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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Trend Tracker | A higher scale
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Trend Tracker | A higher scale

Home-grown opera singers are reshaping the art form and hope it'll reach new heights

The Neemrana Music Foundation’s ‘If I Were King’, staged in Delhi in January 2010Premium
The Neemrana Music Foundation’s ‘If I Were King’, staged in Delhi in January 2010

Thirteen-year-old Alli Roshni practises her scales every day, but while her classmates are busy learning Carnatic and Hindustani ragas, Roshni focuses on arpeggios and arias. She has been learning Western classical vocals at the Delhi School of Music for three years. “I wanted to do something different," she says.

Roshni, a soprano one (the highest range of soprano), sang in the chorus of The Neemrana Music Foundation’s (TNMF’s) last opera, Don Pasquale, from 11-13 December at Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium. “I don’t know if I’ll ever perform as an opera singer, but it’s really good training and I find the music beautiful," she adds.

Teenagers like Roshni are increasingly getting the opportunity to be part of operas, through organizations such as TNMF (its latest production, Alexander the Great in India, will be staged today for guests at the Neemrana Fort-Palace, Rajasthan); the National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA), in collaboration with the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI); and the India National Youth Orchestra (Inyo). For now, though, their participation extends to the choral ensemble and supporting solo roles; international artistes usually play the leads.

Sonia Khan, managing director of Inyo, says it will take time before a fully home-grown production is feasible. “An opera singer needs to be in perfect control of her voice and be louder than an orchestra, without a mic. It takes years of training," she says.

Christine Matovich Singh, a Delhi-based opera singer who was trained in conservatories in Italy, the UK and the US, feels a local opera scene can develop properly only if schools change their approach to music education. Singh, who is the strings director at the American Embassy School and heads the Mozart Children’s Choir in Delhi, says the majority of young singers (aged 8-14) who come to audition have learnt by ear, not by technique. “Schools largely approach Western classical music as an aural tradition. Most of the children can’t sight-read, and have no idea about the formal notation," she says.

Baritone Oscar Dom Victor Castellino
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Baritone Oscar Dom Victor Castellino

Oscar Dom Victor Castellino was one of the fortunate ones. Three years ago, he was working in a software company in Mumbai and spent free evenings practising with the Stop-Gaps Choral Ensemble. This July, he will take on the role of the baritone smuggler in Carmen, staged by UK opera company Opera at Bearwood. Castellino is a student at the Royal College of Music, London, and this will be his first opera.

“Luckily I had saved some money from working, and I got generous sponsorships," he says.

It started when Castellino took part in one of Patricia Rozario’s Giving Voice to India workshops in 2009. Rozario is a celebrated Goan opera singer and teacher based in the UK, and through this initiative, she helps discover and foster operatic talent from her home country.

Rozario isn’t the only Indian-origin artiste who is trying to develop the tradition of opera here. Deirdre Lobo D’Cunha, a concert recitalist based in California, US, and daughter of one of India’s most popular operatic talents, Celia Lobo, teaches students over Skype and is keen to start a vocal academy in Mumbai, where she hopes singers of Indian origin will perform and teach. “We need to start small, maybe with some Gilbert and Sullivan stuff rather than Puccini-Verdi, and give singers more opportunities on local stages, otherwise our talent will have no choice but to leave," she says.

The NCPA has been taking steps to cultivate a more vibrant scene within the country, not just through its productions, but by broadcasting live screenings from The Metropolitan Opera in New York (Wagner’s Parsifal will be screened in Mumbai this weekend; Verdi’s Rigoletto was screened earlier this month). In an email, Khushroo Suntook, NCPA chairman, pointed out that opera has been staged intermittently in Mumbai since the 1920s. “The existence of the Royal Opera House (which incidentally is better known as a bus stop today) is evidence of the importance given by the British regime to opera," he says.

Indeed, indigenous forms of musical theatre have flourished for centuries—from traditional ballad operas in Manipur to Marathi sangeet natak, points out scriptwriter and librettist Rani Day Burra. “I don’t think the idea of musical plays is too foreign at all," she says.

I Pagliacci, produced by the NCPA in Mumbai in February 2012
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I Pagliacci, produced by the NCPA in Mumbai in February 2012

Contemporary, original forms of opera make it even more accessible to audiences, Singh adds. She has appeared as an opera singer in the film Slumdog Millionaire, and has lent her voice to eclectic projects, from live performances at fashion shows to Punjabi singer Rabbi Shergill’s track Tu Hi (they performed at blueFROG in Delhi on 15 March).

Neil Nongkynrih, founder of the Shillong Chamber Choir, agrees that for the scene to grow, opera in India needs to move beyond the stereotype of a grand production featuring a big lady with plaits whose voice shatters glass. Nongkynrih, who trained as a pianist at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, has been trying to bring opera into the mainstream too. “If you want to convert the common person and not just draw in the privileged, you need people to relate to the storyline and music," he points out. In 2004, Nongkynrih composed Sohlyngem, what he calls a “folk-opera", in Khasi. Germanic, or Western-style, operas have been composed in Indian languages before—most well-known is Philip Glass’ Satyagraha in Sanskrit—but rarely in the vernacular.

Nongkynrih’s production is named after a bird in the North-East whose cry sounds like a woman wailing. “I reinvented a folk tale where a girl turns into a bird and cries for her lost lover, and I added undercurrents of social commentary." The production, which debuted in Geneva, Switzerland, featured a home-grown cast of singers from Shillong accompanied by the Vienna Chamber Orchestra.

Poet and novelist Jeet Thayil has also worked on two original operas. In 2009, he and Suman Sridhar, better known for their jazz-inspired electronica as duo Sridhar/Thayil, performed an avant-garde opera called The Flying Wallas—taking the form out of the confines of plush auditoria, and into spaces like restaurants and parks. “It was pretty radical. There were just two of us on stage, we composed the music on a laptop, and the set design was basic," he says.

Sridhar drew on her Western classical music roots, while Thayil’s parts were spoken word, but “the material, the compulsions of murder, love and revenge were all opera" (Thayil also wrote the libretto for Babur in London, a production by The Opera Group that was staged in the UK and Switzerland).

Veteran Bollywood composer Vanraj Bhatia, who studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London and the Conservatoire de Paris, has been working on an opera called Agni Varsha for three years. The going has been slow, with Bhatia preferring to craft his compositions by hand, and with Burra taking over as librettist from poet Ranjit Hoskote halfway.

The first act was performed with piano by Cornell University’s music department in New York in May, but there are still two scenes left to be completed before the opera is fully ready to be staged, says Burra.

The members of Zowe Madrigal, an all-male chorus from Nagaland, have also been working to present opera in a modern avatar to make the form more palatable to younger audiences. “Opera is an art; art is dynamic, it has to keep evolving," says Nise Meruno, its director, who is also a concert pianist and composer.

In concert, the neo-classical group is as likely to perform arias from The Magic Flute and Carmen, original folk fusion tracks and hits by pop artistes from Elvis Presley to Adele. “Traditionally, opera was always for the elite, an older, learned crowd. We’re trying to break that tradition and bring it to a larger audience," explains Meruno.

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Published: 16 Mar 2013, 12:07 AM IST
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