Last week about fifty James Lick High School music students hopped aboard a city bus for an unusual destination in downtown San Jose. Along with their teacher, Tomoko Nakajima, and volunteer chaperones, they set out for the famous, much ballyhooed, extravagantly renovated California Theatre on First Street. What was the big draw? A rock concert perhaps? An e
ducational film?
How about a special full length midday matinee production of the opera, The Barber of Seville, presented by Opera San Jose for a theater full of middle and high schoolers? Kids descended on the ornate theater from every direction. Some arrived in school buses. The Lick students good-naturedly hoofed the several blocks from the First and Santa Clara Street bus stop arriving just in time to be seated as the pit orchestra struck up the overture.
Does this sound like a dynamite combination – a theater full of teenagers expected to sit still for a looooong musical story with a decidedly goofy plot? Well, you would have been wonderfully surprised at the polite demeanor and mature audience manners of the Lick students – and the rest of the young theater-goers!
The Barber of Seville (written by Rossini in 1816) is sung in Italian although the setting is Seville, Spain. Mercifully, there were English supertitles. After the performance, I heard some Lick students mentioning the similarities between the Italian they heard and the Spanish they know. Good listening!
The English translations threw some arcane vocabulary words at these youngsters. Who knew that Figaro the Barber was a factotum? This Latin version of Jack-of-all-trades didn’t faze this young audience. They were rapt as they experienced the drawn-out comedy even through some of its repetitive passages.
After the performance, Ms. Nakajima counted noses outside the theater and off we paraded to the eastbound bus stop on Santa Clara Street. I heard no carping about the highbrow musical experience. I think James Lick music students are mature enough that they thought the opera was pretty darned cool!
ducational film?How about a special full length midday matinee production of the opera, The Barber of Seville, presented by Opera San Jose for a theater full of middle and high schoolers? Kids descended on the ornate theater from every direction. Some arrived in school buses. The Lick students good-naturedly hoofed the several blocks from the First and Santa Clara Street bus stop arriving just in time to be seated as the pit orchestra struck up the overture.
Does this sound like a dynamite combination – a theater full of teenagers expected to sit still for a looooong musical story with a decidedly goofy plot? Well, you would have been wonderfully surprised at the polite demeanor and mature audience manners of the Lick students – and the rest of the young theater-goers!
The Barber of Seville (written by Rossini in 1816) is sung in Italian although the setting is Seville, Spain. Mercifully, there were English supertitles. After the performance, I heard some Lick students mentioning the similarities between the Italian they heard and the Spanish they know. Good listening!
The English translations threw some arcane vocabulary words at these youngsters. Who knew that Figaro the Barber was a factotum? This Latin version of Jack-of-all-trades didn’t faze this young audience. They were rapt as they experienced the drawn-out comedy even through some of its repetitive passages.
After the performance, Ms. Nakajima counted noses outside the theater and off we paraded to the eastbound bus stop on Santa Clara Street. I heard no carping about the highbrow musical experience. I think James Lick music students are mature enough that they thought the opera was pretty darned cool!
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