Earlier this month, our students started working on what will be the biggest production of the year: Mozart’s Don Giovanni. In just unde one month, they will have turn the words and notes of the famous opera into a high quality performance.
Creating stage opportunities is a very important part of all the programmes within the Conservatoire. The tight deadline (only four weeks of rehearsal) is a deliberate choice of teacher for Jeanne-Minette Cilliers as this is a realistic rehearsal period for their professional life as well.
Don Giovanni is one of the classic opera’s and is therefore often performed. By choosing this piece specifically, the students can already add it to their repertoire. Chances are they will play it again in career.
A production of this scale is planned every two years within the Classical Music programme. This includes the entire department, because apart from singers, we also assembled an orchestra entirely made up of students. The idea to increase the interdisciplinary cooperation even further (the costume designers at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts would be involved) was ready for launch, but unfortunately the pandemic put a stop to it.
Jeanne-Minette Cilliers does point out that the global crisis has also had some advantages: the importance of acting in an opera suddenly becomes much clearer for the cast. For how do you enter into dialogue with each other if you have to keep three metres apart at all times? This has made the acting lessons even more intense than they would be otherwise.
Louisa Muller
We are very fortunate to have Louisa Muller in our Conservatoire as a guest director. Muller will work intensively with the students for the whole duration of the project, ready to help them dot the i's and cross the t's. She is the perfect artistic leader to do so, as can easily be derived from her track record of course. Muller has directed the Metropolitan Opera, the Lyrics Opera of Chicago, the New York Philharmonic, the Grand Théâtre de Genève ... and we could go on. Quite an impressive list to be on and so our musicians are pulling out all the stops to put on a high-level, professional and most impressive opera.
European Opera Academy
As a member of the European Opera Academy, the Conservatoire had the opportunity to include three foreign students in the cast: one pianist and two singers. Through foreign exchange programmes, the EOA opens up best practices in opera education for young professionals.