CCPA takes opera into Chicago neighborhoods in March with free performances of The Magic Flute

Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts (CCPA) is reaching out to Chicago’s Edgewater and Pilsen neighborhoods in early March with free performances of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

The fully staged opera will be performed by singers and musicians from CCPA’s Music Conservatory at 7:30 p.m. March 2 and 3 at the Benito Juarez Community Academy, 1450-1510 W. Cermak, in Chicago’s Pilsen community. A concert version of The Magic Flute will be performed at 7:30 p.m. March 5 and 6 at Senn High School, 5900 N. Glenwood Ave., in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood.

Both productions are free and open to the public. For information, contact cbernstein@roosevelt.edu or 312-341-2238.

“Roosevelt University and CCPA are committed to developing long-lasting relationships that make performing arts accessible in our area communities,” said Henry Fogel, dean of CCPA. “Bringing The Magic Flute into area high schools is one way in which we are reaching out to achieve that goal,” he said.
 
The CCPA production will be directed by Andrew Eggert, winner of Opera America’s 2009 Director-Designer Showcase, and will feature a brilliant contemporary stage set by Anka Lupes, who worked previously with Eggert on the Showcase-winning Mourning Becomes Electra and on productions at Chicago Opera Theater. Michael Morgan (pictured above), who has conducted most of America’s major orchestras, including the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, will be guest conductor of the CCPA productions. Costume design is by Christine Pascual.
 
More than 50 students in Roosevelt’s CCPA Symphony Orchestra, its undergraduate and graduate voice performance program and the CCPA-Chicago Opera Theater Diploma Program, which provides post-degree training for opera stars of the future, will participate in the productions.

“Our production of Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) offers a contemporary reading of Mozart’s timeless characters.  Set against a backdrop of modern art and industry, the opera continues to have a deep personal resonance for audiences of today,” said Eggert, who is also an instructor in CCPA’s Music Conservatory. “In the production, characters Sarastro and the Queen of the Night take the stage as two rival visionaries, each embracing a radically different view of how to live in our modern time,” Eggert said. “A descendant of the rational, mind-centered view of the Enlightenment, Sarastro advocates the power of science and reason, while the Queen of the Night, a Romantic, is an artistic dissident and a partisan for the mysterious feelings and force of emotions. Two of The Magic Flute’s main characters, Tamino and Pamina, attempt to navigate through the hierarchies of these mystical and musical worlds - learning ultimately that it is only in the synthesis of thought and feeling, and only in the marriage of art and science, that they can embrace true humanity.”

CCPA’s outreach into the Pilsen community continues at Benito Juarez Community Academy on April 16 when the CCPA Symphony Orchestra performs a program that includes work by Maurice Ravel, Hector Berlioz and the celebrated Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas, an alumnus of Chicago Musical College, which today is known as the Music Conservatory at CCPA.

The semi-staged concert versions of The Magic Flute at Senn High School open a weeklong performing arts showcase, Spotlight on Edgewater, which is being held in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood March 5 through 11.  For more information on the showcase that is co-sponsored by Roosevelt and CCPA, visit http://www.edgewaterdev.org/spotlight/