other key cities (such as Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, among others) emerged as places for great optimism and accomplishments.

The Harlem Renaissance, and similar movements in the aforementioned destination cities, were fueled by the first generations of African Americans who were born free after slavery and had greater opportunities to choose where they lived. Publications such as W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) outlined a new construction of Black identity in the US and how a post-slavery society

could thrive with members from all races. There was an energy and excitement for Black achievement in the arts—literature, music, dance and theater all had a place in the racial uplift movement.

Gershwin wrote an opera in his own style, on his own terms. He called Porgy and Bess an American “folk opera,” a designation open to interpretation and one that has caused much speculation. In using this term, Gershwin brought together the connection to the people—in this case Black people—and the elevated genre of opera. The term “folk” had varied meanings in the beginning of the 20th century, as the development of folklore societies in Europe and the US were founded to preserve oral traditions not written down. These efforts were bolstered during the Depression in the 1930s when the US government sponsored several folk-related projects (such as the Federal Music Project). “Folk” also had a special resonance in the Black community. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois centered this term in his discourse and then began each chapter with a few bars of a Spiritual in music notation, thus linking the uplift of the race with the music of the people.

Though Gershwin wrote his own music in the style of Spirituals (and did not use authentic Spirituals) in his opera, he and DuBose Heyward spent a month on Folly Island, off the coast of South Carolina, to be with African American people and learn about their Gullah culture.

One of the most complex issues around the work is the representation of the characters’ speech and the use of a language meant to express the dialogue and thoughts of the residents of Catfish Row. In a time when minstrelsyradio shows (such as Amos ’n’ Andy) and other media— where white actors, singers, and novelists rely on negative stereotypes of Black people are shunned—today Porgy and Bess can sound awkward and dated. But with recent controversies around the use and importance of what is variously called Black English, Ebonics, and African American Vernacular English, the quest for representing Black culture in ways other than using Standard English has resonance.

The principle of linguistic subordination where language variabilities associated with socio-economically oppressed groups are viewed as linguistic deficits rather than neutral linguistic variations, helps explain how attitudes about such language differences come about. Successful precedents in the beginning of the 20th century go back to the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, as well as to the art songs, Spirituals, and choral arrangements by John Wesley Work, Jr. (as well as his son John Wesley Work, III), Nathaniel Dett, Hall Johnson, Undine Smith Moore, and Eva Jessye—who was a composer as well as the choral director for the first production of Porgy and Bess. What becomes tricky is when someone outside of the subordinated group (in this case the Black community)

Above: Study for Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of the Deep South by Aaron Douglas.

approximates the structure and syntax of the nonstandard version of the language, and the result sounds and feels uncomfortable to those who know the true tradition. In this way, the language choices made by Porgy and Bess’s creators, however well-meant they may have been, are problematic.

Such themes present a microcosm of how representation is fraught in Porgy and Bess. George and Ira Gershwin, alongside DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, gave us a compelling picture of Black southern life that by contrast, and in an uncommon practice for the time, was required to be portrayed by Black performers in true-to-color casting (not blackface) when staged in the US. This provided Black artists—from a wide spectrum of opera singers to the Broadway dancer John William “Bubbles” Sublett (the original Sportin’ Life)—the opportunity to perform on stage to larger and wealthier audiences.

Black artists and composers from the early part of the 20th century did not have the economic and social capital of the Heywards and Gershwins to pull off a venture like Porgy and Bess—one that would have incredible staying power. Recent scholarship is helping to reveal a new historiography of Blackness in opera by uncovering the narratives of Black opera impresarios, such as the Theodore Drury Grand Opera Company that produced a few operas in the first decades of the century, and Mary Cardwell Dawson’s music school and National Negro Opera Company that mounted productions in the 1940s to early 1960s.

Black composers (such as Scott Joplin, Harry Lawrence Freeman and William Grant Still) wrote operas that are continuing to resurface today. They were accomplished in the Western European tradition and wrote in a musical style that expands our understanding of how Black culture was represented in American opera during the first decades of the 20th century. Black composers wrote operas spanning the 20th century; however, they had very difficult times getting their works performed. It is only recently that we see these earlier operas getting performed along with a generation of living composers including Anthony Davis, Rhiannon Giddens, Adolphus Hailstork, Nkeiru Okoye, Terence Blanchard and several others.

Historic Black composers Scott Joplin (top), Harry Lawrence Freeman (center) and William Grant Still (bottom).

BLACK COMPOSERS WROTE OPERAS SPANNING THE 20TH CENTURY; HOWEVER, THEY HAD VERY DIFFICULT TIMES GETTING THEIR WORKS PERFORMED.

Going back to the first half of the 19th century, we have information about Black operatic singers from Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (c. 1809-1876) who toured in the US and sang for Queen Victoria in early 1850s England and Sissieretta Jones (c. 1868-1933), another opera singer who gave recitals and started her own singing troupe in the 1890s through 1915. It was not until 1955 when Marian Anderson sang at the Metropolitan Opera that the genre began to desegregate, and we saw more Black singers and other people of color on stage.

In this respect Porgy and Bess played an important role even though it took a while after its first performance in 1935 (and Gershwin’s untimely death in 1937) to be accepted in the opera repertory. With the Gershwin estate committed to having true-to-color casting when the work is staged in the US and the important performance by Houston Grand Opera in 1976, Porgy and Bess has played a critical role in giving Black singers access to opera houses.

Celebrated Iowa-born bass-baritone Simon Estes is written into this history for creating Porgy at its 50th anniversary when it was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera in 1985. In the first generation of Black male singers who have had stellar international operatic careers, Estes is part of a legacy that connects the past, present and future as opera embraces social justice through the way it elegantly projects human emotions and compellingly conveys relatable characterizations.

Over time, people have thought of Porgy and Bess as the Great American Opera, as well as a frustrating collection of stereotypes that emphasize a vision of Black people who speak in dialect-ridden English, drink and gamble too much, and have a loose moral code. And to some extent, both assessments are true. This opera presents a heritage that has given important opportunities to Black performing artists. Porgy and Bess showcases intensely human emotions that lead to both great passion and heart-wrenching devastation. With all of these contrasting features, it is music that touches us and gets under our skin. And this is what makes Gershwin’s opera so easy to love and so hard to stay mad at.

NAOMI ANDRÉ is an associate professor in the departments of African and Afroamerican Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and is DMMO’s inaugural Scholar-in-Residence.

PORGY AND BESS HAS PLAYED A CRITICAL ROLE IN GIVING BLACK SINGERS ACCESS TO OPERA HOUSES.

Important Black opera singers Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (top), Sissieretta Jones (center) and Marian Anderson (bottom).

SINGING WITH HEART AND SOUL

One of today’s greatest artists, Iowa’s own Simon Estes, makes his long-awaited DMMO debut this summer

BY ROGER PINES

This summer, when DMMO presents its first production of Porgy and Bess, bass-baritone Simon Estes, a truly mighty figure among American singers, will debut at last with his home state’s opera company. His portrayal of Lawyer Frazier is the latest highlight of a stupendous career which has brought him to 84 major opera houses and 115 symphony orchestras around the world, surely a unique record for any singer. It will be his 103rd operatic role.

Two words Estes uses frequently in conversation are “heart” and “soul,” which anchor his artistry. He uses that incomparable voice—with its velvety timbre, sovereign technique and enormous range—to sing from the depths of his being. Estes possesses a passionate desire to share his love of great music, and he sings, above all, “because that’s what God wanted me to do.”

At age 84, Estes retains his extraordinary energy. He still teaches, he’s currently involved in filming a documentary about his life, and at the time of our talk, he was about to travel to New York to accept his 13th honorary doctorate—in this case from The Juilliard School, of which he is an alumnus.

Estes began our talk by recalling his youth in Centerville, where his father—a coal miner and the son of a former enslaved man—worked for low wages but supported a family of six. Unable to read or write, he told his son, “You must get an education. That’s something no one can take away from you.” The Estes household, while lacking material wealth, was rich in faith. With systemic racism confronting the family every day, their faith was constantly tested, “but my parents taught us that you must never hate another human being. I feel blessed that God gave me a good heart. I’ve cried because of racial discrimination, but I’ve never had any room for hatred or bitterness.”

Estes’s mother had a glorious singing voice and a lifelong love of music, both of which her son inherited. As

a boy he performed in church, with no sense that his voice was special, but his elementary music teacher heard something exceptional. While still a boy soprano, he was invited into the high school choir. Performing a spiritual, “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” he reduced a schoolmate’s mother to tears. “I said to her, ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to make you cry!’ She replied, ‘No, Simon, they were happy tears.’”

Baird Rockefeller Foundation Grant. At Juilliard, he spent two years learning arias and recital repertoire while also discovering an ability to learn music quickly and a gift for languages.

America’s lack of opportunities for Black male singers led Estes to Europe. After auditioning in early 1965 for the formidable Deutsche Oper Berlin, he received a contract for his professional debut there as Aïda‘s King of Egypt. Upon his arrival to rehearse, he was informed that he’d be singing the high priest Ramfis instead, a more prominent role. Estes learned the role in German in four days and sang it, having never met any of his colleagues or the conductor until the performance. That successful debut provided Estes’s launching pad, along with a bronze medal win in Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Competition (1966).

When his voice changed, he abandoned the idea of a professional career and entered the University of Iowa to study pre-med. Once his adult voice finally settled, UI’s choir director wouldn’t take him as a member or give him lessons, claiming he wasn’t good enough. “‘I wouldn’t waste my time with you,’” Estes recalls him saying, “but there’s a young teacher coming here this fall. Maybe he’ll take you.’” That was Charles Kellis, of whom Estes says today, “I truly believe that God sent him to me. He really discovered me.” A life-changing mentor (and still with us at 95), Kellis remains the only voice teacher Estes has ever had. At the University of Iowa, Estes also became the first Black member of the Old Gold Singers and the elite Chamber Singers.

It was Kellis who told Estes he had a voice for opera. After Kellis played records of Callas, Price, Siepi and Hines, Estes decided he really liked opera. Kellis arranged an audition for Juilliard, his own alma mater, where Simon was awarded a full scholarship and received the coveted Martha

News of Estes’s medal in Moscow reached the White House, where Estes was invited to perform. During his career he’s sung for seven American presidents, from Lyndon Johnson to Joseph Biden, as well as for countless other world leaders— among them Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu—and for the Nobel Prize Committee. These memorable experiences have never gone to the singer’s head: “My mother said, ‘Always remain humble in life. Don’t let anyone put you down, but don’t ever lose humility.’”

Estes rapidly established himself in major European houses, among them the Opéra National de Paris (both the Palais Garnier and the Bastille), La Scala, London’s Royal Opera House, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, and the State Operas of Vienna, Hamburg and Bavaria. At the Zürich Opera House, general director Claus Helmut Drese learned early on that Estes truly knew his own mind. When Drese offered him the title role in a new Macbeth, he responded, “I can’t do it. My friend Norman Mittelmann [a favorite artist in Zürich] sings that role, and he has a great voice. His friendship means a lot to me.”

When Drese then asked Estes to sing Porgy in a new production, Estes

‘Always remain humble in life. Don’t let anyone put you down, but don’t ever lose humility.’

hesitated for concern over being typecast. He eventually agreed to do the new Porgy for Drese who repaid the singer’s good will. Later the same year in Zürich a new Flying Dutchman was produced for Estes to sing the title role for the first time.

rehearsed the Aïda/Amonasro duet, Leontyne said to me, ‘Simon, singing next to you is like singing next to a black god.’ That was truly humbling.”

In 1982 he finally performed with the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, singing the Landgrave in Tannhäuser. A conversation at the time with Leontyne Price was hugely significant for him: “She said, ‘Simon, it’s going to be more difficult for you [at the Met] than it was for me because you’re a Black man. You’re also independent, you have a beautiful voice and you have character.’” Estes made a successful debut, which led to return engagements in later seasons as the Walküre Wotan in the premiere of Otto Schenk’s celebrated production, Amfortas (shown left), Orest in Elektra, Amonasro (including Leontyne’s farewell performance), and Porgy in the company premiere of The Gershwins’ opera.

Black men triumphing at the most prestigious theaters internationally in roles not specifically designated for Black artists. Today the situation is slowly—very slowly—improving, but Estes can’t forget the many times he had to work very hard, one-on-one, to wake people up to the real story.

A second new Dutchman came Estes’s way in 1978, when he made history as the first Black male artist at Germany’s Bayreuth Festival. He returned there triumphantly every season through 1985, reprising his magnificent portrayal and adding another—Amfortas in Parsifal Personal fortitude enabled him to triumph at Bayreuth, despite those in the press who announced, prior to the Dutchman premiere, “If that Black man opens the season at Bayreuth, we’re going to boo him off the stage.” Remembering that appalling statement today, Estes says only that “it never got in the way of my ability to concentrate.”

The first American company to welcome Estes, San Francisco Opera, presented him in several roles during the 1967-68 season: Colline in La Bohème, Carter Jones in Gunther Schuller’s The Visitation, and the four villains in The Tales of Hoffmann. General director Kurt Herbert Adler invited him back frequently for leading roles over the next 14 years. Estes cherishes his memories of SFO, especially Aïda. For one performance, leading lady Margaret Price was ill and was replaced by another Price —Leontyne! “The first time we

Estes always knew he was never paid fairly in comparison to his white colleagues. He also had to live with the harsh reality that the Black male was shockingly under-represented in classical music. It dismayed him that little had changed since the decades preceding him, “when the only roles Bill Warfield sang were Porgy and Joe [in Show Boat]. Paul Robeson was treated even worse.” In his own generation, Estes and tenor George Shirley were the only

A particularly scarring experience occurred when Bayreuth was planning a new Ring cycle to be conducted by Sir Georg Solti. Festival director Wolfgang Wagner wanted Estes as Wotan. Although he’d sung widely in Europe (including Bayreuth), Solti insisted that he audition. Estes found this deeply humiliating, “but I swallowed my pride and my ego, and I auditioned.” Solti complimented his singing but preferred to avoid problems with the director, Sir Peter Hall, who didn’t want a Black Wotan. Some weeks later, upon encountering Solti in Italy, Estes revealed how distressed he’d been because Solti had rejected him due to his race. To his credit, Solti, then the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s music director, subsequently engaged Estes for acclaimed CSO performances of Simon Boccanegra and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. It was clearly Bayreuth’s loss: when Birgit Nilsson sang Brünnhilde at the Met opposite Estes (shown below), she told him that of all the Wotans she’d sung with, his was the greatest.

It’s impossible for Estes to pick a favorite among the more than 100 operatic characters he’s portrayed (they include 17 title roles). Some, of course, stand out for him: John the Baptist in Salome (“Because I’m a deeply spiritual person”), King Philip II in Don Carlo, the Walküre Wotan and the Dutchman

Estes’s insatiable musical curiosity has led him to take on several rarities, from Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto to Verdi’s Oberto and Falla’s Atlantida. Many characters were wildly different from Estes’s own personality, including Méphistophélès, Attila, and Boris Godunov, “But when I sang a role, I became that person onstage. I’ve never studied acting, but God gave me a talent to act.”

Estes’s hugely successful concert career has encompassed the gamut of repertoire and collaborations with nearly 100 celebrated conductors, among them Ormandy, Giulini, Muti, Maazel and Bernstein. With them he’s amassed a large discography encompassing major works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, and Fauré, plus Wagner arias, Mahler’s Symphony 8, Negro spirituals, and songs from Broadway (the latter with Willie Anthony Waters, the only Black conductor with whom Estes has ever recorded).

Estes’s essential generosity of spirit has led him to make his mark as a revered teacher. A faculty member at Iowa State for the past 23 years, he’s also taught at Wartburg College, Boston University, and the DMACC Ankeny Campus, while also giving lectures and master classes across America and internationally. “I always tell my students, ‘Sing from your heart and from your soul.’ I talk about humanity and the importance of ridding the world of racism. There’s only one race—the human race.”

The breadth of Estes’s activities as a humanitarian is extraordinary. For example, he gives extensive time and resources to the fight against HIV/AIDS and has done so for years. Children desperately needing assistance are cared for through the Simon Estes Educational

kids on the Iowa State University campus, raising $100,000.” Estes later brought 50 high school choirs together from 50 different counties in Iowa for concerts, raising an additional $432,000. Every penny of that total of $532,000 went to the United Nations Foundation’s Nothing But Nets project.

Along with faith, family remains the center of Estes’s life: his daughters, Jennifer, Lynne, and Tiffany (“my three precious gifts from God”), and his second wife, Ovida. Whether at home with those he loves or away on his travels, Estes embraces life and will never ever rest on his laurels. And he will surely never retire from performing; as long as he has his voice, he’ll continue to bring it to a grateful public.

That brings us to his DMMO debut. General Director Michael Egel contacted Estes some time ago to seek his involvement in the company’s 50th anniversary season. “I said, ‘Michael, Porgy and Bess is a great idea. This is one of the greatest operas ever composed.’” Having previously been a much-acclaimed Porgy, Estes was now ready to pass that role to another artist. However, he recalled a dear friend, baritone Arthur Woodley (1949-2020), making an indelible impression as Frazier at the Met. When Egel asked if Estes would appear in the production, he agreed to sing Frazier, honoring Woodley’s memory.

Foundation and the Simon Estes International Foundation for Children. In South Africa performing for the 2010 World Cup grand finale, Estes was horrified to hear that a Black child in sub-Sahara Africa was dying of malaria every minute. “I really felt the Lord was laying this on my heart,” he recalls. After returning to America, “we did a big Christmas concert with 1,000 high school

At each Porgy and Bess performance, before Estes goes onstage, he’ll do as he’s always done—he’ll offer a prayer: “Dear Lord, thank You for giving me this talent to sing. I pray that the hearts of those in this audience will be touched to love You and to love one another.” As long as he continues singing—which we can hope he’ll do for many more years—Simon Estes will sing with gratitude, humility, and love.

ROGER PINES, who recently concluded a 23-year tenure as dramaturg of Lyric Opera of Chicago, is a contributing writer to Opera News, Opera (U.K.), and programs of opera companies and recordings internationally. He has been on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music for the past three years.

“I always tell my students, ‘Sing from your heart and from your soul.’”

BRITTEN

aMidsummer Night's Dream

July 2 7:30 PM

July 10 2:00 PM July 15 7:30 PM July 23 7:30 PM

First Performance: Aldeburgh Festival; June 11, 1960 Previous performances at Des Moines Metro Opera: 1979, 2007 Performed in English with English supertitles

By arrangement with Boosey & Hawkes, Inc., publisher and copyright owner.

A new production made possible by a production gift from Frank R. Brownell III Costume design made possible by a gift from Ellen and Jim Hubbell

Music by BENJAMIN BRITTEN Libretto by BENJAMIN BRITTEN and PETER PEARS, after the play by Shakespeare

THE STORY The Wood

BEFORE THE OPERA BEGINS

The marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta is to take place at the next new moon. A group of rustics is anxious to entertain the royal couple and plan a meeting in the woods to choose a play.

Just at this time, Theseus is called upon by Egeus, a prominent citizen, to invoke the old law which will force his daughter Hermia to marry Demetrius, the man of her father's choice. If she chooses not to marry him, she must accept a sentence of death or life in a convent. Theseus upholds the law and Hermia and her lover Lysander arrange in desperation to meet in the woods to decide on their fate. They make the mistake of confiding in Helena, Hermia's friend, who is so in love with Demetrius that she tells him of the lovers' flight to the woods. He follows them, pursued by Helena.

ACT I: Deepening twilight

The wood is filled with fairies who have come to wish joy and prosperity to Theseus and Hippolyta. But they are disturbed by a quarrel over the custody of a young boy whom the Queen Tytania refuses to relinquish to her husband, King Oberon. Oberon decides to punish her and sends Puck on a hasty search for a magic flower that had been pricked by Cupid's arrow. Hermia and Lysander wish to marry but have run away to escape her father's order that she must marry Demetrius. The latter is pursued by Helena, whom he does not love. Oberon, perceiving Demetrius' scorn for Helena, instructs Puck to use the magic flower to force Demetrius to reciprocate Helena's love. Six rustics meet to prepare a play that they hope to perform in honor of Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding. Quince, a carpenter, plans the entertainment with much help from Bottom, a weaver. Through Puck's error, Lysander, sleeping on the ground near Hermia, is anointed. He awakens to see Helena still in pursuit of Demetrius and follows her into the wood. Oberon squeezes the juice of the magic flower into the sleeping Tytania’s eyes: when she awakes she will fall in love with the first creature that she sees.

INTERMISSION

ACT II: Dark night

The Rustics meet to rehearse. The knavish Puck gleefully slips an ass' head upon Bottom's shoulders. The rest of the company flees in terror at the sight. Tytania wakes up, falls madly in love with the absurd monster, adorns his head with roses, orders her fairies to wait upon him, and falls asleep in his arms. Exhausted, Demetrius lies down to sleep, and Oberon, having learned of Puck's mistake, sends his messenger to fetch Helena while he drops the love-potion into Demetrius' eyes. As Helena arrives, quarreling with Lysander, their voices awaken Demetrius who promptly falls in love with Helena. The confusion deepens and bitter words are exchanged on all sides, with the young men rushing out to fight a duel. Puck soon sets things straight by causing the four to fall asleep and removing the spell from Lysander's eyes with the juice of another flower.

INTERMISSION ACT III: Early next morning

Oberon, now in possession of the disputed boy, cures Tytania's enchantment and orders Puck to release the ass' head as Bottom wakes, stretches and assumes the evening's events to be part of a dream. At the break of day Theseus, Hippolyta and their train come to the wood to hunt and enjoy their wedding festivities. Their horns awaken the lovers who find themselves happily paired at last. When the Duke learns that Demetrius, now in love with Helena, willingly gives up Hermia to Lysander, he is so pleased that he invites the lovers to be married in the same ceremony with himself and Hippolyta. The rustics’ play is chosen to be performed. When midnight strikes, Theseus declares that it is time for bed. Oberon, Tytania, the fairies and Puck appear and give their blessing.

†

PRODUCTION

Conductor

ELIZABETH ASKREN *

Stage Director CHAS RADER-SHIEBER

Scenic and Costume Design JACOB A. CLIMER

Lighting Design CONNIE YUN *

Make-Up/Hair Design BRITTANY V.A. RAPPISE *

Youth Chorus Director

ALLEN PERRIELLO

Associate Conductor

WILLIAM HOBBS

Musical Preparation

ELDEN LITTLE

Assistant Stage Director

ISAAC LERNER

Youth Chorus Pianist

TAYLOR BURKHARDT *

Stage Manager

MEG EDWARDS

Millinery

ELIZABETH FLAUTO

Costume Makers

COLIN DAVIS JONES STUDIOS

JEFFREY WALLACH/THE COSTUME SHOP AT NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP FRITZ MASTEN

* DMMO mainstage debut

Former DMMO Apprentice Artist

‡ Current DMMO Apprentice Artist or Ensemble Artist

CAST in order of vocal appearance

Cobweb

EMMA ROTHFIELD ‡

Mustardseed

NAOMI BRIGELL ‡

Peaseblossom

VÉRONIQUE FILLOUX ‡

Moth

MIYA HIGASHIYAMA *‡

Puck

LIAM BECK-O’SULLIVAN *

Oberon JOHN HOLIDAY

Tytania SYDNEY MANCASOLA

Lysander ISAIAH BELL *

Hermia TAMARA GURA *

Demetrius

ALEXANDER BIRCH ELLIOTT †

Helena

SUSANNE BURGESS †

Peter Quince MATT BOEHLER †

Snug the Joiner WEI WU *

Robin Starveling MICHAEL PANDOLFO *‡

Francis Flute MICHAEL KUHN *

Tom Snout COREY TRAHAN †

Nick Bottom BARNABY REA *

Theseus ALAN WILLIAMS *‡ Hippolyta SYDNEY FRODSHAM *‡

Youth Chorus

BENJAMIN BJORKLUND

MICAH BROERS *

HATTIE GREEN * CALLEN KLEENE *

ALEX MILLER * LUCY MILLER * EVAN MOYER * XAVIER MUIR *

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

by Chas Rader-Shieber, Stage Director

What is magic? Shakespeare (and Britten for that matter) has offered a world in which fairies and mortals co-exist. All of the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream meet in the woods, the domain of the fairy world, and in one way or another, they all experience the idea of magic. In one instance, magic is a spell to make someone fall in love with the next person she sees. In another, magic is a man transformed into a donkey by a jealous Oberon.

But magic doesn’t just belong to the fairies who inhabit the forest at night. It is the magic that we see every day but don’t often value, that is of equal importance in this opera. When the construction worker decides to leave the city to join his friends and express himself artistically—that is magic. When the teenager learns the difference between a crush and true

love—that is magic. These moments, as well as the supernatural ones, are filled with a feeling of wonder that might be overlooked but for how sweetly and smartly they are offered to us in this astonishing work.

Britten is at his very best here, creating not so much what the forest at night sounds like, but what it also “feels” like. Along with his partner Peter Pears, Britten has adapted, trimmed and refined Shakespeare’s play to amazing effect. He guides us through three interconnected stories, weaving them towards a conclusion filled with joy and laughter and a certain kind of poignant maturity. Every character is afforded the opportunity to grow and change and become more themselves that ever before—and that, too, is a kind of magic.

JOHN HOLIDAY SYDNEY MANCASOLA

ISAIAH BELL

ALEXANDER BIRCH ELLIOTT

BARNABY REA

LIAM BECK-O’SULLIVAN

TAMARA GURA

SUSANNE BURGESS

MICHAEL KUHN

britten’s magical midsummer

How Midsummer’s appeal lies in the fantastic and the mundane

BY GENEVIEVE LANG

THE MAGIC OF BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S early life is that music found him at all. He came from a self-described “very ordinary middleclass family.” None of his three siblings showed any inclination towards music; neither of his parents were musical; and music was not taught at school. But by age six, in the British fishing port of Lowestoft in Suffolk, Britten was writing incidental music for self-devised plays and “publishing” these works, complete with clear and precise descriptions of each character’s costumes. With his theatrical bent emerging so young, Britten would go on to be England’s greatest composer of opera.

Britten’s early musical path put him on course to meet with composer, violist and conductor Frank Bridge, 34 years his senior. Bridge took Britten on as his only student. His teaching style was unconventional: focusing on aesthetics, idiomatic writing, and clarity. Britten credited Bridge with impressing on him the importance of scrupulous attention to technical craft and the maxim that “you should find yourself and be true to what you find.” The former meant that Britten was often able to compose at great speed—A Midsummer Night’s Dream was turned out in just six months; the piece he wrote in tribute to his teacher, the Variations on a Theme of Frank

Bridge, in a mere three. As to idiomatic writing, you need only consult with any harpist or viola player to discover how brilliantly “from-the-inside-out” Britten was able to compose for every single instrument.

It's rare for Britten and Wagner to appear in the same sentence—differences abound in musical language, temperament, scale and conception of major works, and reputation. Yet there is one notable similarity: the sense that a composer must have, if not complete control, then at least a very heavy hand in both the musical and literary creation of an opera. Britten was once offered an unsolicited libretto, which he politely declined, explaining that he was very sorry but he couldn’t accept it because he hadn’t been in on it since the beginning. “This is a long business,” he explained. “The idea for an opera must come from the composer.”

Which begs the question, why decide to “work with” Shakespeare? Well, not too long before the 1960 Aldeburgh Festival, Britten and Peter Pears—his life partner, singer and fellow creative—realized that there was no jewel in the crown of that year’s festival. They could be forgiven for having been distracted with the renovations to the Jubilee Hall, the festival’s major

venue. Thoughts of his soon-to-be-composed War Requiem were also likely turning in Britten’s mind, drawing attention away from the minutiae of festival planning. In any case, rather than starting 100% from scratch, Britten and Pears turned to the great Bard and took an editor’s pen to cut large swaths of Shakespeare’s text, doing away with the entire first act, and reducing the text to half its original size. Britten commented that had they kept all of Shakespeare’s text, the opera would have rivalled Wagner’s Ring Cycle in length. Makes sense when you consider the speed of delivery from spoken dialogue, versus the time it takes to bend and shape prose into beautiful phrase upon beautiful musical phrase.

“One of the greatest gifts a composer can offer a director,” says DMMO director Chas Rader-Shieber, “is once they’ve confronted and absorbed the source material, to make sure the action always moves forward. I love the way Britten sends this thing forward among the three groups. And he’s also written in beautiful moments of repose—there’s a spectacular piece of music when Tytania and Bottom fall asleep with one another. It’s my job,” says Chas, “not to let down a great composer.”

Whether this is your first Britten opera or your 23rd Midsummer, key to your enjoyment, says Chas, is your ability to let the first 15 minutes just wash over you. “The first half-hour of a James Bond film can be just as confusing, just as complicated, but we know not to worry because that’s how those movies run.” There’s a strong argument with Britten, as with Handel, for not including a synopsis in the printed program. “We can get overwhelmed by the complexity of the plot.” [Spoiler alert: they all live happily ever after.]

Similarly, the musical language of Britten can be a bit of an exercise to grasp. Here’s a Britten hack: for each group of characters in the opera, he created a unique sound world: celesta, harp and high woodwind for the fairies, lower brass for the “Mechanicals” (the theatrical group) and more conventional orchestral scoring for the lovers.

The music of the opening immediately establishes a sense of otherworldliness in the forest where most of the opera is set: a series of sliding chromatic chords, which have the rhythm of a sleeper’s breathing. These chords are discordant when placed alongside each other, but as discrete units, are simple triads—three notes piled up on top of each other, a foundational structure in music. Britten builds a world that is both “natural” (triads) and “unnatural” (dischords and chromaticism), a place where normal rules do not apply.

“Normal rules” similarly don’t apply to the leading role of Oberon. Britten broke new ground in the 20th century by casting the King of the Fairies as a countertenor. Britten had long admired the music of the last great English composer of opera—Henry Purcell. Around the time Britten was conceiving Midsummer, there was a man called Deller who was singing a lot of Purcell in an authentic style and repopularising the male “alto” voice along the way. Alfred Deller’s countertenor voice was very high and uniquely expressionless, which lent it exactly the otherworldly quality that Britten was searching for. He wrote to Deller inviting him to sing Oberon: “I see you and hear your voice very clearly in this part…”

In 1960 Deller was something of a curiosity. Though he was the father of three children and sported a beard, he still had to endure insinuations about his virility. There’s a delightful story of a Frenchwoman (or German) inquiring, “Monsieur, you are eunuch?”

To which Deller replied, “I’m sure you mean unique, Madame.” Incidentally, Deller wasn’t sure he was up to the part, as he was somewhat lacking in stagecraft. Britten reassured him: “Your height and presence will be absolutely right—and so will your beard!” (DMMO is delighted to be presenting genre-bending countertenor John Holiday—and his beard!—in this production.)

By cutting the entire first act of Shakespeare’s play, Britten launches us into Oberon’s world of the fairies. The sprites look magical, dressed in Elizabethan-inspired translucent gauze, and they behave magically—for one thing, the grass in the forest glade doesn’t stain their near-white fairy finery! Designer Jacob A. Climer also introduces the most wondrous of creatures, fireflies, as companions for the fairies. The spell is cast.

Costume designs by Jacob A. Climer.

“The real magic,” says Chas, “is in childhood. And growing up. Being a hormonal teenager is magic. It’s a miracle I got through my teenage years.” And lo! This is Puck’s tale. The Mechanicals, in their comic, hapless, hopeless ways, also carry magic within. “Being a day laborer frowned upon by the whole of society, with a bunch of beer drinking buddies, who also wants to make a play? Or paint a painting? These guys’ wives will never understand that they’re actually going into the forest to express themselves. This is where magic and reality can co-exist.”

What place does A Midsummer Night’s Dream hold in this DMMO season? Sitting in triumvirate with The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess—a story of Shakespearean proportions but told in the American vernacular—and our brandnew work A Thousand Acres by Kristin Kuster and Mark Campbell, a modern retelling of King Lear, Britten’s gentle comedy is perhaps the most “foreign” of the three. But there are universal themes to be explored here, and the music adds another layer through which they can be understood: What is magic? What is fantastic? What is otherworldly? The fairies comprise only one third of the cast—human existence is magical too. It has things in it that are just hard to explain. Like the act of growing up. Tragically, meaningfully, you can’t go back.

Ultimately, leaving aside all the hard work, the analysis, the blood, sweat, rehearsal masks, foggy spectacles, and tears of getting the show to the stage, A Midsummer Night’s Dream invites you in for a great night out. “Communal

entertainment reminds us that we’re with other people, witnessing that shared “something” that comes with live theatre. And thank goodness we’re not still at home rewatching yet another comic’s Netflix special.” We’ve been asked so many times over the last two years to believe the unbelievable. Entering an opera theatre—or any theatre, for that matter—asks us to do the same again. With almost Puck-like sincerity, Jacob is taking responsibility: “We have to make sure our audiences feel safe enough in a theatre to suspend disbelief.”

Genevieve Lang was first captivated by opera when, as a nine-year-old girl, she was taken by her father to see Bizet’s Carmen at the Sydney Opera House. For many years she performed as harpist with Australia’s major orchestras, and more recently she’s added writing and broadcasting to her skillset. Nowadays, Genevieve shares her passion for music on ABC Classic, Australia’s national classical music station, where she’s part of the regular presenter lineup.

BRITTEN and DMMO

The relationship between DMMO and Benjamin Britten’s operas stretches all the way back to the company’s opening season. Some 13 years earlier, founder Robert L. Larsen was in the audience to witness Britten conduct A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Holland Festival, soon after its premiere in Britten’s hometown of Aldeburgh. Larsen taught that there were four “Bs” of serious music— Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Britten. He very much believed in Britten and his music, so much so that Albert Herring was part of the very first DMMO season in 1973. We now proudly count seven of Britten’s operas in our repertory. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was first mounted in 1979 and also helped celebrate our 35th season and joins the festivities for our half-century.

The company’s first performance of Midsummer, pictured left, was unforgettable, in part because it was the first production to be broadcast by Iowa PBS. But magical forces were in play. Just after the first act had concluded a massive storm knocked out power to the theatre, mid-broadcast, and with a live audience in situ! Jennifer Ringo, who was singing Tytania that evening, recalls that she and Rinde Eckert, who sang the role of Snout, under emergency lighting and in sweltering heat, “entertained the audience for hours with folk songs, guitar, juggling, and any talent we could muster to keep them from leaving!” Happily, it worked. The audience stayed, the recording was captured, and everyone went home tired and happy at 2am.

From that 1979 season, the mischievous Puck—a character viewed by Britten as “absolutely amoral and yet innocent”—climbed out of the memorable production and onto the top of DMMO’s logo, where he remained, faithfully watchful and with a twinkle in his youthful eye, until 2015.

A THOUSAND ACRES

Music by KRISTIN KUSTER Libretto by MARK CAMPBELL Based on the novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

THE STORY

PROLOGUE

Ginny sits on the front steps of her father’s house and realizes this is the last time she’ll see their farm. Memories from her childhood begin to surface, but she quickly pushes them away and decides to move forward.

ACT I

SCENE 1: Three years earlier. At a gathering of friends and family, Larry Cook suddenly announces he will divide his farm among his three daughters. Ginny and Rose acquiesce but Caroline demurs, not wanting to give up her new life in Des Moines. Larry tells her she’s out and shuts the door in her face.

SCENE 2: Later that night, Ginny and her husband Ty discuss the future and Ty’s big plans. After he falls asleep, Ginny dreams of a baby, even after so many miscarriages.

SCENE 3: Making breakfast for her father, as she does every morning, Ginny enthuses about the future of the farm while Larry broods. In a sudden outburst, Larry accuses Ginny and her sister Rose of turning Caroline against him.

SCENE 4: Ginny greets the recently returned Jess Clark, a neighbor’s son, while he is out running. He tells her about his 13 years away from the farm, and they make a connection.

SCENES 5-6: Ginny and Rose celebrate Rose’s recovery from breast cancer. Rose makes Ginny promise that if anything should ever happen to her, Ginny will take care of Rose’s daughters, Pammy and Linda. The sisters decide to host a family game night and invite Jess Clark. During the Monopoly game that evening, they discuss Larry’s increasingly strange behavior, and Rose hints at a dark family secret.

SCENE 7: On a walk in the fields behind her house, Ginny and Jess begin a love affair.

SCENE 8: Ginny confronts her father about his drinking and showing up at Caroline’s office unannounced. Larry accuses her of turning Caroline against him and vows to get the farm back.

SCENE 9: Another Monopoly game is interrupted by the news that Larry has had a minor car accident while driving drunk. Unrepentant, Larry rages at Ginny and Rose, calling them whores, and runs off into the approaching storm.

INTERMISSION

ACT II

SCENE 1: Early the next morning, after the storm, Rose tries to get Ginny to admit that Larry sexually abused them as children. Ginny denies it. Ty and Pete return from their search without Larry, who has taken refuge with the neighbors.

SCENE 2: Ginny and Ty learn that Larry is suing them to get the farm back. Harold, their next-door neighbor, and Marv, the family lawyer, suggest that Ginny and Rose should apologize to their father, lest the neighbors begin to talk. Ginny refuses and vows to keep up appearances. Ty takes Larry’s side and Ginny is incredulous at his reaction.

SCENE 3: Later that day, while making the bed in her childhood home, Ginny is overcome with memories of being sexually abused by Larry as a child.

SCENE 4: Several weeks later, Ginny learns that Pete, Rose’s husband, has killed himself under the strain of running the farm and their troubled marriage. Rose leaves her two daughters, Pammy and Linda, in Ginny’s care while she goes to identify Pete’s body. Ginny struggles to distract the girls while keeping such a devastating secret.

SCENE 5: On another walk in the fields, Jess decries the abuse of the land around them. Ginny admits to Jess that she has fallen in love with him, but he does not return her feelings and pushes her away.

SCENE 6: The night before the trial, Rose begins to melt under the pressure of the lawsuit. Ginny tries to calm her, but Rose vows the patriarchal legacy will stop with their generation. Ginny is left stunned by the news that Rose and Jess have begun an affair.

SCENE 7: Ginny and Ty win the legal case but their marriage falls apart. Ty accuses Ginny of betraying him by lying about her miscarriages and bitterly complains about all of the secrets that have come to light. Fed up with all of it, Ginny leaves.

EPILOGUE

Three years later. Rose and Larry are both dead, and Ginny is raising Rose’s daughters. The farm has been lost, and Ginny and Caroline are dividing up what is left. After giving Caroline everything that’s left, Ginny leaves the farm for good.

†

PRODUCTION

Conductor

DAVID NEELY

Stage Director

KRISTINE MCINTYRE

Scenic and Projection Design

LUKE CANTARELLA *

Costume Design

VALÉRIE THÉRÈSE BART *

Lighting Design

KATE ASHTON

Make-Up/Hair Design

KELLEN M. EASON *

Associate Conductor

MATTHEW STRAW *

Musical Preparation

YASUKO OURA

Assistant Stage Director

JANINE MORITA COLLETTI

Stage Manager

BRIAN AUGUST

* DMMO mainstage debut

Former DMMO Apprentice Artist

CAST

Ginny

in order of vocal appearance

ELISE QUAGLIATA †

Pete

TAYLOR STAYTON

Pamela

MARA STOA *

Linda ANSLEY MASON *

Rose SARA GARTLAND †

Marv Carson WEI WU *

Jess JOHN MOORE †

Harold KRISTOPHER IRMITER

Ty KEITH PHARES * Caroline GRACE KAHL †

Larry ROGER HONEYWELL

FROM THE MAESTRO by David Neely, Conductor

The sound of a voice. Alone. Recalling. The orchestra enters with the quiet, undulating sound of distant memory. We are transported into the past with a cheerful guitar song. The music gently bounces in conversation, then filters down to a flowing lullaby as sisters reflect on the unchanging nature of farm life. The tempo broadens, the harmonies become tinged with melancholy, the vocal lines arch, yearningly reach their peak, and then quietly resign themselves back to reality. We are IN.

Mood break. The musical pace brightens in a river of eighth notes under playful conversation. Guests arrive. The sound of the broad plains proudly cuts in. A speech, full of confidence and pride, followed by unexpected hesitancy, is reflected in orchestral stillness. Sisters begin to argue, slowly at first. Emotions rise, the heartbeat in the orchestra accelerates, the harmonies plead. The three voices intertwine, steadily rising

in tessitura. It is at once unnerving and gorgeous, striving toward a resolution that does not come. Full stop. An anxious string tremolo rises and ebbs. Angry words, spoken, bring it to a stop. “Then you’re out.” Pause. The orchestra begins a reflective interlude.

Thus runs the opening Kristin Kuster’s first fulllength opera. A composer of note in the orchestral world with a growing resume of vocal works, Kristy (as we have fondly come to know her) gets it. Story, emotions, timing, process, voices, orchestra, the joy of collaboration on something meaningful and true. All of it. Cast, orchestra, and I have reveled in taking ownership of her music, of unlocking for the audience what she has so astutely brought to life. It’s been an unspeakably rewarding experience that has forged a lasting bond between creators and performers—a family, but unlike the family of the story, one glowing with warmth and unified purpose.

ELISE QUAGLIATA

SARA GARTLAND KEITH PHARES TAYLOR STAYTON

GRACE KAHL

ROGER HONEYWELL JOHN MOORE WEI WU

KRISTOPHER IRMITER

STRETCHES TO THE HORIZON

BY KRISTINE MCINTYRE, DIRECTOR

THE CHOICE OF A Thousand Acres as the subject for an opera company in Iowa should come as no surprise. Set on an Iowa farm in the late 1970s, this retelling of the King Lear story seems the perfect melding of subject matter and locale. Jane Smiley is a writer with deep ties to the Midwest, and the novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

It is a story with great scope, with the iconic American image of family farm as its backdrop. The setting is modern enough for us to easily recognize the characters and their stories but distant enough to lend it some universality. It has a central female protagonist and distinctive female characters to enrich a modern opera canon in desperate need of them. And it seemed the perfect choice to satisfy the best piece of advice that we were given as we embarked on this quest—that the opera should have resonance for the local audience who have supported the company throughout its fifty-year history.

Jane Smiley spent almost two decades in Iowa, first as an MFA student at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop/ University of Iowa and later, after finishing her PhD, as a Professor of English at Iowa State University. It was during these years that she began to think seriously

of writing a book that brought together several different areas of interest: a growing concern about the use of pesticides in industrial agriculture and what it was doing to the land, a desire to explore dysfunctional families and a continuing interest in feminist theory. And, of course, there was King Lear.

Like many of us, Smiley read King Lear in high school and college. The play disturbed her—Lear talked too much, endlessly pontificating and defending himself—and Smiley was annoyed that Goneril and Reagan didn’t get to tell their point of view. These female characters are often held up as archetypal examples of angry and ungrateful daughters, but Smiley understood there was more to it. She thought she knew why they were so angry, and she wanted to give that suspicion a voice.

I, too, recognized that Goneril and Reagan were getting the short end of the stick. In college my English professor would strut around the room enthusiastically shouting, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child,” which my professor took as a statement of fact. But Smiley knew that Goneril and Reagan were not thankless. They had been wronged, horribly so, by their father and she was going to tell their story. “Women who are that

angry all share the same background. I wanted to shape their experiences into the plot so there would be hope at the end of the novel that some of them could go forward, into life.”

The setting for A Thousand Acres the fictional Zebulon County—was inspired by the countryside about an hour north of Ames. Driving back from Minneapolis along Interstate 35, Smiley looked out the car window and was struck by the strange, flat, spooky landscape. The farms there had been built in an area that was once marshland. Through the use of agricultural tiles, the immigrants who settled the area had drained the water and reclaimed more than 12 feet of topsoil. The result was farms that were incredibly large, productive and worth fighting for. “This is the place,” Smiley said, “to set that Lear book.”

A Thousand Acres is a first-person narrative. It is through Ginny, the eldest Cook daughter, that Smiley explores not only the events of the story but the very nature of memory and how narratives of self can fracture and need to be rebuilt. Ginny barely remembers her mother who, like Lear’s wife, has been largely erased from her daughters’ lives. Alone in her father’s house, Ginny seeks to reclaim her. She has vague doubts about the myth of how her family assembled the thousand acres—the

Cooks’ rise to greatness—and she struggles to reconcile her memories with the accepted version of the story. And for much of the novel, Ginny has repressed the memory of her sexual abuse at the hands of her father, despite her sister Rose’s insistence that it did happen, first to Ginny and then to Rose herself. But later, alone in her childhood bedroom, the memories return in a sudden and violent flood, laying bare all the lies that have been buried for so many years.

This is memory as a form of resistance— resistance to abuse, to the erasure of women’s lives, to ownership of Ginny’s body, to the rewriting of her history, as critic Sinead McDermott has observed. Just as her ancestors reclaimed the farmland from the sea beneath, so Ginny reclaims and rediscovers her story and her sense of self. All the proper names in the novel—Cook, Carson, Clark, Ericson, Lewis, Pike, Zebulon—are those of explorers and conquerors. Larry Cook, the patriarch, is well-named and well-placed in this pantheon. But so is his eldest daughter, Ginny Cook, who writes an entirely new story for herself and for her nieces far from the farm, the thousand acres and its poisoned legacy.

I first read A Thousand Acres almost 30 years ago. I loved Smiley’s clever use of the Lear story, but even more I loved her crafting of an American family saga on a grand scale. Four years ago Michael Egel asked me for ideas for the subject of our new

opera. I suggested A Thousand Acres New American opera is a chance to tell our stories, and this one seemed particularly suited to the opera stage— and fortunately Jane Smiley agreed.

A Thousand Acres is an opera dependent on a sense of the land around us, and so it was clear that we needed a composer who was attuned to the natural world, to the seasons and the weather, and who was interested in rendering those aspects of the story in her music. But equally she needed to have a sense of interior landscape and be able to explore the emotional breadth of these deeply troubled characters. And it seemed both right and fitting that the work of a great female novelist should be set by a vibrant and skillful female composer.

I knew we had found that composer when I first heard Kristin Kuster’s Rain

On It, an orchestral celebration of a rainstorm and its aftermath, and Myrrha, a striking and much darker piece for soprano, orchestra and male chorus. Known for her driving, minimalist rhythms and exuberant use of percussion, Kuster is a bold composer with full command of the orchestra. Her work has a modern American sound but with a dissonance which I find to be both extremely appealing and exactly right for this material. Her choices, especially of instrumentation, are often unexpected, surprising, even jarring, but always on point. She is an intuitive composer who sets not only the obvious meaning of the text but also the darker, emotional undertones through her use of orchestral color.

Orchestral interludes separate many of the scenes, representing the passage of time and Ginny’s shifting relationships to her family and their land. The early interludes describe the arrival of full summer— abundant, verdant and full of joy— and speak to an idyllic childhood on the farm. But Larry’s music soon invades as Ginny becomes full of disquiet. The music becomes more slippery, and dissonant harmonies emerge. Long, plaintive lines of solo strings are violently interrupted by marimba and drums, insistently driving the music to an explosion for full orchestra, as though it cannot be contained any longer. Woodwinds and strings cascade relentlessly over one another, like the water beneath the land, threatening to wash everything away. Musical themes representing Ginny, Larry, and the farm are woven throughout the score, then manipulated and inverted as Ginny comes to recognize the truth about her family and her past. Nothing in this story is as it first seems; nothing is on solid ground, and that is as true of the music as it is of the characters themselves.

Kuster is, I think, a brave composer, particularly in starting the entire opera with a solo voice, a cappella, devoid of any of the lush orchestral writing for which she is known. But what better way to ensure that it is Ginny’s voice we hear as she tells us her story? In this, Kuster is a fitting match for the brave female novelist who dared to take on one of the most iconic, influential, and patriarchal of plays in the theatrical canon, rewrite it, set it in Iowa, and tell her new story in a woman’s voice.

Framing this story as a memory play, with a prologue and epilogue, was just one of the important choices that librettist Mark Campbell made as he adapted the novel to the operatic stage. Such a framework is not an uncommon theatrical device, but it is particularly useful in this first-person narrative as it introduces Ginny as our point of reference for the storytelling. The memory play then requires that

Crib Flare (2020) by Amee Ellis.

Shadow Bin (2020) by Amee Ellis.

Ginny be in every scene and renders the opera a true tour-de-force for the singer tasked with creating her. Such a complex book was always going to require a large number of scenes and locations, but Campbell has effectively concentrated the characters and the action and keeps the focus on the farm itself. The world outside almost ceases to exist. Indeed, the farm is Ginny’s world and so it seems appropriate that we never see her beyond its boundaries until the very end.

A seasoned librettist, Campbell encouraged the writing of ensembles in the opera, creating several opportunities for duets between Ginny and Rose, a trio for the three sisters, and a quartet between the couples that demonstrates a rare moment of familial harmony which is handled beautifully by Kuster. Campbell also chose to pair the scenes in the opera in a unique and meaningful way. A scene early in the opera often has a second, darker counterpart or is inverted in some fashion. The breakfast scenes in Larry’s kitchen, the monopoly games, Jess and Ginny’s walks in the field, the scenes on

Ginny’s porch, and even the bedroom scenes follow this pattern. The pairings highlight the sense of routine, at once comforting and monotonous, that has been a hallmark of Ginny’s life thus far.

But they also illustrate how unstable that foundation truly is. In short order, the repeated scenes go awry and take their dark twists and turns. Again, nothing is as it seems or should be. Ginny’s confusion and sense that the future is slipping away from her is woven into the very structure of Campbell’s libretto.

Creating an opera in the place that it is set brings unique challenges, especially when that opera is so deeply related to the land itself. Knowing that a different visual perspective on the Iowa landscape might be incredibly useful, I was intrigued when I came across an image of a wide but lonely farm with a bright horizon and gathering storm clouds overhead. The photograph, entitled Mingo, was by Iowa photographer Amee Ellis and seemed to have uncanny resonance with the story of A Thousand Acres. Ellis lives in Des Moines and has farming

in her blood. She is particularly attuned to the subtle beauty of this landscape which she photographs mostly in black and white. Her use of film and old manual cameras make her photographs feel both old and new, of past and present, gritty but luminous in their silver gelatin prints. We invited Ellis to create a series of photographs from the perspective of each of the three Cook daughters, and the result was a beautiful study entitled The Sea Beneath Our Feet. Describing it, Ellis has written, We are shaped by our landscape and it is shaped by us. Our memories live in the soil, some buried so deeply we forgot we planted them.

Water is one of the most surprising and important themes in A Thousand Acres, and Smiley uses it throughout the novel. It is a metaphor for the mutability of memory and Ginny’s shifting recollection of the events of her childhood. It also speaks to the farmland itself, where sudden storms can threaten all that is in their path, or the water beneath the soil can rise at any time and wash everything away. This idea of impermanence and the impending flood has inspired Kuster’s music, Ellis’s photographic study, and also Luke Cantarella’s scenic and projection design. “The grass is gone now,” Smiley writes, “and the marshes, ‘the big wet prairie,’ but the sea is still beneath our feet, and we walk on it.”

When I asked her recently in an interview what she thought of the idea of turning her novel into an opera, she was incredibly supportive. “The advantage of opera, as opposed to a play, is that they can sing what they think, and that has a quality of introspection that is hard to arrive at on the stage.” Opera, she thought, would elevate the characters and the story. “I’ve never seen an opera that didn’t lift the spirits of the audience no matter how horrible and horrifying the events in the opera were,” Smiley assured me. “All you need is music.”

Mingo (2018) by Amee Ellis.

AMERICAN APOLLO

PRODUCTION

Conductor

DAVID NEELY

Stage Director

KIMILLE HOWARD *

Video/Projection Design

DAVID MURAKAMI *

Scenic Design

CALVIN STARA *

Lighting Design

BRIDGET S. WILLIAMS Costume Design

HARRY NADAL *

Make-Up/Hair Design

KELLEN M. EASON *

Associate Conductor

DONALD LEE III * Musical Preparation

TESSA HARTLE

Stage Manager

CARMEN CATHERINE ALFARO *

July 20 7:30 PM

July 21 2:00 PM

July 23 2:00 PM

CAST

in order of vocal appearance

John Singer Sargent

THOMAS GLENN *

Thomas McKeller

JUSTIN AUSTIN *

Isabella Stewart Gardner

MARY DUNLEAVY *

Jimmy JASON ZACHER ‡

* DMMO mainstage debut ‡ Current DMMO Apprentice Artist

JUSTIN AUSTIN THOMAS GLENN MARY DUNLEAVY JASON ZACHER

by LILA PALMER

Music by DAMIEN GETER Libretto

First performance: Washington, D.C.; Washington National Opera, April 2021 Company Premiere. Performed in English

In partnership with the Pyramid Theatre Company and Des Moines Art Center Leadership funding provided by Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey

DIRECTOR'S NOTES by Kimille Howard, Stage Director

We are in an amazing and urgent time of reckoning where complicated and dark truths about the past are beginning to receive recognition, especially through the arts. Those who are a part of exposing these truths get to be like pioneers digging into the other side of a well known facet of history and crafting the way it’s disseminated to the people.

Thomas Mckeller’s story has been buried behind the fame of John Singer Sargent’s artwork for nearly a century, and it is such an honor to be a part of undoing that erasure through American Apollo. This extraordinary opera sheds light on the life and impact of the Black elevator operator-turned-artists’ model and the lasting effect he had on Sargent as well as

Isabella Stewart Gardner. We are opening the door to explore what a day in the life of this man was like as he interacted with the man who viewed his body as a template to represent the gods, but couldn’t—or wouldn’t—give him the public recognition he deserved.

I’m excited for audiences to experience Damien Geter’s evocative music and Lila Palmer’s powerful words as they weave an unfortunately familiar tale about the use of a Black body for personal gain. Despite McKellar’s circumstances, American Apollo serves as an acknowledgement and celebration of his lasting contribution to art history. Even if it is posthumous, we see him now.

Boston’s Apollo

BY NATHANIEL SILVER

IN FEBRUARY 2017, digging through a storage cabinet in search of a set of Whistler etchings, I came across a large portfolio. Contained inside were ten stunningly beautiful large-format works on paper signed by John Singer Sargent. The nine charcoal drawings and one collotype depicted bodies in whole and part, both women and a man. He stood out.

African American, athletic and nude, his remarkable physique and thoughtful, pensive expression—when visible—practically jumped off the page. Thomas McKeller was his name, as I soon found out. I also discovered that all of the drawings, most of which had never been displayed and none of which were known even to specialists, were studies for the cycle of murals executed over nearly a decade by Sargent at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Let me be clear. I use the word “discover” only in the sense of a personal epiphany. Neither the portfolio nor the man’s name or his role in the murals was in any sense my own discovery.

All the Gardner Museum’s works on paper had been catalogued in 1968 by Rollin Van N. Hadley, these among them. Over 200 other drawings distributed across the Eastern Seaboard in museum collections from Amherst to Washington, D.C.—many recently digitized and accessible online—further attested to the extent of this model’s participation. McKeller’s name has formed part of the art historical record since at least 1956 when David McKibbin organized the exhibition Sargent’s Boston, and that information had even made it into the press. And none of this would have been news to Sargent’s contemporaries. Not only had friends and colleagues met McKeller in the painter’s studio, but a tribute newspaper article commemorating Sargent’s death in 1925 described the model’s pivotal role in the murals, albeit anonymously.

While the sitters of many of Sargent’s portraits have been the subject of essays, articles and even entire books, comparatively little ink has been spilled on the lives of his models. No one had addressed Thomas McKeller’s life in any depth. A sitter pays for a portrait to perpetuate

his or her memory for posterity, and a model is paid to perform his or her job in relative anonymity but that one is as worthy of study as the other is a fact only recently acknowledged in exhibitions and accompanying scholarship.

I wanted to know more about Thomas McKeller, and I felt that our visitors would too. Who was this man? How long did he work with Sargent? On other projects too? Did he know Isabella Stewart Gardner? And what became of McKeller after both died? Every time I visited the Museum of Fine Arts murals and gazed at the MFA’s magnificent sketches for them displayed on the walls beneath Sargent’s rotunda, I was reminded of how much we did not know.

Over the next two years, I discovered how difficult it is to piece together from the archives a life simply lived. Thomas McKeller (1890–1962), a Black elevator operator, WWI veteran, and artist’s model, bore witness to some of the most brutal events in America’s history. As a child, he experienced a massacre of the Black citizens of his hometown Wilmington, N.C., and the subsequent introduction of Jim Crow segregation laws and never lived to see their abolition. As a teenager he joined the Great Migration, arriving in Boston and finding employment at the Hotel Vendome, where a chance encounter brought him face-to-face with painter John Singer Sargent (1856–1925).

McKeller subsequently became Sargent’s principal model in this country. Two murals—at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Harvard University—as well as drawings and a full-length nude painting memorialize nearly a decade of work in the artist’s studio, where Sargent transformed McKeller into deities, allegories and soldiers, and from individualized to classicizing, male to female, and black to white.

Our 2022 collaboration includes a performance of the current 20-minute

a discussion with the opera’s creative team lead

and a post-show reception generously sponsored by

invest in the expansion of this new work—with the evening-length production

Nathaniel Silver is the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of Collections, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, Mass.

version of the opera, a presentation by Dr. Nathaniel Silver,

by DMMO Scholar-In-Residence Dr. Naomi André,

Fredrikson & Byron on Wednesday, July 20. DMMO is excited to

debuting as a part of our 2024 season.

The CREATORS

MARK CAMPBELL (Librettist, A Thousand Acres) is a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy Award-winning librettist/lyricist who is at the forefront of the contemporary opera scene in this country. Mark has written 40 opera librettos, lyrics for 7 musicals and text for 7 song cycles and 4 oratorios. His works include Silent Night, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, As One, The Shining, Elizabeth Cree, Sanctuary Road, Stonewall, Later the Same Evening, The Nefarious, Immoral but Highly Profitable Enterprise of Mr. Burke & Mr. Hare, Volpone, Rappahannock County, The Manchurian Candidate, Volpone, Bastianello/Lucrezia, Frida Kahlo and the Bravest Girl in the World, The Secret River, and Songs from an Unmade Bed. Other awards include: the first Kleban Foundation Award for Lyricist, two Richard Rodgers Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, three Drama Desk nominations, a Jonathan Larson Foundation Award, a NYFA Playwriting Fellowship, and the first Dominic J. Pelliciotti Award.

Campbell is involved in the training of future generations of librettists and composers and serves as mentor with the American Opera Project and American Lyric Theater. In 2020 he also created and funded the first award for librettists in the history of opera: the annual Campbell Opera Librettist Prize. He also recently co-created the True Voice Award to help with the training of transgender opera singers. Upcoming premieres include: Edward Tulane (Minnesota Opera), A Sweet Silence in Cremona (Center for Contemporary Opera/Villa la Pietra–Continuum Theater, Florence), Supermax (Long Beach Opera), A Nation of Others (Oratorio Society of New York at Carnegie Hall), A Year to the Day (The Violin Channel), Irena (Poznań Teatr Muzyczny) and Émigré (Shanghai Symphony Orchestra).

DAMIEN GETER (Composer, American Apollo) infuses classical music with various styles from the Black diaspora to create music that furthers the cause for social justice. In 2022 Geter has six premieres. His large work, An African American Requiem, premiered in Spring 2022 in partnership with Resonance Ensemble and the Oregon Symphony with subsequent performances at the Kennedy Center. I Said What I Said for Imani Winds, co-commissioned by Anima Mundi Productions, Chamber Music Northwest, and The Oregon Bach Festival, will premiere in 2022 as well, in addition to his one-act opera Holy Ground for Glimmerglass Opera in July 2022. Also premiering in July 2022, is his piece Elegy for American Guild of Organists, his piece The Bronze Legacy for Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the chamber version of American Apollo for Des Moines Metro Opera. Future commissions include premieres at Seattle Opera and Emmanuel Music and World Premiere full operatic productions in 2024, 2025, and 2026 at Des Moines Metro Opera, Seattle Opera, Virginia Opera, InSeries Opera and Portland Opera.

Also an operatic bass-baritone, Geter made his Metropolitan Opera debut in the Grammy award-winning production of Porgy and Bess as the Undertaker. This season Geter will sing the title role of Quamino in the world premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s Quamino’s Map with Chicago Opera Theatre, Angelotti in Tosca with Portland Opera, Sam in Reno Symphony’s Voices of a Nation: Trouble in Tahiti, William Still in Sanctuary Road with the Oakland Symphony, and the bass soloist in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony for the Richmond Symphony. Future engagements include Archibald Craven in The Secret Garden with Hawaii Opera Theatre and a Holiday Favorites concert with Symphony Tacoma.

KRISTIN KUSTER (Composer, A Thousand Acres) “writes commandingly for the orchestra,” and her music “has an invitingly tart edge” (The New York Times). Her colorfully enthralling, lush and visceral compositions take inspiration from architectural space, the weather and mythology. Based in Ann Arbor, Kuster is an associate professor and chair of composition at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre and Dance.

Recently she received an OPERA America Discovery Grant for female composers, made possible through The Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Upcoming and recent premieres of Kristin’s music include works for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the United States Air Force Heritage Brass Ensemble, Philadelphia-based Network for New Music, the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra and the Lisbon Summerfest Chamber Choir. Her music has received support from such organizations as the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Sons of Norway, American Composers Orchestra, League of American Orchestras, New Music USA, American Opera Projects, the Jerome Foundation, and the Jack L. Adams Foundation.

LILA PALMER (Librettist, American Apollo) is a librettist whose warmth, clarity and stylistic flexibility have made her a favored partner of established and emerging composers alike. Upcoming performances in 2022 include the pandemic-rescheduled In Her Own Valley with Grace Mason (Liverpool Philharmonic); Holy Ground with Damien Geter for Glimmerglass Opera and the live performance premiere of the short chamber American Apollo for Des Moines Metro Opera. Palmer’s song cycle for soprano Golda Schultz, This Be Her Verse, hailed as “a new repertoire staple” (Opera News), is out on Alpha Classics and touring Europe. Palmer will attend the 2022 Aix-En-Provence Women’s Opera Lab. Future works coming in 2023 and 2024 include her children’s opera with Clarice Assad, The Selfish Giant (Opera Saratoga); Shell Shaker with Jerod Impichchaachaaha Tate; Splintered, a choose-your-own-adventure Nutcracker fantasia with Jorge Sosa and Justine Chen and the extended-commission full-length American Apollo.

Palmer is an alumna of ALT’s CLDP, where she is Associate Director for Partnerships and Promotions following a year as Interim Managing Director. As well as supporting Artist Development at ALT, she serves as Artist Leader/ Dramaturgy Mentor in new works development for Boston Opera Collaborative and Loose Tea Music Theater, Canada.

NATHANIEL SILVER (Curator and Guest Lecturer, American Apollo) is the William and Lia Poorvu Division Head and Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where he oversees the Collections, Conservation, and Archives departments. He has organized many exhibitions including most recently, Titian: Women, Myth and Power, a collaboration between the Gardner, the Museo del Prado and the National Gallery, London. Silver holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art and has received awards for his work from various institutions.

JANE SMILEY (Author, A Thousand Acres) is an American novelist known for her lyrical works that center on families in pastoral settings. Smiley studied literature at Vassar College (B.A., 1971) and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1975; M.F.A., 1976; Ph.D., 1978). From 1981 to 1996 she was a professor of English at Iowa State University. She subsequently turned to writing full-time.

Her first novel, Barn Blind (1980), focuses on the relationships between a mother and her children. Duplicate Keys, a mystery novel, appeared in 1984. The Greenlanders (1988) is a sweeping epic centered on a 14th-century family, the Gunnarssons. A Thousand Acres (1991; film 1997), which won a Pulitzer Prize, is Smiley’s best-known novel. Modeled on William Shakespeare’s King Lear, it focuses on the Cook family and farm life in Iowa in the 1980s. Smiley’s subsequent novels included Moo (1995), a satire of academia; Horse Heaven (2000), about horse racing; Ten Days in the Hills (2007), a reworking of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron set in Hollywood; and Private Life (2010), which examines a woman’s marriage and interior life. Some Luck (2014), which covers 33 years in the history of the Langdons, a farming family, was the first entry in a trilogy. Early Warning and Golden Age (both 2015), the second and third volumes, were similarly expansive narratives about subsequent generations of the Langdon clan. In 2020 Smiley published the lighthearted Perestroika in Paris, about a racehorse that wanders the French city, making a number of animal friends. She also wrote The Georges and the Jewels (2009), a young adult novel.

Among Smiley’s nonfiction works are a biography of Charles Dickens (2002) and A Year at the Races (2004), a memoir of her experiences as a racehorse owner. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005) is a highly personal study of the form and function of the novel. Smiley was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. In 2006 she won the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature.

The ARTISTS

KATE ASHTON

Designer, West Orange, NJ

Lighting Design, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Wozzeck, 2019

RECENT

Hometown to the World, Santa Fe Opera

The Turn of the Screw, The Juilliard School

The Tales of Hoffmann, Aspen Music Festival

UPCOMING

Dedication, Edinburgh Fringe Festival Fall for Dance, New York City Center

SPONSOR

Barbara Brown

VALÉRIE THÉRÈSE BART

Designer, New York, NY

Costume Design, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Fidelio, Heartbeat Opera

It's Christmas, Carol!, Oregon Shakespeare Festival

Annie Get Your Gun, Bay Street Theater

UPCOMING

Poor Yella Rednecks, Manhattan Theatre Club

Twelfth Night, Kansas City Repertory Theater Into the Woods, Guthrie Theater

SPONSOR

Janice Walter

PATRICK BLACKWELL

Bass-Baritone, Los Angeles, CA

Undertaker, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

Amahl and the Night Visitors, 2013

RECENT

Carmen, San Diego Opera

The Ghosts of Versailles, Los Angeles Opera

La Bohème Los Angeles Opera

UPCOMING

Antony and Cleopatra, San Francisco Opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Los Angeles Opera

Carmina Burana, The Dallas Symphony

SPONSOR

Steve Marquardt

ELIZABETH ASKREN

Conductor, Paris, France

Conductor, A Midsummer Night's Dream DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Pearl Fishers, The Dallas Opera Hart Institute for Women Conductors The Elixir of Love, Lyric Opera of Chicago

UPCOMING

The Secret Garden, Hawaii Opera Theatre

The Turn of the Screw, Opera Dijon Così fan tutte, The Dallas Opera

SPONSORS

Roger Brooks and Sunnie Richer

JUSTIN AUSTIN

Baritone, Stuttgart, Germany

Thomas McKeller, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Hamlet, The Metropolitan Opera

Fire Shut Up In My Bones, Lyric Opera of Chicago Intimate Apparel, Lincoln Center Theater

UPCOMING

Peter Grimes, The Metropolitan Opera

Nielsen Symphony No. 3, The Cleveland Orchestra

St. Matthew Passion, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

SPONSORS

Charlotte and Fred Hubbell

LIAM BECK-O'SULLIVAN

Actor, Minneapolis, MN

Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Music Man, Chanhassen Dinner Theater Albert Herring, Minnesota Opera

The Barber of Seville, Minnesota Opera

SPONSORS

Susan E. and Carl B. Voss

ISAIAH BELL

Tenor, Victoria, BC, Canada

Lysander, A Midsummer Night's Dream DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Barber of Seville, Vancouver Opera Curlew River, Mark Morris Dance Group Hadrian, Canadian Opera Company

UPCOMING

La beauté du monde, L’Opéra de Montréal Elijah, Oratorio Society of New York

The Book of My Shames, Pacific Opera Victoria SPONSORS

Mary K. and Daniel M. Kelly

MATT BOEHLER

Bass, Minneapolis, MN

Peter Quince, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT Orpheus in the Underworld, 2000

RECENT

Fidelio, Austin Opera

Rigoletto, Florida Grand Opera

Fat Pig (composer), Victory Hall Opera

UPCOMING

The Lord of Cries, Odyssey Opera

The Marriage of Figaro, Madison Opera

SPONSORS

Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton

JOSHUA BORTHS

Director, Richmond, VA

Preview Lecturer

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT A Little Night Music, 2017

RECENT

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?, Virginia Opera Rusalka: The Littlest Mermaid, OPERA Iowa Hansel & Gretel vs the Witch, Opera Columbus

SPONSORS

Joshua and Susie Kimelman

LUCIA BRADFORD

Mezzo-Soprano, Brooklyn, NY

Maria Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Elijah, Oratorio Society of New York

Bach Mass in B Minor, The Voices of Ascension Mozart Requiem, Baltimore Choral Arts Society

UPCOMING

Handel Messiah, National Philharmonic SPONSORS Dr. Louis and Lois Fingerman

ERRIN DUANE BROOKS

Tenor, Detroit, MI Robbins, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Das Lied von der Erde, Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra

Lucia di Lammermoor, The Metropolitan Opera Intimate Apparel, Lincoln Center Theater

UPCOMING

Ariadne auf Naxos, Lakes Area Music Festival Ariadne auf Naxos, Vashon Opera Idomeneo, The Metropolitan Opera SPONSOR Schiller Family Foundation

R. KEITH BRUMLEY

Designer, Kansas City, MO

Scenic Design, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT Die Fledermaus, 1989

RECENT

Tosca, Lyric Opera of Kansas City

Carmen, Opera Colorado Flight, Utah Opera

UPCOMING Carmen, Lyric Opera of Kansas City

SPONSORS Carleton and Barbara Zacheis

SUSANNE BURGESS

Soprano, Atlanta, GA Helena, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT Apprentice Artist Program 2017

RECENT

The Pirates of Penzance, The Atlanta Opera Rigoletto, Bohème Opera NJ

La Bohème, New York City Opera

UPCOMING Rigoletto, Medea, The Metropolitan Opera Don Giovanni, The Atlanta Opera

SPONSORS

Paul Meginnis, II and Jo Sloan

TAYLOR BURKHARDT

Pianist and Coach, Jefferson City, MO Chorus Pianist, Porgy and Bess, A Midsummer Night's Dream Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Finding Wright, Dayton Opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Lyric Opera of Kansas City Amahl and the Night Visitors, Lyric Opera of Kansas City

SPONSORS

Roger and Deb Hatteberg

LUKE CANTARELLA

Designer, Brooklyn, NY

Scenic and Projection Design, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Hometown to the World, Santa Fe Opera

Woody Sez, Merrimack Repertory Theatre

South Pacific, Goodspeed Musicals

UPCOMING Fun Home, TheaterWorks

SPONSORS

Tom and Marsha Mann

JACOB A. CLIMER

Designer, New York, NY

Scenic and Costume Design, A Midsummer Night's Dream DMMO DEBUT

The Abduction from the Seraglio, 2015

RECENT

Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Olney Theatre

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Austin Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, The Atlanta Opera First Down, Noor Theatre

UPCOMING

GARY, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Utah Opera, Calgary Opera

SPONSORS

Ellen and Jim Hubbell

JANINE MORITA COLLETTI

Director, Fair Lawn, NJ

Assistant Director, A Thousand Acres Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT AAP Director, 2016

RECENT

Flight, The Dallas Opera Speed Dating Tonight, Arizona State University

The Impresario, Tempe Center for the Arts

SPONSOR Susan B. Moore

RICHARD CORDOVA

Conductor, Pianist, Coach, New York, NY

Associate Conductor, Diction Coach, Detective, Porgy and Bess

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT Music Staff, 1988

RECENT

Semele, St. Petersburg Opera

Owen Wingrave, Little Opera Theatre of New York

Dinorah, Amore Opera

SPONSORS

Bernie and Linda White

LYNNESHA CRUMP

Soprano, Washington, D.C.

Strawberry Woman, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Emancipation, Harris Theater

The 42 Project, University of Utah Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Lyric Opera of Chicago, The Metropolian Opera

SPONSOR

Andrew Thomas

MARY DUNLEAVY

Soprano, Montvale, NJ

Isabella Stewart Gardner, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Solo Recital, Union Avenue Opera Dinner at Eight, Wexford Festival

The Exterminating Angel, The Metropolitan Opera SPONSORS

Andrew and Dr. Katherine Hauser, M.D.

KEVIN DEAS

Bass-Baritone, Trenton, NJ Porgy, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Shining, Opera Colorado Porgy and Bess, New York Philharmonic St. Matthew Passion, Portland Symphony Orchestra

UPCOMING Bach Mass in B Minor, Boston Baroque Verdi Requiem, Winter Park Bach Festival

SPONSORS Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur

BLAKE DENSON

Baritone, Paducah, KY

Jake, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Romeo and Juliet, Houston Grand Opera

Dialogues of the Carmelites, Houston Grand Opera Carmen, Houston Grand Opera

UPCOMING

Carmen, Hamburg State Opera

The Girl of the Golden West, Bayerische Staatsoper La Bohème, Washington National Opera

SPONSOR

Ruan Foundation

KELLEN M. EASON

Designer, Portland, OR Makeup and Hair Design, Porgy and Bess, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Agrippina, Florida Grand Opera Attila, Sarasota Opera Tosca, Sarasota Opera

SPONSOR Rusty Hubbell Family Fund

JACQUELINE ECHOLS

Soprano, Maryland Clara, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Cinderella, The Metropolitan Opera Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera MLK Celebration, The Cleveland Orchestra

UPCOMING Morris and Friends, Cincinnati Opera Omar, Los Angeles Opera

SPONSORS

Stan and Mary Seidler/The Seidler Foundation

ALEXANDER BIRCH ELLIOTT

Baritone, St. George, UT

Demetrius, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT Apprentice Artist, 2011

RECENT

Eugene Onegin, Opera Omaha

La Bohème, The Metropolitan Opera

The Queen of Spades, Des Moines Metro Opera UPCOMING

Lucia di Lammermoor, Los Angeles Opera Mozart Mass in C Minor, Pittsburgh Symphony

SPONSOR

Frank R. Brownell III

KEVIN FITZGERALD

Conductor, Brighton, MI

Conductor, Stars of Tomorrow

2nd Associate Conductor, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Handel Messiah, Alabama Symphony Orchestra

2021 Tanglewood Conducting Fellow

Cover Conductor, New York Philharmonic

UPCOMING

Associate Conductor, Jacksonville Symphony Guest Conductor, Rochester Philharmonic

Messiaen Des canyons aux étoiles..., The Chamber Orchestra of Pittsburgh

SPONSORS

Bob and Ardene Downing

NORMAN GARRETT

Baritone, Philadelphia, PA

Crown, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT Flight, 2018

RECENT

The Marriage of Figaro, Seattle Opera

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, The Metropolitan Opera Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera

UPCOMING Omar, Los Angeles Opera Factotum, Lyric Opera of Chicago Treemonisha, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis

SPONSORS

Phil and Judy Watson

SARA GARTLAND

Soprano, St. Paul, MN Rose, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Regina, 2008

RECENT

Beethoven Mass in C, Jacksonville Symphony Hansel and Gretel, San Diego Opera Rusalka, Canadian Opera Company

UPCOMING

Pagliacci, Opera San Antonio Die tote Stadt, Opera Colorado

SPONSORS Nix and Virginia Lauridsen, Lauridsen Family Foundation

THOMAS

GLENN

Tenor, Smithfield, UT

John Singer Sargent, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Manon, Opera Idaho

Hadrian, Canadian Opera Company

Louis Riel, Canadian Opera Company, Festival d’Opéra de Québec

UPCOMING

Messiah, Regina Symphony Orchestra

SPONSORS

Ann and Brent Michelson

TAMARA GURA

Mezzo-Soprano, Gran Canaria, Spain

Hermia, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oper Frankfurt

Giulio Cesare, Semperoper Dresden

L’italiana in Algeri, Theater Heilbronn

UPCOMING

Die Fledermaus, New National Theater Tokyo

Verdi Requiem, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

SPONSORS

Mary Stuart and David Yepsen

TESSA HARTLE

Pianist and Coach, Pittsburgh, PA

Musical Preparation, Porgy and Bess Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT Music Staff, 2012

RECENT

The Pearl Fishers, Sarasota Opera Il Postino, Virginia Opera

The Grapes of Wrath, Detroit Opera

SPONSORS

Jeanine and Bob Carithers

LISA HASSON

Chorus Director, Pianist, Coach, Fort Thomas, KY Irene Graether Chorus Director and Director of the Apprentice Artist Program

DMMO DEBUT

La Cenerentola, Ariadne auf Naxos, 2004

RECENT Opera Coach, University of Cincinnati-CCM Sandford Studio Artist Director and Chorus Master, Kentucky Opera

The Elixir of Love, Dayton Opera

SPONSOR

John Graether in memory of Irene Graether

LEAH HAWKINS

Soprano, Philadelphia, PA

Serena, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Adriana Lecouvreur, Baltimore Concert Opera

Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera

7 Deaths of Maria Callas, Opéra national de Paris

UPCOMING

Rusalka, Pittsburgh Opera

Ariadne auf Naxos, Arizona Opera

La Bohème, The Metropolitan Opera

SPONSORS

Alan J. Savada and Will Stevenson

ROLAND HAWKINS II

Tenor, Minneapolis, MN

Peter, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

Supplemental Chorus, 2005

RECENT

Hands on A Hard Body, Minneapolis Musical Theatre Opulence, Minnesota Opera

The Limit of the Sun, Nautilus Music-Theater

UPCOMING

The Magic Flute, Mixed Precipitation Opera

SPONSOR

Trudy Holman Hurd

WILLIAM HOBBS

Conductor, Pianist, Coach, Weehawken, NJ

Associate Conductor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT The Queen of Spades, 2021

RECENT The Marriage of Figaro, Montclair State University

Face to Face: Piano Music of Christos Hatzis and Sorabji, Winter 2022 release Il Trovatore, Randsman Artists Management

SPONSOR

The Petrie/White Higher Education and Performing Arts Fund

JOHN HOLIDAY

Countertenor, Rosenberg, TX

Oberon, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT Flight, 2018

RECENT

Eurydice, The Metropolitan Opera Flight, The Dallas Opera Agrippina, Bayerische Staatsoper

UPCOMING

Idaspe, Quantum Theatre

The Hours, The Metropolitan Opera Proximity, Lyric Opera of Chicago

SPONSORS

Linda and Thomas K. Koehn

ROGER HONEYWELL

Tenor, Stratford, Ontario

Larry, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Peter Grimes, 2013

RECENT

Follies, Koerner Hall Toronto

The Phantom of the Opera, Opera on the Avalon Boris Godunov, The Royal Opera

UPCOMING

Gould’s Wall, RCM/Koerner Hall

The Shining, Lyric Opera of Kansas City

SPONSORS

Nancy and Bill Main

KRISTOPHER IRMITER

Bass-Baritone, Clemson, SC

Harold, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

The Girl of the Golden West, 2015

RECENT

Susannah, Manitoba Opera

Don Pasquale, Teatro Carlo Felice

The Cunning Little Vixen, Opera at USC

SPONSOR

Diane Morain

MICHAEL KUHN

Tenor, Crofton, MD

Francis Flute, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Sweeney Todd, Opera Omaha

Gianni Schicchi, On Site Opera

The Abduction from the Seraglio, Opera Omaha

UPCOMING

The Marriage of Figaro, Opera Omaha

SPONSORS

Carol and Eric Weber

KIMILLE HOWARD

Director, Queens, NY

Director, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Quamino’s Map, Chicago Opera Theater Highway 1, USA, Indiana University Opera

UPCOMING

B.R.O.K.E.N. Code B.I.R.D. Switching, Berkshire Theater Group

The Passion of Mary Cardwell Dawson, Washington National Opera Honey and Leon, Theatre Row

SPONSORS

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey

MICHAEL ELLIS INGRAM

Conductor, Schwerin, Germany Conductor, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Andrea Chénier, Haydn Creation, Anyone Can Whistle, Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater Schwerin

UPCOMING Carmen, Portland Opera Sleeping Beauty, Compagnie Illicite Bayonne Aïda, Barclays Arena Hamburg

SPONSORS

Mollie and Britt Baker

MICHELLE JOHNSON

Soprano, Houston, TX Bess, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Aïda, Opera Carolina Tosca, Opera Columbus Cavalleria Rusticana, Boston Lyric Opera

UPCOMING

Turandot, Opera Southwest Aïda, Opera Grand Rapids La Bohème, Nashville Opera

SPONSORS

Barbara and Michael Gartner

GRACE KAHL

Soprano, Queens, NY

Caroline, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

A Little Night Music, 2017

RECENT

A Little Night Music, Arizona Opera

Finding Wright, Dayton Opera Fellow Travelers, Des Moines Metro Opera

UPCOMING Expressions, Dayton Philharmonic The Magic Flute, Arizona Opera

SPONSORS

Marla Lacey and Steve Znerold

DONALD LEE III

Conductor, Pianist, Coach, Chicago, IL

Associate Conductor, American Apollo 2nd Associate Conductor, Porgy and Bess

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Magic Victrola, Lyric Opera of Chicago Night Trip, Opera NexGen

SPONSORS

William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton

ISAAC MARTIN LERNER

Choreographer, Director, New York, NY

Assistant Director, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

Orphée et Eurydice, 2016

RECENT

Dancer, The Bang Group and Kizuna Dance

Platée, Des Moines Metro Opera

UPCOMING

Big Love, Western Connecticut University

Creator and Dancer, Kizuna Dance

SPONSORS

Wes Hunsberger and Mark Holub

ELDEN LITTLE

Pianist and Coach, East Lansing, MI

Musical Preparation, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

The Rake's Progress, Rigoletto, 2006

RECENT

Bon Appétit!, Des Moines Metro Opera

Sweeney Todd, Des Moines Metro Opera

Albert Herring, Michigan State University

UPCOMING

La Finta Giardiniera, Michigan State University

SPONSORS

Dana Quick-Naig and Scott Naig

SYDNEY MANCASOLA

Soprano, Redding, CA Tytania, A Midsummer Night's Dream DMMO DEBUT Le Comte Ory, 2014

RECENT

Orpheus in the Underworld, Komische Oper Berlin

The Elixir of Love, Opéra national de Paris Così fan tutte, Luzern Oper

UPCOMING

The Magic Flute, The Metropolitan Opera Pelléas et Mélisande, Los Angeles Opera Breaking the Waves, Opéra Comique, Paris

SPONSORS

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey

KRISTINE MCINTYRE

Director, Portland, OR Stage Director, A Thousand Acres DMMO DEBUT La Bohème, 2011

RECENT

Flight, The Dallas Opera

Rising Stars in Concert Lyric Opera of Chicago Flight, Utah Opera

UPCOMING

Rusalka, Pittsburgh Opera Don Giovanni, The Atlanta Opera

SPONSORS

Chérie and Bob Shreck Adrienne McFarland and Joe Clamon

JOHN MOORE

Baritone, Milford, IA Jess, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Madama Butterfly, 2004

RECENT

La Bohème, Seattle Opera

The Marriage of Figaro, New Zealand Opera Shining Brow, Arizona Opera

UPCOMING

The Barber of Seville, New Orleans Opera

A Thousand Splendid Suns, Seattle Opera

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Utah Opera

SPONSOR

Doris Salsbury Endowment Fund

DAVID MURAKAMI

Designer, Los Angeles, CA Video/Projections Design, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Opera in the Outfield, Minnesota Opera

Das Rheingold, Minnesota Opera (3D remaster)

The Elixir of Love, University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz

UPCOMING Ainadamar, L’Opéra de Montréal

SPONSORS

Craig and Susan Porter

HARRY NADAL

Designer, San Juan, Puerto Rico Costume Design, Porgy and Bess, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Seven Guitars, Arena Stage Freedom Ride, Chicago Opera Theater

The Folks at Home, Baltimore Center Stage

UPCOMING

The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, ZACH Theatre

SPONSORS Stanley Ransom

DAVID NEELY

Conductor, Hyattsville, MD

The Marshall and Judy Flapan Music Director and Principal Conductor, A Thousand Acres, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT The Crucible, Falstaff, 2003

RECENT Tiefland, Sarasota Opera West Side Story, The Atlanta Opera Florencia en el Amazonas, Indiana University

UPCOMING

Ainadamar, Indiana University

SPONSOR

Marshall Flapan

YASUKO OURA

Pianist and Coach, Chicago, IL

Musical Preparation, A Thousand Acres

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT Der Freischütz, Tosca, 2009

RECENT

Fire Shut Up In My Bones, Lyric Opera of Chicago

Becoming Santa Claus, Chicago Opera Theater

The Elixir of Love, Lyric Opera of Chicago

UPCOMING

King Roger, Chicago Opera Theater

Carmen, Lyric Opera of Chicago

Albert Herring, Chicago Opera Theater

SPONSORS

Dr. Stephen and Martha Stephenson

CINDY C. OXBERRY

Director, New York City, NY

Assistant Director, Porgy and Bess

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Blue, Pittsburgh Opera

Così fan tutte, Washington National Opera

Queen of the People’s Hearts, Angela Knight Music Productions

UPCOMING

Judische Kulturbund Project, Documentary: Shared Stories East African Girls Christmas in your town, 10 City National Tour Blue, Washington National Opera

SPONSORS

Bob and Betsy Freese

KEITH PHARES

Baritone, Manalapan, NJ Ty, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Three Decembers, 2014

RECENT

King of the River, American Modern Ensemble

A Little Night Music, Arizona Opera

The Copper Queen (film), Arizona Opera

UPCOMING

The Life and Love of Joe Coogan (recording)

The Merry Widow, Toledo Opera

SPONSORS

Roger and Kay Berger

CHAS RADER-SHIEBER

Director, St. Louis, MO

Stage Director, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

DMMO DEBUT

The Abduction from the Seraglio, 2015

RECENT

Dangerous Liaisons, Curtis Institute of Music

Platée, Des Moines Metro Opera

Shining Brow, Arizona Opera

UPCOMING

L’Orfeo, OrpheusPDX

Die Tote Stadt, Opera Colorado

SPONSOR

Easter Family Fund

KIMBERLY ROBERTS

Voice Teacher, Knoxville, TN

Resident Voice Teacher

Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

La Rondine, 1997

RECENT

Assistant Professor in Voice, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

SPONSORS

Peter and Rita Reed

RON PIRETTI

Fight Director, New York City, NY Fight Director, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Seven Guitars, Arena Stage Fight Director, Actors Studio Drama School Acting Teacher, The Barrow Group

SPONSORS

Michael and Ann Gersie

ELISE QUAGLIATA

Mezzo-Soprano, Miami, FL

Ginny, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT The Tales of Hoffmann, 2005

RECENT

Dead Man Walking, Opera Idaho

Flight, Utah Opera

Carmen, Pensacola Opera

UPCOMING

Edward Tulane, Minnesota Opera

40th Anniversary Gala, Pensacola Opera

The Daughter of the Regiment, Utah Opera

SPONSORS

Christine Lauridsen Sand and Rob Sand

BRITTANY V.A. RAPPISE

Designer, Pensacola, FL

Makeup and Hair Design, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Magic Flute, Pensacola Opera

The Barber of Seville, Opera Delaware Così fan tutte, Curtis Institute of Music

UPCOMING

Carmen, Brevard Music Center

The Barber of Seville, Amarillo Opera La Bohème, Pensacola Opera

SPONSOR

Dr. Beth Triebel

JERMAINE SMITH

Tenor, Saint Louis, MO

Sportin’ Life, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Gianni Schicchi, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera

Porgy and Bess, The Atlanta Opera

UPCOMING

Gospel Mass, Carnegie Hall

SPONSOR

Patty and Jim Cownie Charitable Fund

BARNABY REA

Bass, Frankfurt, Germany

Nick Bottom, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oper Frankfurt

Die Odyssee, Opernhaus Zürich

Peter Grimes, Teatro Real Madrid

UPCOMING

Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Oper Frankfurt

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opéra de Rouen Normandie Wozzeck, The Royal Opera

SPONSORS

Kate and Tom Carey

CALVIN STARA

Designer, Elkhorn, NE

Scenic Designer, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

Stage Crew Intern, 2015

RECENT

WNBA Draft, 11th St Workshop

New Golden Age, 11th St Workshop

Thom Browne Fashion Show, 11th St Workshop

SPONSORS

Deb Wiley and John Schmidt

TAYLOR STAYTON

Tenor, Sidney, OH

Pete, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT Don Pasquale, 2011

RECENT

The Barber of Seville, The Atlanta Opera Messiah, Pacific Symphony Platée, Des Moines Metro Opera

UPCOMING

Mozart Requiem, Grand Rapids Symphony

SPONSOR Dr. Darren R. Jirsa

COREY TRAHAN

Tenor, Fort Worth, TX

Snout, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT Apprentice Artist Program, 2003

RECENT

H.M.S. Pinafore, Pensacola Opera Candide, Des Moines Metro Opera

The Polar Express, Louisiana Delta Ballet

SPONSOR Jo Ghrist

BRIDGET S. WILLIAMS

Designer, Chicago, IL

Lighting Design, American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

Lighting Supervisor, 2019

RECENT

Candide, Depaul Opera Theatre

Knuffle Bunny, Young People’s Theatre of Chicago

Il Tabarro, Opera Festival of Chicago

UPCOMING Peabody, Young People’s Theatre of Chicago

SPONSORS

Carrie Clogg and Josh Barlage

MATTHEW STRAW

Conductor, Pianist, Coach, Rochester, NY Associate Conductor, A Thousand Acres Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Assistant Conductor, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien Assistant Conductor, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra

2022 Solti Foundation US Career Assistance Award Winner

SPONSORS

Randy and Thang Holt

TAZEWELL THOMPSON

Director, Harlem, New York City, NY Stage Director, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Blue, Seattle Opera, Pittsburgh Opera

UPCOMING

Blue, Toledo Opera, Dutch National Opera, Washington National Opera Liberation, New York Philharmonic Jubilee, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Virginia Rep.

SPONSOR

Daniel J. and Ann L. Krumm Charitable Trust

NATHAN TROUP

Director, Selinsgrove, PA Apprentice Artist Program Staff

DMMO DEBUT Directing Staff, 2014

RECENT

Wozzeck, Boston Symphony Orchestra Così fan tutte, Boston University Albert Herring, Boston Conservatory

UPCOMING John Williams 90th Birthday Celebration, Tanglewood SPONSOR Pat Brown

ROBERT WIERZEL

Designer, New York City, NY Lighting Design, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Carmen, Minnesota Opera Rigoletto, Boston Lyric Opera

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, The Atlanta Opera

UPCOMING Carmen, Portland Opera Blue, Dutch National Opera

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Utah Opera

SPONSORS

Denise and John Wieland

WEI WU

Bass, Beijing, China

Snug, A Midsummer Night's Dream Marv Carson, A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

Rigoletto, Opera Philadelphia

The Magic Flute, Washington National Opera

The Tales of Hoffmann, NCPA Beijing

UPCOMING

Tosca, Los Angeles Opera

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Calgary Opera

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Utah Opera

SPONSORS

John and Peggy Wild

CONNIE YUN

Designer, Seattle, WA

Lighting Design, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT

The Marriage of Figaro, Seattle Opera

Madama Butterfly, Hawaii Opera Theatre

The Elixir of Love, Palm Beach Opera

UPCOMING

L’Orfeo, OrpheusPDX

The Fall of The House of Usher, OrpheusPDX

The 39 Steps, Merrimack Repertory Theatre

SPONSORS

Tony Braida and Mark Babcock

The FESTIVAL STAFF

PRODUCTION

Director of Production

BEARCLAW HART

Assistant Production Manager

BRIDGET ANDERSON

Production Team Assistant MICHELLE SILVA

COSTUME Costume Director

BLAINE SHEPHERD

Costume Shop Manager

JESSICA RIDGON

Assistant Costume Shop Manager

CAIT DURRANCE

Wardrobe Supervisor

ALEXANDRA BELL

Stitcher/Dressers

SABRINA FULLHART

DEIRDRE GRAHAM

WILLIAM SWEENEY

LIGHTING

Lighting Supervisor

BRIDGET S. WILLIAMS

Head Electrician

SAMMY JELINEK

Assistant Head Electrician

MACK WOODS

Lighting Programmer

GRAHAM BEATTY

EVAN PURCELL

Electricians

DAVID FITZPATRICK GABRIELLE HENRY

PAINT

Charge Artist

CARA SPENCER

Assistant Charge Artist GABRIELA AHUMADA

PROPS

Head of Props

JAMES B. WARREN

Assistant Head of Props

RORY BROWNELL

Props Stage Supervisor

MICHAEL GAULT

Props Artisan/Run Crew

GWENDOLYN RYGG

SHOP

Assistant Scenic Designer

CALVIN STARA

Technical Director

NATALIE HINING

Assistant Technical Director: Shop JEFFREY CLARK

Assistant Shop Supervisor RACHEL VAN NAMEN Head Carpenter/ Shop Foreman NICHOLAS MAYHUGH Carpenter JESSE DYLAN CURVIN

SOUND Sound Supervisor

JOSEPH REYNOLDS Sound Engineer SJ KNOX

STAGE MANAGEMENT

Production Stage Manager

BRIAN AUGUST

Stage Managers

MEG EDWARDS

FRANCESCA MACBETH

LAUREN WICKETT

Assistant Stage Managers

CARMEN CATHERINE ALFARO

OLIVIA DARLING

BETH GOODILL JACK RUFFER

STAGE/SHOW OPERATIONS

Assistant Technical Director: Stage Ops

CHRISTOPHER CULVER

Assistant Technical Director: Show Crew

MOOSE FINGER

Assistant Stage Supervisor

BRANDON HEARRELL

Fly Chief

CHRISTIAN HAKE

Stage Carpenter

AMBER N. HAHN

PATRICK HEARN

JARET PAYNTER

CARTER VOORDE

VIDEO Video Supervisor

JOSEPH REYNOLDS

Video Engineer

EMILY BERKHEIMER

Video Programmer

GRACE KROEGER

WIGS AND MAKEUP

Shop Supervisor

JAMES OGLE

Wig and Makeup Artisan

MATTISON DROBNEY

ANSLEY HUGHES

EMILY SANTIAGO

CHORUS

SUPPLEMENTAL CHORUS FOR PORGY AND BESS

Soprano

PAULE ABOITE LYNNESHA CRUMP MAKEDA D. HAMPTON MARGUERITE JONES Mezzo-Soprano

JIHANNA CHARLTON-DAVIS CHANTELLE GRANT

Tenor DARELL HAYNES MAURIO HINES TIMOTHY D. PARROTT CHARLES WILLIAMSON

Baritone/Bass

BRIAN L. FENDERSON ROCKY EUGENIO SELLERS VINCE WALLACE

CHILDREN’S CHORUS FOR A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM BENJAMIN BJORKLUND

MICAH BROERS

HATTIE GREEN CALLEN KLEENE ALEX MILLER LUCY MILLER EVAN MOYER XAVIER MUIR

The FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA

VIOLIN Concertmaster

ELIOT HEATON Ann Arbor, MI

Assistant Concertmaster LIJIA PHANG Milwaukee, WI

Principal Second ELLEN ENSEY Tucson, AZ

ZULFIYA BASHIROVA Boca Raton, FL JOHN HELMICH Urbandale, IA

CHIA-LI HO Boise, ID

JUAN C. JARAMILLO B. Pittsburgh, PA SHENGNAN LI Milwaukee, WI

BRAM MARGOLES Birmingham, AL MAGGIE NIEKAMP Cincinnati, OH

ALEXANDER NORRIS North Liberty, IA

YURI POPOWYCZ Detroit, MI

CAROLINE SLACK Chicago, IL SHANSHAN ZENG Beaverton, OR

VIOLA Principal

ELIZABETH OKA Silver Spring, MD CHARLES MIRANDA Des Moines, IA CHRISTINE PRINCE Victoria, BC, CAN KURT TSENG Fuquay-Varina, NC

CELLO Principal KEVIN KUNKEL Portland, OR SETH BIAGINI Beaverton, OR HILARY GLEN Bloomington, IN SCHUYLER SLACK North Chesterfield, VA

BASS Principal JEREMY C. BAGUYOS Omaha, NE JOHN TUCK Evanston, IL

PICCOLO Principal LUKE FITZPATRICK Fort Wayne, IN SONJA GILES Ames, IA

FLUTE Principal LUKE FITZPATRICK Fort Wayne, IN SONJA GILES Ames, IA KIMBERLY HELTON Des Moines, IA

OBOE Principal

EDUARDO SEPULVEDA Syracuse, NY JENNIFER BLOOMBERG Des Moines, IA

ENGLISH HORN Principal

EDUARDO SEPULVEDA Syracuse, NY JENNIFER BLOOMBERG Des Moines, IA

CLARINET Principal

NATALIE HOE St. Petersburg, FL RANDALL CUNNINGHAM Liberty, MO E-CHEN HSU Thunder Bay, ON, CAN JAMES ROMAIN Des Moines, IA

BASS CLARINET RANDALL CUNNINGHAM Liberty, MO

ALTO SAXOPHONE MICHAEL GILES Ames, IA JAMES ROMAIN Des Moines, IA

TENOR SAXOPHONE BEN CARLSON Ames, IA

BASSOON Principal KRISTY TUCKER Winnipeg, MB, CAN MATT LANO Richmond, VA

HORN Principal ERIN LANO Richmond, VA MICHAEL DALY Savannah, GA JENNA MCBRIDE-HARRIS West St. Paul, MN JACOB WHITE Tiffin, IA

TRUMPET Principal SAMUEL HUSS Richmond, VA DONALD CREECH Greensboro, NC KEVIN TAGUE Cape Girardeau, MO

TROMBONE Principal TIMOTHY HOWE Columbia, MO BENJAMIN HAHN Iowa City, IA

BASS TROMBONE CALEB LAMBERT Iowa City, IA

TUBA Principal MICHAEL SHORT Des Moines, IA

VIOLIN SEATING IS BASED UPON A ROTATION CYCLE FOR MAINSTAGE SHOWS.

TIMPANI Principal ANDREW NOWAK Alexandria, VA

PERCUSSION Principal MARK DORR West Des Moines, IA ALINA GRIMM Des Moines, IA CHRISTOPHER LARSON Portland, OR HANNAH WEAVER Omaha, NE

HARP Principal NUIKO WADDEN Pittsburgh, PA TABITHA STEINER Overland Park, KS

BANJO SETH HEDQUIST Des Moines, IA

KEYBOARD TESSA HARTLE Detroit, MI ELDEN LITTLE East Lansing, MI YASUKO OURA Chicago, IL

ORCHESTRA PERSONNEL AND OPERATIONS MANAGER MARK DORR West Des Moines, IA

MUSIC LIBRARIAN CYNTHIA STACY Bloomington, IN ORCHESTRA INTERN PHINEAS POPE St. Paul, MN

Described by Opera News as “a ninja warrior with a baton” for his performance of Berg’s Wozzeck with DMMO, David Neely maintains an active career in concert, opera, and higher education. Previously serving on the conducting faculty of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, he is currently Director of Orchestras at the University of Maryland School of Music.

As Music Director and Principal Conductor of Des Moines Metro Opera, a post he has held since 2012, Neely continues to elevate the company’s musical profile with acclaimed performances of a wide range of repertoire such as Queen of Spades, Billy Budd, Manon, Turandot, Jenůfa, Falstaff, Elektra, Peter Grimes, Dead Man Walking, Macbeth, Don Giovanni, The Girl of the Golden West, Rusalka and Flight His performances have been praised in publications such as Opera News, Opera Today and the Chicago Tribune

Neely is equally at home in concert, opera, musical theater and ballet settings. He has appeared as conductor with numerous orchestras, including the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Portland Symphony Orchestra, Bochumer Symphoniker, Dortmunder Philharmoniker, and the Symphonieorchester Vorarlberg. He has led productions with Atlanta Opera,

Sarasota Opera, Bonn Opera, Halle Opera, Dortmund Opera, Saarland State Opera, St. Gallen Opera, and the Eutiner Festspiele, among others. He was Associate Music Director of Chicago for the Munich and Basel runs of the current Broadway production. Recent highlights include Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 at the University of Maryland and The Opposable Thumb for the American Lyric Theater in New York. Upcoming highlights include Golijov’s Ainadamar at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music.

Neely has led many premieres, including the German premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie, the North American premiere of David Dzubay’s SIJO for orchestra, Robert Orledge’s reconstruction of Debussy’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and world premieres of Arthur Gottschalk’s Four New Brothers, Billy Childs’ Concerto for Horn and Strings, Alexandre Rydin’s Clarinet Concerto, and Maria Newman’s Our Rights and Nothing Less with Carmen Balthrop as narrator. He was part of the mentorship team for Washington National Opera’s 2020-21 American Opera Initiative that culminated in a recorded performance of Damien Geter and Lila Palmer’s American Apollo at the Kennedy Center. He serves as a guest master teacher for WNO’s Cafritz Young Artist Program.

DAVID NEELY

The Marshall and Judy Flapan Music Director and Principal Conductor

The Frank R. Brownell III APPRENTICE ARTISTS

BRANDON BELL

ENSEMBLE ARTIST

Baritone, Suffolk, VA Jim, Jake (cover), Porgy and Bess Thomas McKeller (cover), American Apollo

RECENT Beethoven 9th Symphony, Cape Symphony Another City, Houston Grand Opera La Traviata, Fort Worth Opera

SPONSOR

Catherine Erickson

MICHAEL PANDOLFO

ENSEMBLE ARTIST

Baritone, Fort Worth, TX

Robin Starveling, Demetrius (cover), A Midsummer Night’s Dream DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Magic Flute, The Glimmerglass Festival Fellow Travelers, Florida Grand Opera Rigoletto, Florida Grand Opera

SPONSORS

Alan J. Savada and Will Stevenson

DAVID MORGANS SANCHEZ

ENSEMBLE ARTIST

Tenor, Kansas City, MO Mingo, Sportin’ Life (cover), Porgy and Bess

RECENT Intimate Apparel, Lincoln Center Theater La Bohème, Florentine Opera Fire Shut Up In My Bones, The Metropolitan Opera

SPONSOR

James Luke

DIMERY ALEXIS

Soprano, Mitchellville, MD

Bess (cover), Porgy and Bess DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Elijah, The Florence Choral Arts Society Porgy and Bess, The Metropolitan Opera Turandot, Gateway Classical Music

SPONSOR Anastasia Polydoran

ANTHONY D. ANDERSON

Baritone, Washington, D.C. Jim (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Puppy Episode, Opera Columbus

Emperor Norton, Oberlin College

Conservatory of Music Così fan tutte, Oberlin College

Conservatory of Music

SPONSOR John Robert Wise

ALYSSA BARNES

MARIA DIPALMA ARTIST

Soprano, Houston, TX

Clara (cover), Porgy and Bess

RECENT The Magic Flute, Des Moines Metro Opera

Rusalka: The Littlest Mermaid, OPERA Iowa

Carmen, Houston Grand Opera

SPONSOR DT Doan

GEORGIA BELMONT

Soprano, New York, NY

Cobweb & Peaseblossom (covers), A Midsummer Night's Dream

Isabella Stewart Gardner (cover), American Apollo

RECENT L’enfant et les sortilèges, Agrippina, Rice University Finalist, Houston Saengerbund Competition

SPONSOR Henry G. and Norma A. Peterson Charitable Trust

NAOMI BRIGELL

Mezzo-Soprano, Chicago, IL

Mustardseed, A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Eugene Onegin, Opera in the Heights

Don Quichotte at Camacho's Wedding, Opera Saratoga Ghost Variations, Thompson Street Opera Company

SPONSORS

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris

LAUREN CARROLL

Soprano, Bettendorf, IA

Helena (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Così fan tutte, Drake University Falstaff, Drake University

The Magic Flute, International Lyric Academy

SPONSORS

Thomas G. and Rita Fisher

THADDEUS ENNEN

Baritone, Buffalo Center, IA

Coroner, Porgy and Bess

Jess (cover), A Thousand Acres

RECENT Orson Rehearsed, Turner-Fischer Opera Center Così fan tutte, Turner-Fischer Opera Center

Lucrezia, Opéra Louisiane

SPONSOR Michael Patterson

VÉRONIQUE FILLOUX

Soprano, Redwood City, CA Peaseblossom, Tytania (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Carmen, Pittsburgh Opera Semele, Pittsburgh Opera Così fan tutte, Pittsburgh Opera

SPONSOR Muriel A. Pemble

SYDNEY FRODSHAM

Mezzo-Soprano, Montreal, Quebec

Hippolyta, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Le flambeau de la nuit (world premiere), Opéra de Montréal

The Magic Flute, Opéra de Montréal

The Marriage of Figaro, Opéra de Montréal

SPONSORS Alvin and Sue Ravenscroft

ROBERT GEROLD

Tenor, Portland, ME

Snout (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

Larry (cover), A Thousand Acres

RECENT The Magic Flute, Des Moines Metro Opera

Rusalka: The Littlest Mermaid, OPERA Iowa Il signor Bruschino, Sarasota Opera

SPONSORS Jerilee M. Mace and T.J. Johnsrud

DARIUS A. GILLARD

Tenor, Anderson, SC

Nelson & Crab Man (covers), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Stinney: An American Execution, Opera Grand Rapids Blue, Toledo Opera

The Summer King, Detroit Opera

SPONSOR Jeff Chelesvig

VIVIANA AURELIA GOODWIN

Soprano, Tulsa, OK

Strawberry Woman (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Così fan tutte

Oklahoma City University

Little Women, Oklahoma City University Master Class, Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma

SPONSORS

Elizabeth and Jared Carter

GEDEANE GRAHAM

Mezzo-Soprano, Bay Springs, MS

Annie, Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Albert Herring, Michigan State University

A Hand of Bridge, Michigan State University

Artsong Colorado Voices of the African-American Diaspora

SPONSORS

Jon Duvick and Carol Hendrick

SANKARA HAROUNA

Baritone, Chicago, IL

Nelson, Crown (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Pirates of Penzance, Atlanta Opera Holiday Celebration soloist, Kentucky Opera

The Barber of Seville, Cincinnati Opera

SPONSOR Paul Woodard

TANYA HARRIS

Soprano, Salinas, CA

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT L'amant anonyme, University of Cincinnati-CCM

La Rondine, University of Cincinnati-CCM

Vierne's Messe Solennelle, University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music

SPONSOR Barbara Beatty

MIYA HIGASHIYAMA

Mezzo-Soprano, Seattle, WA

Moth, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT If I Were You, Northwestern Opera Theater

Così fan tutte, Northwestern Opera Theater

Die Fledermaus, Northwestern Opera Theater

SPONSORS

Jason and Emily Pontius

MATTHEW HRDLICKA

Baritone, West Des Moines, IA

Robin Starveling (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Don Giovanni, Rice University

Lesbo, Rice University

The Clock/Black Cat, Rice University

SPONSORS

Dr. Louis and Lois Fingerman

The Frank R. Brownell III APPRENTICE ARTISTS

DENIQUE ISAAC

Soprano, Baltimore, MD

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Into the Woods, Annapolis Opera

The Medium, Baltimore Concert Opera Street Scene, Young Artists of America

SPONSORS

Dennis and Betty Keeney

GEORGIA JACOBSON

Mezzo-Soprano, Duluth, MN

Hermia (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT The Hours, Philadelphia Orchestra

The Marriage of Figaro, University of Cincinnati-CCM

Fellow Travelers

Des Moines Metro Opera

SPONSOR Rosalie Gallagher

SHANNON KEEGAN

ANNE LARSON ARTIST

Mezzo-Soprano, Naperville, IL

Ginny (cover), A Thousand Acres

RECENT The Marriage of Figaro, Staatsoper Stuttgart

Don Giovanni, Staatsoper Stuttgart

The Magic Flute, Des Moines Metro Opera

SPONSOR Liz Garst

NICHOLAS KELLIHER

Countertenor, Baldwin, NY

Oberon (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Hours, Cincinnati Opera Fusion: New Works

Robeson Opera, Cincinnati Opera Fusion: New Works

Galileo Galilei, University of Cincinnati-CCM

SPONSORS Martha James and Michael Myszewski

RYAN LUSTGARTEN

Tenor, Kirkland, WA

Francis Flute (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream, John Singer Sargent (cover), American Apollo

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Così fan tutte, Boston University Opera Institute Rigoletto, Shreveport Opera Garden of Alice, City Lyric Opera

SPONSORS

Stephen and Margaret Blake

SAM MATHIS

Tenor, Spartanburg, SC

Lysander (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

Pete (cover), A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT La Bohème, Opera North, Indiana University Gianni Schicchi, Indiana University

SPONSORS

Kirk Brown and Lori DiPrete Brown

ELARY MEDE

NICOLE TROUT ARTIST

Soprano, Chambersburg, PA

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Three From the Hearth, MSU Opera Theatre

Don Giovanni, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Sweeney Todd, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

SPONSORS

Patricia Barry and Bryan Hall

IMARA MILES

MOLLIE SHAPIRO ARTIST

Mezzo-Soprano, Bowie, MD

Lily, Maria (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Second Nature, Opera Fayetteville

The Barber of Seville, Pensacola Opera

The Magic Flute, Pensacola Opera

SPONSORS

Jane and Steve Bahls

JONATHAN PATTON

Baritone, Durango, CO

Policeman, Porgy and Bess

Ty (cover), A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Rape of Lucretia, University of North Texas

The Elixir of Love, University of North Texas Gianni Schicchi, Festival Napa Valley

SPONSORS

Ed and Elizabeth Mansfield

ISABEL RANDALL

Mezzo-Soprano, Rota, Spain

Annie (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT After Life, Longy School of Music of Bard College

Alcina, Longy School of Music of Bard College

The Lives They Lived, Boston Opera Collaborative SPONSORS

Steve and Erna Morain

NAMAREA RANDOLPH-YOSEA

Tenor, Tacoma, WA

Mingo (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Magic Flute, Pacific Lutheran University

The Merry Widow, Vashon Opera Albert Herring, University of Houston Moores School of Music

SPONSORS

Thomas Urban Jr & Mary B Urban Foundation

KAILEIGH RIESS

Soprano, Foxborough, MA

Mustardseed & Moth (covers), A Midsummer Night's Dream Caroline (cover), A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Mansfield Park, Boston University Opera Institute

Lys Symonette Award Winner

The Rake's Progress, Boston University

SPONSORS

William and Pauline Niebur

OLIVIA ROMINIYI

Soprano, Woodbine, MD

Serena (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Ọmọ Àgbẹtó d’Olórin, James Madison University Opera Theatre

Madama Butterfly, Kennedy Center, Asian American Music Society Oh, Freedom!, Virginia Opera

SPONSOR Mary Lou Detwiler in memory of Thomas Detwiler

EMMA ROTHFIELD

Soprano, Chicago, IL

Cobweb, A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Proving Up, Lyric Opera of Chicago Sweeney Todd, Des Moines Metro Opera Dog Days, Northwestern University Opera Theater

SPONSOR Barbara Jackman

DEMETRIOUS SAMPSON, JR.

Tenor, Atlanta, GA

Crab Man, Robbins (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Bastianello, Georgia State University Opera Theater

SPONSORS Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran

JEREMIAH SANDERS

Baritone, Minneapolis, MN

Undertaker (cover), Porgy and Bess Harold (cover), A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Highway 1, USA, Falstaff, Indiana University Opera Theater Three Decembers, South Bend Lyric Opera

SPONSOR John Graether

Baritone, Des Moines, IA

Detective, Policeman & Coroner (covers), Porgy and Bess

Snug the Joiner (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream Jimmy (cover), American Apollo

RECENT The Magic Flute, Des Moines Metro Opera Fellow Travelers, Platée, Des Moines Metro Opera

SPONSOR Ann Garton

ALEXIS SEMINARIO

Soprano, Levittown, NY

Rose (cover), A Thousand Acres DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Medium, Bard College Conservatory Brahms Requiem, Fisher Center A Midsummer Night's Dream, Chautauqua Institution

SPONSOR Betty Augspurger

JAIME SHARP

Mezzo-Soprano, Orlando, FL

Lily (cover) Porgy and Bess Hippolyta (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT The Dialogues of the Carmelites, Opera MODO Galileo Galilei, University of Cincinnati Bulrusher, Cincinnati Opera

SPONSOR Roswell and Elizabeth Garst Foundation

JOSHUA THOMAS

Bass-Baritone, Houston, TX Marv Carson (cover), A Thousand Acres

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Bruckner Te Deum, Plymouth Oratorio Society Rise for Freedom, University of Michigan Amahl and the Night Visitors, Opéra Louisiane

SPONSORS Robert and Sandra Tatge

ALAN WILLIAMS

Bass-Baritone, San Bernardino, CA

Lawyer Frazier (cover), Porgy and Bess Theseus, A Midsummer Night's Dream

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Rise for Freedom, University of Michigan Detroit Players Club Opera Event, Detroit Opera

Harry T. Burleigh Symposium, Oxford Lieder Festival

SPONSOR Margot Burnham

RYAN WOLFE

Baritone, Arlington Heights, IL Peter Quince (cover), A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Galileo Galilei, University of Cincinnati-CCM

The Magic Flute, Des Moines Metro Opera The Marriage of Figaro, University of Cincinnati-CCM

SPONSOR Julia Hagen

ARTEGA WRIGHT

Bass-Baritone, Dallas, TX

Porgy (cover), Porgy and Bess

DMMO DEBUT

RECENT Quamino’s Map, Chicago Opera Theater Vanqui, Opera Columbus Amahl and the Night Visitors, MIOpera

SPONSOR Babette C. Brenton

JASON ZACHER

Bass-Baritone, Livingston, NJ

Jimmy, American Apollo

Theseus & Nick Bottom (covers), A Midsummer Night's Dream

RECENT Eugene Onegin, Opera in the Heights

Laßt uns sorgen, laßt uns wachen, Ars Lyrica Houston

Platée, Des Moines Metro Opera

SPONSORS Melanie Porter and Wayne Halbur

KELLEN SCHRIMPER

The INTERNSHIP PROGRAMS

Though DMMO's productions have received national recognition and been viewed all over the world during the 2020 Virtual Festival, the operas seen on stage reveal only a fraction of what goes on throughout the summer season. From the design process to the transformation of the stage from one night to the next, from the selling of tickets to the stories told through DMMO’s marketing channels, the company takes pride in the people who work behind the scenes, and the internship programs are an extension of that philosophy.

This season 38 interns selected from over 100 applications are be given valuable career training and professional opportunities. The design and production department offers internships in stage management, production management, stage operations, scenic painting, properties, lighting, sound, video, shop, wig and make-up, and costumes. The curriculum also includes portfolio showcases, talkbacks and sessions with visiting directors and designers to complement time spent gaining hands-on experience.

DMMO has yet again expanded their administrative internships, tailoring them for students interested in careers in digital media and marketing, company management and guest services. Interns are given opportunities to build their resumes, learn professional etiquette, create and edit marketing and public relations materials, enhance customer service skills, understand basic bookkeeping and finance, and even maintain health and safety protocols.

Whether it’s designing, building, running or marketing an opera, Des Moines Metro Opera prides itself on its multiple educational opportunities and professional experiences for the Administrative, Design and Production Internship programs.

DESIGN AND PRODUCTION

Production Management Intern

EDDIE DEAN PARKER II

Stage Management Interns

KAYLIN STORY

ASH STRANGE

Stage Operations Interns

HAL BENSON

EMILY HANSON

JOHN MALLEY

DAWSON MCDONALD

ERIN MICHAUD

JUSTICE ORRAND

TYLER SALOW

ANNA WEHRMANN

MICAH ZIMMERMAN

MILES ZOELLICK

Painting Interns

KORYNA LAROCQUE

HAYLEY E. WALLENFELDT

Properties Interns

EMILY ARVIDSON

JACOB LAUFENBERG

ANDREJ NAWOJ

Lighting Interns

SOPHIE SMYCZEK

GABE WHITNACK

Shop Intern

ISABELLE WITHERS

Sound Intern

HARRY HEINRICH

Video Intern

LILI FEDERICO

Costume Interns

KJERSTIN ANDERSON

CORISSA GAVIN

AVA GREER

WESLEY MARTINEZ

Wig and Makeup Interns

TAYLOR G. RICHARDSON

SAM RICKARD

ADMINISTRATIVE

Company Management Intern

JUSTIN E. BELL

Digital Media and Marketing Intern

ROGER PAVEY JR.

Guest Services Interns

MELANIE MCCOY

ABIGAIL SHERMAN

Business and Finance Assistant

NATE STONE

Orchestra Management Intern

PHINEAS POPE

Front of House Interns

OLIVIA BAXTER

SHEA LUENINGHOENER

SEAN WHITSON

In MEMORIAM

ANNA

PHYLLIS CORE

SONJA CRAIN

THOMAS DETWILER

BETTY EHLERT

WILLIAM (BILL)

DOROTHY ELY

JAMES ERICKSON Past President of the Board

CHUCK FARR Past President of the Board

CARLISLE FLOYD

HOWARD GARTON

DAVID GRADWOHL

WENDELL HARMS

HOMER HAUKE

CORA HAYES

LARRY HEDLIN

CAROLE HOROWITZ Guild Member

PLATO KARAYANIS

CHUCK KERR

THEODORE LAMBRINOS

SHIRLEY LEEPER Guild Member

DR. DIANA LEE LUCKER

DUDLEY LUCKETT

MARIAN YEAGER LUKE

NELSON MCGHEE Apprentice Artist

MARCO PANUCCIO Apprentice Artist

MARY PAPPAJOHN

JAMES PULLEN

GERALD RANDELMAN

LOIS ROETS

BURT ROUTMAN Board Member

JOHN RUAN III

MICHAEL J. RUPPERT

SIGIRD THILL Guild Member

CHARLENE VER STEEG

ROBERT WATTS Guild Member

RICHARD WILLIAMS Music Staff

LINNEA YOUNG

BRUCE BODDEN Orchestra Musician

FRED BROWN Guild Member

AND CHRIS CHRISTOFFERSON Guild Members

ELLIOTT Guild Member

Guild Member

Guild Member

Principal Artist

The ENCORE SOCIETY

Members of the Encore Society help secure Des Moines Metro Opera’s commitment to artistic excellence, innovative programming, and fiscal stability by making provisions for DMMO in their estate plans or by establishing life income arrangements naming the company as a beneficiary. Thanks to their support, the quality you experience today will be enjoyed by future generations.

By informing us of your bequest, beneficiary designation or other planned gift, you will be included as a member of this important group of friends. To learn more about planned gift opportunities or to make an arrangement to speak with Tim McMillin, Director of Advancement, call (515) 200-5385.

EXAMPLES OF PLANNED GIFTS INCLUDE:

• Making a bequest to Des Metro Opera Foundation (EIN 42-1376458) in a will or trust

• Naming Des Moines Metro Opera Foundation as a beneficiary of an IRA or other retirement plan

• Naming Des Moines Metro Opera Foundation as the beneficiary of a life insurance policy

• Investing in a Charitable Gift Annuity to benefit Des Moines Metro Opera and generate tax-free income for you during your lifetime

• Naming Des Moines Metro Opera Foundation as the beneficiary of a Charitable Remainder Trust

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris Anonymous (10)

Barbara Brown

Frank R. Brownell III

Jim and Patty Cownie

Randall Daut and Patricia Ryan

Ellen and Jim Diehl

Michael Egel

Julia Hagen

Lawrence and Carolyn Hejtmanek

Annette Isaacson

Darren R. Jirsa, D.D.S. Mary Keithahn

Tom and Marsha Mann

Marian W. Sharp Trust

Middleton Family

Susan B. Moore

Margaret R. Penney and Tory J. (TJ) Lea Stanley Ransom

Lois F. Roets

Arnold Samuel

John Schmidt and Deb Wiley

Chérie and Bob Shreck

Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur Glenn Sowder

Chris and Denise Vernon David G. Wright and Krenio Wright

Des Moines Metro Opera is grateful to members of the Encore Society, who have demonstrated legacy commitment to the company.

EVENT SPONSORS

2ND STAGES SERIES

Magic Flute Presenting Sponsor Nix and Virginia Lauridsen/ Lauridsen Family Foundation

American Apollo Presenting Sponsor

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey

Premier Sponsors Polk County Prairie Meadows

Director Sponsors Krause Group Voya

Reception Sponsor Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.

Partner Sponsor D.T. Doan

Additional Support Elizabeth and Jared Carter Julia Hagen Ann and Brent Michelson Karen and Gordon Shinn Dr. Stephen and Martha Stephenson

EDUCATION DIVISION

OPERA Iowa Presenting Sponsor The Coons Foundation

OPERA Iowa Premier Sponsors Bravo

Fred Maytag Family Foundation

The Gabus Family Foundation Iowa Arts Council

Daniel J. and Ann L. Krumm Charitable Trust National Endowment for the Arts Principal Foundation

OPERA Iowa Director Sponsors

American Equity Investment Life Insurance Company

Babette C. Brenton in memory of C. Robert Brenton EMC Insurance Companies

The Vredenberg Foundation

OPERA Iowa Partner Sponsors

Merchants Bonding Company

MidAmerican Energy Foundation Henry G. and Norma A. Peterson Charitable Trust

Additional Support Casey's General Store

OPERA Iowa Performance Sponsors

Larry Ladd and Shirley Hanson Linn-Mar School Foundation Janice Walter

WINE, FOOD & BEER SHOWCASE

Presenting Sponsor TruBank

Reserve Experience Sponsor Elder Corporation

Director Sponsors

Homesteaders Life Company John and Peggy Wild/ Iles Funeral Homes

Partner Sponsor Rusty Hubbell

Vendor Sponsors

Iowa ENT Center

GuideOne Insurance

Additional Support Bryan Hall and Pat Barry

In-Kind Donations 801 Chophouse adorn Allspice Americana Amour Mollie and Britt Baker Ballet Des Moines

Belle DuChene Media + Management Bike World Brenton Arboretum Bubba

Elizabeth and Jared Carter

Cedar Rapids Opera The Class Act Climb Iowa Copper + Fringe Cycle Bar

William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton

DeeDee Miller Photography

Des Moines Art Center

Des Moines Music Coalition

Des Moines Playhouse

Des Moines Performing Arts

Des Moines Symphony and Academy Django East Village Spa

Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP Feed & Foster

Fleet Feet Des Moines

Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden

Harbinger Restaurant Heartland Dermatology and Skin Cancer Center

Hilton Des Moines Downtown Hinterland HoQ

IMT Des Moines Marathon

Iowa Culinary Institute

Joe Crimmings Creative Media Katherine McClure Photography

Mary Ellen Kimball

Kitchen Collage Krause Group

La Mie Bakery Nix and Virgina Lauridsen Lauritzen Gardens

The Local Vine

Lula Belle Designs

Lyric Opera of Kansas City Massage Heights

Minneapolis Institute of Art Minnesota Opera Mishmash Eats

Diane Morain

Mr. B Clothing National Balloon Classic

Omaha Symphony Orchestra Iowa

Pageturners Bookstore

Principal Charity Classic Projects Contemporary Furniture Seth Robb and Tim McMillin RoCA

Savor the Rise Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur Chérie and Bob Shreck State Historical Museum of Iowa Jacqueline Thompson Susan and Carl Voss Todd Carroll Woodworking Wakonda Club

John and Peggy Wild/ Iles Funeral Homes WineStyles

GOLDEN GALA

Presenting Sponsor Bankers Trust

Director Sponsor Prairie Meadows

Venue Sponsor Krause Group

Table Sponsors

Frank Brownell

Patty and Jim Cownie Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton

Principal Foundation Chérie and Bob Schreck

Patron Sponsors

Mollie and Britt Baker

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey Patricia Barry and Bryan Hall

Dale J. Jansen

Daniel M. and Mary Kelly Joshua and Susie Kimelman Susan E. and Carl B. Voss Marla Lacey and Steve Znerold

Additional Support

Sandra Bruggemann Ann and Michael Gersie

Jo Ghrist

Melanie Porter and Wayne Halbur John C. and Fay G. Hill

Nancy and Bill Main

La Donna and Rich Matthes

Diane Morain

Roscoe and Cheryl Morton Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran

Harold and Joyce Templeman William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton Denise and John Wieland

ACRES UNEARTHED SERIES is presented in partnership with Humanities Iowa, with additional support from Practical Farmers of Iowa.

SCHOLAR-IN-RESIDENCE SERIES is made possible by a Humanities Project Grant with funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and administered by the Iowa Arts Council and the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs.

ANNUAL FUND

Des Moines Metro Opera is deeply grateful to the long-time contributors and new donors who have made gifts during the 2021-2022 season. Contributions to the company provide the critical support to supplement income generated from ticket sales and program fees. Thank you to all who have helped to make Des Moines Metro Opera the Midwest’s choice destination for exceptional music and professional theatre for 50 years!

IMPRESARIO

$100,000 and above

BRAVO Greater Des Moines

Partner Local Governments: Altoona, Ankeny, Bondurant, Carlisle, Clive, Des Moines, Grimes, Indianola, Johnston, Norwalk, Pleasant Hill, Polk County, Polk City, Urbandale, Waukee, West Des Moines, Windsor Heights Frank R. Brownell III

Des Moines Metro Opera Foundation

Nix and Virginia Lauridsen/ Lauridsen Family Foundation

National Endowment for the Arts Doris Salsbury Endowment Fund

FOUNDER’S CIRCLE

$25,000 - $99,999

The Coons Foundation Des Moines Metro Opera Guild

Gabus Family Foundation

Thomas K. and Linda Koehn

Daniel J. and Ann L. Krumm

Charitable Trust

Christine Lauridsen Sand and Rob Sand

Nancy and Bill Main

Fred Maytag Family Foundation

Principal Foundation

Simpson College

William Randolph Hearst Endowment for Educational Outreach

LEADERS

$15,000 - $24,999

Bankers Trust

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey Roger Brooks and Sunnie Richer Kate and Tom Carey Corteva Agriscience

Patty and Jim Cownie Charitable Fund

Marshall Flapan

Barbara and Michael Gartner Mary K. and Daniel M. Kelly

National Endowment for the Humanities People’s Company

Ruan Foundation

Stan and Mary Seidler/The Seidler Foundation Chérie and Bob Shreck Phil and Judy Watson

Carol and Eric Weber

DIRECTOR’S CIRCLE

$10,000 - $14,999

American Enterprise Group

Roger and Kay Berger

Charlotte and Fred Hubbell Ellen and Jim Hubbell

Rusty Hubbell Family Fund

Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton

Humanities Iowa

City of Indianola Dr. Darren R. Jirsa Tom and Marsha Mann

Steve Marquardt

John Pappajohn

Principal Charity Classic “Birdies for Charity” Program Dr. Craig and Kimberly Shadur Mary Stuart and David Yepsen TruBank Janice Walter

GUARANTOR

$5,000 - $9,999

American Equity Investment Life Insurance Co.

Mollie and Britt Baker

Tony Braida and Mark Babcock Babette C. Brenton

Barbara Brown Margot Burnham

William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton Bob and Ardene Downing Elder Corporation EMC Insurance Companies

Catherine Erickson

Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP Dr. Louis and Lois Fingerman Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.

Jo Ghrist

Roger and Deb Hatteberg Andrew and Dr. Katherine Hauser, M.D. Trudy Holman Hurd Kemin Industries

Chuck Kerr

Susie and Josh Kimelman

Kum & Go

Marla Lacey and Steve Znerold

James Luke

Jerilee M. Mace and T. J. Johnsrud

Ed and Elizabeth Mansfield

Paul J. Meginnis, II and Jo Sloan

Meredith Corporation Foundation

Ann and Brent Michelson

Susan B. Moore Diane Morain

Stanley Ransom Schiller Family Foundation

Alan J. Savada and Will Stevenson Susan E. and Carl B. Voss Voya

The Vredenberg Foundation John and Peggy Wild Paul Woodard Carleton and Barbara Zacheis

BENEFACTOR

$2,500 - $4,999 Betty Augspurger Jane and Steve Bahls

Patricia Barry and Bryan Hall Stephen and Margaret Blake

Sue Rutledge Brenton and J.C. (Buz) Brenton Kirk Brown and Lori DiPrete Brown Pat Brown Jeanine and Bob Carithers

Jeff Chelesvig Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines DT Doan

Jon Duvick and Carol Hendrick Charles Farr

Bob and Betsy Freese Rosalie Gallagher Roswell and Elizabeth Garst Foundation

Liz Garst

Michael and Ann Gersie John Graether

Julia Hagen

Randy and Thang Holt

Homesteaders Life Company

Wes Hunsberger and Mark Holub

Josephs Jewelers

Dennis and Betty Keeney Adrienne McFarland and Joe Clamon

Merchants Bonding Company

MidAmerican Energy Foundation

Steve and Erna Morain

Dana Quick-Naig and Scott Naig William and Pauline Niebur Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran

Michael Patterson Anastasia Polydoran Craig and Susan Porter Melanie Porter and Wayne Halbur

ANNUAL FUND

Ramsey Family Charitable Foundation

Peter and Rita Reed

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Steve and Marina Sandquist

Dr. Stephen and Martha Stephenson

Andrew Thomas

Thomas Urban, Jr. and Mary B. Urban Bernie and Linda White Denise and John Wieland

PATRON

$1,500- $2,499 City of Ames

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris

Barbara Beatty Elizabeth and Jared Carter

Mary Lou Detwiler in memory of Thomas Detwiler

Michael Egel

Wells Fargo

Thomas G. and Rita Fisher

Gabus Automotive Group

Ann Garton

Barbara Jackman

Martha James and Michael Myszewski John A. McTaggart Muriel A. Pemble

Henry G. and Norma A. Peterson Charitable Trust

The Petrie/White Higher Education and Performing Arts Fund

Jason and Emily Pontius Dianne S. Riley

Linnea Sodergren

Robert and Sandra Tatge Thomas D. Turnbull and Darrell Smith Donald Stumbo and Janene Panfil Chris and Denise Vernon John Robert Wise

PRODUCER

$500 - $1,499

Emily and Cory Abbas Steven Adelman and Katherine Elsner Anonymous (2)

Cynthia Baker

Jane Farrell-Beck and Marvin Beck Susan Bennett and Shane Swanson Amy Billingham Michelle Book

Margaret Bradford Allan Bradley and Derrill Pankow

Denise Brown

Gretchen and Jeffrey Brown Nathan and Katherine Brown

Daniel Brown

Daniel Burden and Beth Mack Bob and Judy Camblin Valerie and David Canter

Barbara and Steven Cappaert

Mary Carlsen and Peter Dahlen C. Dean and Sandra Carlson Bruce Carr and Robert Thelen Casey’s General Store

Emily Chafa

Janine Clark

Thomas and Sharon Clarke

Carrie Clogg and Josh Barlage Terri Combs and Thomas Swartwood Jake Coughennower Fred Crane

Drs. Robert and Beverly Croskery Don and Pat Dagenais Paula and Jeffrey Danoff Randall Daut and Patricia Ryan Judy McCoy Davis Kurtis Denison

Des Moines Metro Opera Guild-Ames Chapter

Douglas B. Dorner and Carole Villeneuve Ann Dorr

Dr. and Mrs. Ronald D. Eckoff Karen Engman

William Farlow

Cary Feick John Fisher and Jann Freed Rebecca Foerschler David Friedgood

Wayne Fuller

Charles Garmen

Steve A. Gentile, Jr. Gary and Elizabeth Graeser Jake and Ruth Graves

John Greer

Katrina Guest and Andrew Gangle GuideOne Insurance

Lois and Wendell Harms

Sue Haskell

Dr. Gary and Kamie Haynes

Vicki Hedlin

Dennis P. and Melinda Hendrickson

Elizabeth Hoak

Laura Howe

Iowa ENT Center

Jean M. Isaacson

Dale J. Jansen

Todd and Peggy Janus

Nick and Kiersten Johnson

Jacquelyn M. Kaufman

Mary Keithahn

Patrick Kelly

Richard and Annette Kerr

Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball

Allan Kniep

Kristin and Wayne Knutson

Joanne and David Kolenda Martha Kroese

Dylan Lampe

Phil and Karen Langstraat

Lori Lee M. Larson and Mark M. Belz

The Leman Family Cheryl Flapan Lewis Susan Loomis

Kurt and Rose Bollin Loth

Proctor Lureman and Chad Russell Leslie Mamoorian and Richard Johnson

John R. and Cyril A. Mandelbaum

La Donna and Rich Matthes

Sarah McDougal George and Sandra McJimsey John and Mary Melvin

Meredith Corporation Foundation

Microsoft Matching Gifts Program

Craig and Betty Miller

Peter Mitchelson and Judith Henderson Charles and Tracey Mohns

Roscoe and Cheryl Morton Ted and Carolyn Neely Michael and Ginger O’Keefe Lynsey Oster

Rosemary and Jonathan Parson Tom Press and Donna Paulsen

Dr. Carolyn and Martin Pease

Colin Pennycooke

William Phillips Practical Farmers of Iowa Tamara Jo Prensil and Frank Potter Neva L. Pruess

Marilu and V.V. Raman Alvin and Sue Ravenscroft

Robert G. and Kay J. Riley Jr.

The Jack and Marty Rossmann Charitable Fund

Dr. James Rutherford Neil and Debra Salowitz

Patrice Sayre Ralph and Charlotte Schlenker Charitable Trust Deb Wiley and John Schmidt Alan and Linda Shapiro

Karen and Gordon Shinn Dr. Heidi Shreck and Dr. Brian Shellenberger Ellen and Scott Shumway

Linda and Bruce Simonton

Lily Smith

Joe E. Smith and Robert Steinborn

Hope C. Solomons

Sam Specht

Sandy and James Spencer

Mary Susman and Thomas Herm

Jamie Sutphen Household

Michael Tabor

Dawn Taylor

Theresa Taylor

Diane L. Thiessen

Rebecca Thomas

Jacqueline Thompson

Thrivent Financial

Dr. Beth Triebel

Wellmark Foundation

George Whitman

Marianne Whitman

Gaye Wiekierak

Dr. Trevor and Allison Wild

Connie Wimer

Glady and David Winter

Tom and Kyrie Wong

Dr. Robert H. and Eleanor Zeff The Zoo Bar

SUSTAINER

$250 - $499

Roberta Abraham Bob and Elizabeth Angelici Kim Babberl

Thomas and Jill Barland John M. Barone

Lawrence E. Bechler

Lawrence Beeson Mary Beh

Todd and Karey Bishop

Mark and Deborah Blaedel

Richard Boyum and Louie Chua

Martin and Rochelle Brody

Gregory Burley Brown

Sandra Bruggemann

Donna Carlson

Bill and Nancy Child Richard and Christine Clogg Melody and Jeffrey Clutter

Margaret Dana Ellen and Jim Diehl

Nicholas and Kim Dragelevich

Bennett and Leisa Ely

Lori Fenton

James C. and Martha Fifield

Kathleen A. Finkenauer

Kerry Finley

Nancy Foster

Todd Fraaken

Patrick H. Goeser

Hanna Gradwohl

Marlys A. Graettinger

Scott and Kathy Green

Fran Fleck and Terry Greenley

Klaus and Claudia Grunewald

Pam Guthrie

Joel and Debra Hade

Larry and Marybeth Heikes

Larry and Carolyn Hejtmanek

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Mary Jack

James Leymaster Johnson

Melanie Keiper

Dorothy Knight

Matt and Chari Kruse

Gerald and Dorothea Lalonde

William Larson

Nancy and Hugh Lickiss

Liz Lidgett and Nick Renkoski Diana Lee Lucker

Sharon Marek and Celeste Goodrich

Polly Moore

Arthur Neis Donald Newsom

Lee E. Nickelson, Jr. Barb and Andy Nish Robert Oberbillig

Allen Perriello

James and Rita Pray

Timothy and Rosemary Rahm Daphne and Jaime Reyes

Dolph and Rania Robb James and Cheryl Robb Timothy B. Robinson

Wendy Samuelson

Jane Sanford

Gretchen Sauer

Mark F. and Leila Schlenker Gwen and Jeff Schroder Arlen and Jean Schrum

Kevin Smith and Jeff Mallory Charles and Meg Smith

Siobhan Spain and Jonathan DeLima Paul and Susan Stageberg

Julie Stiller

Emily and Tim Stork Dr. LeRoy I. Strohman Harold and Joyce Templeman Chris Urwin and Matt Huth

Kate Wiley Dolores Willemsen

Susan and Peter Wilson Sumner and Karen Worth Lisa-Marie Wright

FRIEND

$50 - $249

Kim and Patti Abild adorn

deEtt Allen

Sandra and Donald Allgood AmazonSmile

Kerry Anderson

John and Jennifer Andres

Joyce Andrews and Frank Hoffmeister Anonymous (6) Scott Arens

Jerry Artz

Judson and Heidi Barr

Mary Jo Bennett

Gerald W. and Phyllis Benson Gordon and Martha Bivens Donald Adams and Nan Bonfils Linda Ade Brand Donald and Patricia Brandt Paul and Phyllis Breddin Deanne Brill Ted and Elyse Brimeyer Catherine and Gary Broadston Sandi and Bill Bruns

Eric Burmeister and Casey Smith Willis M. and Linda Ann Bywater Connie Carroll Frank Carroll Arden and Jim Carson Earl and Judy Check Hosung and Won Hi Chung Joan Turner Clary Karen and William Claypool Benjamin and Laura Cooper Charitable Fund

Phyllis Core Mary Corsair John Crouch Bryan Crowder Paul Dana Michael Dayton Ethel DiPrete John Dresser Linda Halquist Drucker Stephen and Barbara Duncan Jo Ann and Carolyn Eddy George Ehrenberg Roy and Averyle Ehrle Jamie Burch Elliott Warren and Linda Erickson Peggy Faden Feed & Foster

Peggy Fitch and Ben Allen Lance and Marcy Fortnow Jeff Frasure William and JoAnn Friedman H.B. Fuller Company Foundation T. and Roy Fuller

David and Michele Gabel Elizabeth Gildea Marge Gowdy

Grateful Fund

Jan Grimes

Amelia Groetsch

Robert Guild Barbara and Karl Gwiasda Veronica Haluska Gerald Hammond and Victoria Meade

ANNUAL FUND

Lowell Hanson

Henry Harmon

Suzanne Hartline

Bob Haug and Anne Kimber

Brad and Rae Anne Havig

Beth Henning

Dan Herdeman

Teri Herron

Gladys Hertzberg

Esther and Dan Hoffa

Nikolas Huffman

Mary Elizabeth Ingram

Connie Isaacson

Louise M. Jirsa

Jeff and Julie Johnson Kurt Juhl

Shirlie Katzenberger

Dr. Colin and Sandra Kavanagh

Brent Kelso

Sue and Dan King Bob Klassy

Silvia B. Klein

J.L. Mercer-Klimowski and Kevin Klimowski

Daniel J. Knepper

Mary M. Knosby

Patricia Kobe

Geoffrey and Nancy Kolb

Lori Lane

Alan Lange

Russelle Leggett

Gregory Largent and Anna Leppert-Largent

Janet Leslie

Caroline Levine

Tracy Levine

Doug and Theresa Lewis

Bernice Lindstrom

Jane W. Lohnes

Juanita Lovejoy

David Lynch and Glenys Bittick Lynch

Richard Lynch

Robert and Joan Matheson

Jim and Stacey McCallum

Dugg McDonough

Adele McDowell

Ray McHenry

Harry and Marilyn McIntyre

Murray and Elizabeth McKee

Teresa Hay McMahon

Eunice McMillin

Michael McNeil

Jenny McTaggart

David and Jean Meek

Sheila A. Meginnis

Deb Miller

Larry and Donni Mitchell

Revs. Jack and Rachel Mithelman

Hannah and Carsten Moeller

Robert and Wynette Moore

Elyse D. and Kyle W. Morris

Richard Morrison Household

Marilyn Mueller

Kathleen Murrin

David and Delpha Musgrave Candace Nardini

Network For Good Frank Nowasell

Jay and Cheri Nugent John Goode and Janwin Overstreet-Goode Paul and Linda Palmer Mary and Richard Parrish Mary Jean Paschen Rick and Sandra Penning

Floyd Pentlin

Carole Permar

Michael and Miriam Perriello

Paul Petersen

Gary Peterson

Nancy Pinkerton Chad and Debbie Piper William Pollak

Valorie and Michael Prahl

Lettie Prell and John Domini

Shelly Priebe

Don Priest

Sheryl Prill

Ann Marie Reed Dr. John Reed

Sylvia Richards

Shirley M. Riney

Robert Ringgenberg

Steve and Connie Ringlee

William Robinson

David Rollison

Rotary Club of Fairfield Arnold Samuel Steve and Lisa Sanders

Judith Sandstrom and Peter Kohn Michael and Karen Schoville

Christine Seitz

Sara Sersland

Sheryl Shaughnessey

Martha Jane Sheston

Erin Siebers

Wesley and Cheryl Siebrass Laurie and Nathan Skjerseth Don A. Smith

Eleanor Smith

Sally Sonnenburg

Jill Southworth

Kayla and Jeff Stratton

Diane Streeter

Susan Stroope

Kirk and Denise Stuart Coreen K Sweeney Jean and Paul Swenson

Phyllis Swink and Caesar Smith, Sr. Darrell Taylor

Gary M. Thelen Charles L. Thiesenhusen

Robert Toon

Robert and Karen Unrau Margaret Van Houten Barbara Van Sickle

Gertrude Vanginkel Higgs Bob and Molly Veenstra

Virginia Ver Ploeg

Catherine Vesley

T. Waldmann-Williams Ryan and Elizabeth Waller Skip Walter Liz and Joel Weinstein Marlene Weisshaar M. Eugene and Janet L. Williams

Janie and Jim Wine Marvin and Robbie Winick Margy Wood Richard L. Wood Charles M. Wright Maryann Wycoff David Yurdin and Elaine Lundstrom Ekhard and Wendy Ziegler

MEMORIAL GIFTS

In memory of E. James Bennett Mary Jo Bennett

In memory of C. Robert Brenton Babette C. Brenton

In memory of Woodward G. Brenton Michelle Book

In memory of Fred Brown

Roberta Abraham

Scott Arens

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris Tom and Betty Barton

Jane Farrell-Beck and Marvin Beck Roger and Kay Berger

Sarah Bohlke

Gretchen and Jeffrey Brown Kirk Brown and Lori DiPrete Brown Pat Brown

Ethel DiPrete

Michael Egel

Peggy Faden

Hanna Gradwohl

Marge Gowdy

Dennis P. and Melinda Hendrickson

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Dennis and Betty Keeney

Jane W. Lohnes

David and Jean Meek

Margie Schaefer Moore

Michael Patterson

Alvin and Sue Ravenscroft

Shirley M. Riney

Steve and Connie Ringlee Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Kenneth and Shirley Shaw Julie Stiller

Skip Walter Carol and Eric Weber Marlene Weisshaar Bernie and Linda White

In memory of Anna Christofferson

Ames Unit No. 37 American Legion Auxiliary

In memory of Anna and Chris Christofferson

David Lynch and Glenys Bittick Lynch

Richard Lynch

Jim and Stacey McCallum

David and Jean Meek

Richard Morrison Household Daphne and Jaime Reyes Robert Ringgenberg

In memory of Phyllis Crouch John Crouch

In memory of Thomas Detwiler Mary Lou Detwiler

In memory of Maria DiPalma

Elyse D. and Kyle W. Morris Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

In memory of Doug Duncan

Elyse D. and Kyle W. Morris Harold and Joyce Templeman

In memory of Dorothy Ely

Joanne Andrews

Anonymous

Amy Billingham

Lori Elder-Bisbee and Michael Bisbee

Sue Rutledge Brenton and J.C. (Buz) Brenton

Maximilian Bridgewater Margot Burnham

John E. and Kathryn Campbell Ms. Holly H. Craiger

Stephen and Barbara Duncan

Michael Egel Stephen Ely

Jo Ghrist

Kay Grother

Gerald Hammond and Victoria Meade

Renee Hirsch

Nancy Jo and James W. Hopkins, MD

Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball

Debra and Donald Laster Jeanne and Dick Levitt

Lynzy Loyet

Sharon Marek and Celeste Goodrich

Paul Meginnis, II and Jo Sloan

Diane and Michael Milobar Julie and Clayton Murphy

Robert Oberbillig

Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran Mary Jean Paschen

Michael Patterson

Rebecca and Craig Pepper Jane Petrson

Dr. Mark and Mary Purtle

Anne Marie Reed Dr. John Reed

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Rotary Club of Fairfield

Juanita Scriven

Sheryl Shaughnessey

Brenda Shelburg

Chérie and Bob Shreck

William Staplin

Robert and Susan Thompson

Roger and Mary Kay Wilson Don and Mary Wine

In memory of Dr. Lawrence Ely Stephen Ely

In memory of Marcia Ely Stephen Ely

In memory of Arnold Engman Karen Engman

In memory of Jim Erickson*

Michael Egel Dennis P. and Melinda Hendrickson Nancy and Bill Main Michael Paterson Seth Robb and Tim McMillin Chérie and Bob Shreck

In memory of Charles “Chuck” Farr

Central Iowa Principal Financial Group Retiree Steering Committee

Michael Egel

Michael and Ann Gersie

Bryan Hall and Pat Barry Charlotte and Fred Hubbell Jim and Jeanne O’Halloran Michael Patterson Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

In memory of Marilyn Farr Tracy Levine

In memory of Judy Flapan* Ian Aaron Don and Margo Blumenthal Stephen Hay Margo Myres Susan E. and Carl B. Voss

In memory of Mary Garst Roswell and Elizabeth Garst Foundation

In memory of Howard Garton Ann Garton

Alan and Susan Hattell Margy Wood

In memory of Judy Gaston Nancy and Geoffrey Kolb

In memory of DeEtte Graettinger Robert and Wynette Moore

In memory of Rachel Gildea Elizabeth Gildea

In memory of Robert Guild Sandra Guild

In memory of Muffy Harmon Henry Harmon

In memory of Carole Horowitz Scott Arens

Michael Egel Michael Patterson

In memory of Rejman E. Jirsa Louise M. Jirsa

In memory of Roberta Starry Kerr* Chuck Kerr

In memory of Dr. Robert L. Larsen*

Bruce and Diana Adams

Cynthia Baker Stephen Ely Charles Garmen

Teri Herron

Teresa Hay McMahon

Elyse D. and Kyle W. Morris

Marilyn Mueller

Kimberly Price

The Jack and Marty Rossmann Charitable Fund

Neil and Debra Salowitz

Christine Seitz

Martha Jane Sheston Harold and Joyce Templeman

In memory of Ross and Shirley Leeper Revs. Jack and Rachel Mithelman

In memory of Diana Lee Lucker

Steve A. Gentile, Jr.

Peter Mitchelson and Judith Henderson Steven Ptaszek

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin Diane Streeter

In memory of Marian Luke*

Michael Egel

Kurt Juhl James Luke Michael Patterson

In memory of Bill Marion

Roberta Abraham

Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris

Tom and Betty Barton

Jane Farrell-Beck and Marvin Beck

Joseph Biela

Peggy Faden

Hanna Gradwohl

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Jane W. Lohnes

John B. and Kathryn Miller

Margie Moore

V.V. and Marilu Raman

Alvin and Sue Ravenscroft

Steve and Connie Ringlee Kenneth and Shirley Shaw Jan Tibbetts Carol and Eric Weber

In memory of Donni Nowasell Frank Nowasell

ANNUAL FUND

In memory of the Arno Perels Gerald W. and Phyllis Benson

In memory of Richard Richards Sylvia Richards

In memory of J. R. Rooney Denise Brown

In memory of Judith Shaltanis Rhonda and Michael Smith

In memory of Margaret Stagner M. Eugene and Janet L. Williams

In memory of Patricia Struck Lawrence E. Belcher

In memory of Carol Stuart Kirk and Denise Stuart

In memory of Bill Vernon Chérie and Bob Shreck

In memory of Bill and Marilyn Vernon

William and JoAnn Friedman Connie Wimer Janie and Jim Wine

In memory of Marilyn Vernon Anonymous Don and Margo Blumenthal Willis M. and Linda Ann Bywater Clark and Marilyn Colby Michael Egel James and Martha Fligg

David Fini and Reynolds & Reynolds, Inc.

William and Carolyn Frederick Jo Ghrist

Susan J. Glazer Foundation

Rusty Hubbell Family Fund Krause Gentle Foundation

Jeanne and Dick Levitt

Nancy and Bill Main Dwight and Vicki Moeckly Lisa McMulin Mulbrook

Barbara and Tel Pappajohn John and Mary Pappajohn Michael Patterson Sheryl Prill

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Ruan Foundation

Carol Runger

Chérie and Bob Shreck

Wendy and Joseph Stocker Duane and Dianna Swihart Dawn Taylor David Tribble

In memory of Bob Watts Julia Hagen

HONOR GIFTS

In honor of Dr. Virginia Cook Bennett; Susan Bennett and Shane Swanson; Ed Bennett and Margo Mary Jo Bennett

In honor of Joyce Castle William V. and Patrick M. Madison-McDonald

In honor of Dennis and Melinda Hendrickson Lawrence Beeson

In honor of Tom and Linda Koehn

BRAVO Greater Des Moines

In honor of Diane Morain David and Delpha Musgrave Susan Stroope

In honor of Achilles Avraamides and Dilys Morris Linda Avraamides

In honor of Mary Seidler Rosalie Gallagher

In honor of Craig and Kimberly Shadur Tom Press and Donna Paulsen

In honor of William B. Tomlinson Muriel A. Pemble

In honor of Susan Voss Lois and Wendell Harms Debra Peckumn

In honor of my favorite singers –EM, Isaac, and Theo Deb Miller

Gifts received after 6/12/22 will be acknowledged in next season’s program

2021 SEASON GIFTS

RECEIVED AFTER 6/14/21

$10,000 - $14,999

Principal Charity Classic “Birdies for Charity” Program

$5,000 - $9,999 Dr. Bruce Hughes and Dr. Randall Hamilton Roger and Deb Hatteberg John and Mary Pappajohn

$2,500 - $4,999 Jo Ghrist Christine Lauridsen Sand and Rob Sand

$500 - $1,450

Bruce and Diana Adams City of Ames Virginia Bennett Mary Lou Detwiler in memory of Thomas Detwiler Dr. and Mrs. Ronald D. Eckoff William Farlow Martha Kroese Janet Leslie Candy Morgan

The Petrie/White Higher Education and Performing Arts Fund

Melanie Porter and Wayne Halbur Neil and Debra Salowitz Gary Thor Wedow and Larry Lipnik

$250-499

Linda D. Appelgate Sandra Bruggemann

Linda Carroll Paula and Jeffrey Danoff

Randall Daut and Patricia Ryan Nicholas and Kim Dragelevich David Friedgood

Robert Gordon Mary Gottschalk

Susan Loomis

Richard Maynard and Jan Gaumer Dana Quick-Naig and Scott Naig

Network For Good Jean Parker and Maggie O’Dea Stephen Perlowski Dan Pinault

George Rowbottom Katherine and Wesley White Dolores Willemsen

$50-249

Erick Apland and Kimberly Gooch, M.D. Cynthia Baker

John and Linda Benoit

Margaret Boulware Tessa Brow

Gregory Burley Brown Elizabeth Buschor

Barbara and Steven Cappaert Karen Core Ellen and Jim Diehl

Roy and Averyle Ehrle Marion L. Elmquist Erin Freeberg Kiera Harris

Suzanne Hartline

Renee Hining

Amy Hutchison

Mary Johnson J.P. Kumar

Brett Logsdon

Francis Mariner Patricia and Charles Matteson Janice Mayer

Sarah Nagle David Neely Michael O’Brien

Michael Pezzulo Jane Quail

Tatiana Roganova Michael and Karen Schoville Daniel Seth Jeanie and Bill Smith Susan Stroope Chi Zhang

GIFTS & ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Gifts to support “A Concert for Robert” received after the printing of the 2021 program: $2,000 and above

Nancy and Bill Main Chérie and Bob Shreck

Paul Meginnis, II and Jo Sloan

$1,000 - $1,999

Harry Bookey and Pamela Bass-Bookey Bob and Ardene Downing Jo Ghrist

Rusty Hubbell Family Fund

Daniel M. and Mary Kelly

Nix and Virginia Lauridsen/ Lauridsen Family Foundation

Martha James and Michael Myszewski

Phil and Judy Watson

John and Peggy Wild

$500 - $999 Margaret Dana Michael Egel

Veronica Guyader

Julia Hagen

Seth Robb and Tim McMillin

Thomas F. and Amy N. Worthen

$200- $499

Tara Starr and Bruce Brown Charles Garmen

Cheryl Hinman

Dr. James and Mary Ellen Kimball

Michael Patterson Tim Reuter

Roberta Swartzendruber

William L. Dawe III and Sheila K. Tipton

Up to $199

April and Richard Angotti Nita Ball

Barbara Beatty

Jeff Bertelsen

Nancy Betker

Donald Adams and Nan Bonfils

Richard Bowlsby

Kathy and Ben Brackney

Melinda Brown

Natalie Burnham

Everett Burns Household

Nancy and Wayne Byal

Ann Campbell

Cherie Carl

Sandra and Walter Clark

Avon Crawford

Mary Creswell

Russell and Sue Currier

Danille Curtis

Paul and Maurine Dalluge

John Darlington

Elizabeth Davies

Donna Davilla

Catherine Deutsch

Mihail Dobrinov

Paul Duffy

Rosalie Gedler

John Graether

Roger Grau

Joel and Debra Hade

Esley Hamilton

Larry Ladd and Shirley Hanson

Stephen Hay

Dennis P. and Melinda Hendrickson

John C. and Fay G. Hill

Jean M. Isaacson

Dan Jacobsen

Dale J. Jansen

Linda Kasanders

Joshua and Susie Kimelman

Todd Lieber

Barbara and Bruce Martin

Sue McCaffrey

Terri Mickelson

Peg and Jim Mikulanec

Craig and Betty Miller

Rachel and Jack Mithelman

Barb and Andy Nish

Jay and Cheri Nugent

Laura Oliver

Lynsey Oster

Kimberly Pegg-Zeleznik

Timothy and Rosemary Rahm

Galina Raman

V.V. and Marilu Raman

Kay Reasoner

Sue Richardson Tanya Robinson

Dolly Ruther

Travis and Jennifer Senne

Jeanne Serb

Charles and Meg Smith

Laura and Ben Stansberry

Dick Stoffer

Kayla Stratton

David Stuart Ann Swenson

Katharina Tumpek-Kjellmark

Robert and Karen Unrau Sally Van Dorin Warren Varley

Kathy Veach

Ron Warnet

Patricia Westphal Denise and John Wieland Clark Williams

Des Moines Metro Opera acknowledges with appreciation the individuals and businesses who provided in-kind donations or assisted in meaningful ways during the 2022 season:

Mollie and Britt Baker

Joshua Barlage, Des Moines Symphony Academy

Harry Bookey & Pamela Bass-Bookey Dwana Bradley Alex Brodersen

Jennifer Brown, Grinnell College

Samuel Carroll Elizabeth Carter Joyce Castle

Joyce Coles  Jonathan DeLima, Krause Group Des Moines Art Center

Des Moines Performing Arts

The Des Moines Public Library

DMMO Medical Advisory Panel Dr. Daniel H. Gervich Dr. Craig Shadur Dr. Robert Shreck Dr. Stephen Stephenson Evelyn Schnoor, MSN, RN Ellen Diehl

Sally Dix, Bravo Greater Des Moines

Amy Duncan, Indianola Independent Advocate

Richard Early, Des Moines Symphony

Brian Edwards, Krause Group William Farlow

Jill Featherstone, Des Moines Art Center

Leanne Freeman-Miller, Drake University

Jodi Goble, Iowa State University

Rick Goetz, Theatre Simpson

Chris Goodson, Plymouth Congregational Church

Zach Heitzman, Country Landscapes

Dennis Hendrickson

Joy Hesse, Iowa ENT Center

Daniel Hoy, Metropolitan Opera

Charlotte and Fred Hubbell

Iowa Public Radio, Jacqueline Halbloom

Iowa PBS, Judy Blank

Tiffany Johnson, Pyramid Theatre Company

Gabe Kauffman, Landscape Lighting Bob Kling

Tamme Klutman, Simpson College Music Department

Dylan Lampe

Virginia and Nix Lauridsen

Jacob Lemons, Drake University Fine Arts Center

Kathy Magruder, Pageturners Bookstore

Alice Meyer, Beaverdale Books

Matt Miller, Drake University Events

Charity Nebbe, Talk of Iowa

Kelly D. Norris, Horticulturist Emily Pontius, Fredrikson & Byron Polk County Heritage Gallery Nick Renkoski

Niki Reynolds and staff, Whiterock Conservancy Ben Robinson, Simpson College Buck Ross

Gwen Schroeder, Indianola City Council

Brian Shultes, Simpson College Jane Smiley

Chad Sonka, Iowa State University Molly Spain

Siobhan Spain Nancy St. Clair

Laura Sweet, Des Moines Performing Arts

Vicki Thill

Paxton Williams Shekinah Young

Des Moines Metro Opera PRODUCTION HISTORY

1993 Donizetti Don Pasquale Verdi A Masked Ball Menotti The Saint of Bleecker Street

Bizet Carmen Verdi Rigoletto Blitzstein Regina

Sweeney Todd Moore The Ballad of Baby Doe

The Marriage of Figaro

Puccini La Bohème Verdi Macbeth Mozart Così fan tutte

Mozart Don Giovanni Puccini La Rondine Britten Albert Herring

Puccini Tosca Lehár The Merry Widow Beethoven Fidelio Hoiby Summer and Smoke

Rossini The Barber of Seville Verdi Il Trovatore Weill Street Scene 2000 Bellini Norma Menotti The Consul Offenbach Orpheus in the Underworld

Puccini La Bohème Verdi La Traviata Puccini Il Trittico Barber Vanessa

Puccini Turandot

Salome

Candide

Verdi Falstaff Gounod Faust Ward The Crucible Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors

2004 Puccini Madama Butterfly Rossini La Cenerentola R. Strauss Ariadne auf Naxos

Offenbach The Tales of Hoffmann Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor Britten Gloriana Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors

Mozart The Magic Flute Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress Verdi Rigoletto

Bizet Carmen Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream Verdi Otello

Verdi A Masked Ball Blitzstein Regina Donizetti The Elixir of Love 2009 Puccini Tosca Weber Der Freischütz Rossini The Barber of Seville 2010 Mozart The Marriage of Figaro Verdi Macbeth Floyd Susannah 2011 Puccini La Bohème Donizetti Don Pasquale Poulenc Dialogues of the Carmelites 2012 Mozart Don Giovanni Puccini La Rondine Tchaikovsky Eugene Onegin 2013 Gounod Romeo and Juliet Britten Peter Grimes Strauss Elektra 2014 Verdi La Traviata Heggie Dead Man Walking Rossini Le Comte Ory Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors Bizet/Brook The Tragedy of Carmen

2015 Mozart The Abduction from the Seraglio Puccini The Girl of the Golden West Janáček Jenůfa Heggie Three Decembers Catán Rappaccini’s Daughter 2016 Verdi Falstaff Massenet Manon Gluck Orphée et Eurydice Schubert Winterreise Glass Galileo Galilei 2017 Puccini Turandot Sondheim A Little Night Music Britten Billy Budd Little Soldier Songs Piazzolla/Ferrer María de Buenos Aires 2018 J. Strauss Die Fledermaus Dvořák Rusalka Dove/De Angelis Flight Kaminsky/Campbell/Reed As One Copland The Tender Land 2019 Puccini La Bohème Bernstein Candide Berg Wozzeck Cipullo Glory Denied Hoiby Bon Appétit! 2020 Virtual Season Poulenc La Voix Humaine Massenet Manon Hoiby Bon Appétit! Dvořák Rusalka Britten Billy Budd Rossini Le Comte Ory 2021 Sondheim Sweeney Todd Tchaikovsky The Queen of Spades Rameau Platée The John Holiday Experience Spears/Pierce Fellow Travelers 2022 Mozart The Magic Flute Britten A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess Kuster/Campbell A Thousand Acres Geter/Palmer American Apollo

Program

Des Moines Metro Opera thanks our advertisers, whose support helps us provide this complimentary program for our Summer Festival. For advertising information, call our office at 515-961-6221 or visit dmmo.org/advertising/.

Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell College PAGE 2

Tassel Ridge Winery BACK COVER

American Enterprise 24

American Equity 50

American International Czech and Slovak

Voice Competition 55

Appanoose Rapids 53

Bankers Trust 25

Bravo Greater Des Moines 6

Catch Des Moines 4

Central City Opera 55

Community Foundation of Greater Des Moines 52

Confluence Brewing Company 31

Country Inn and Suites 53

Des Moines Symphony 45

EMC Insurance 26

ETC 8

Faegre, Drinker, Biddle & Reath LLP 50

Fredrikson & Byron, P.A. 51

Gib’s A & W 47

Gong Fu Tea 31

ARTWORK/PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

Group and Event Photos Jen Golay

Mainstage Photos Duane Tinkey

Production Publicity Photos Ben Easter/Kim Dragelevich

Page 15 Luke Behaunek

Page 19 Tim McConnell

Page 32-35 John Schultz Page 38 Mark Davitt

Homesteaders Life Company 49 Hotel Pommier 47

Iles Funeral Homes 29

Indianola Chamber of Commerce 47

Iowa PBS 10

Iowa Public Radio 12 Kemin 51

Krause Group 49

Merchants Bonding 55 MercyOne 29

MidAmerican Energy Company 52 Mr. B Clothing 31

Practical Farmers of Iowa 52 Prairie Meadows 28

Olson-Larsen Galleries 30 Opera Omaha 54

S&P Piano Services 48

Scottish Rite Park 44 Simpson College 46 TruBank 27

Pages 60-61 Study for Aspects of Negro Life: An Idyll of the Deep South by Aaron Douglas, courtesy of the Nelson-Atkin Museum of Art © 2022 Heirs of Aaron Douglas / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Pages 62-63 William Grant Still (1941), Marian Anderson (1940); Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964).

Pages 64 Photo credit: Paige Peterson

Pages 66-67 Photos credit: James Heffernan/Met Opera Archives

Page 76-77 Kyle Starcevich

Page 78-83 Amee Ellis

Pages 84-85 Study of a Seated Male Nude above a Roundel for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Charcoal on paper, 63.3 x 48 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.5)

Page 86 Study of Eros and Psyche for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Charcoal on paper, 48 x 63 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.6)

Page 87 Study of a Seated Male Nude in a Roundel for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Charcoal on paper, 58.5 x 47.6 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.1)

Study for Three Dancing Figures for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Charcoal on paper, 47.6 x 63 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.10)

Study of a Seated Male Nude for the Rotunda or Grand Staircase of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 18561925), Charcoal on paper, 63.5 x 47.6 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.4)

Study of Two Male Nudes for a Cartouche for the Rotunda of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1916-1921. John Singer Sargent (American, 1856-1925), Charcoal on paper, 47.7 x 63.2 cm. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (S.G.Sar.4.1.2)

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