Grand opera! 

On Wednesday, May 22, Fort Wayne will witness a concert of vocal pyrotechnics like nothing ever heard in this town, certainly not on this scale. 

Heartland Sings, our hometown professional choir and vocal group led by Maestro Robert Nance, is mounting a massive singing competition with international competitors, within a concert featuring songs and scenes from operas from the golden age of the 1800s presented by more than 50 professional singers and a 50-piece professional orchestra. It’s audacious and completely unprecedented for these parts — not to mention centered on singing in a style that most of our readers have never heard live on stage.

The competition begins downtown at Plymouth Congregational Church from May 20-21. Winners will then be announced during A Night at the Opera on Wednesday, May 22, at Purdue University Fort Wayne’s Auer Performance Hall.

Reaching the summit

Fort Wayne, for a city its size, has a surprising amount of fine classical music. The Philharmonic orchestra have performed full seasons more than 80 years, but the Summit City has never had a professional opera company. Of course, local university music schools stage small, scaled-down opera productions with student singers from time to time, as a means of teaching, but it’s not the big time.

Grand opera in the full scale thrives only in the largest cities. You need to go to places like Chicago and Cincinnati, or farther afield, to see the great works of the genre performed by companies with decades of experience, not to mention with the financial support it takes to put on these colossal productions.

Heartland Sings is bringing us a taste of all that with A Night at the Opera. The singers and orchestra will be there, but without the staging, costumes, swordplay, and dancing. It’s a good start to build what may become a new tradition.

No shortage of music

The 16 semi-finalists taking part in the Vocal Artists Competition are young world-class singers, from grad-school age to their early 30s. 

These sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, countertenors, tenors, and baritones have been performing with opera companies around the world and have sung in other professional competitions. Most are from the U.S. and all of them live here, but several are from other countries, including the Philippines, South Korea, and Germany. 

You can see photos of each contestant and read their bios at heartlandsings.org/competition.

On May 22, you will hear the three finalists, backed by the semi-finalists, 35 professional choral singers and soloists from Heartland Sings, and a 50-piece professional orchestra conducted by Nance. The finalists, singing famous solo arias, will compete for thousands of dollars in prizes. The audience will get to vote along with the panel of six judges. 

The six judges — Caroline Smith, Kathryn Cowdrick, Keith Brautigam, Timothy Cheek, Natalie Young, and Nance — have lifetimes of experience not only as international performers but also as college professors, training generations of singers.

Opening and closing the show, Heartland Sings will present pieces from a swath of grand opera from the 1800s and 1900s. You’ll hear arias, duets, and choruses from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, Bizet’s Carmen, Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore and Lucia di Lammermoor, and Verdi’s Nabucco and La Traviata, from the golden age of the 1830s through the 1870s in Europe, and sung by the cast in the original German, French, and Italian. The outlier is Bernstein’s Candide, from 1956, sung in English. Local favorites Ashlee Bickley McCrory, Wagner Pástor, Antonio Azpiri, Ian Williams, Lisa Gerstenkorn, and Young will be featured.

The competition

Those are just the set pieces between the actual competition. 

As for the soloists, each has chosen their own solo aria, accompanied by orchestra, some from operas spanning even farther back, to Mozart and Handel in the 1700s.

On Monday, May 20, from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. at Plymouth Congregational Church is where the intense competition among the 16 semi-finalists will occur. It’s open to the public at no charge, if you want to drop by and hear the range of talent. 

The competition will be closed to the public the following day as students participate in master classes with judges, and Nance will hold the rehearsal with the singers and orchestra. 

The big show is Wednesday, May 22, at 7:30 p.m. at Auer Performance Hall, and for that you’ll need tickets.

Nance and Heartland Sings have spent the better part of a year planning all this out, and it’s required heavy financial support from a number of patrons, donors, and foundations. The Purdue University Fort Wayne School of Music and the Philharmonic Players Association are providing support, too. 

Aspirations for city

Like all classical music on this scale, the money from tickets sales is only a fraction of what it costs to put on a show like this.

The competition began in November, when more than 150 applicants from around the world sent in audition videos. A team of distinguished judges, professors from famous music schools, screened them down to the 16 finalists that Heartland is paying to bring to Fort Wayne. 

The work all this creates for Nance as a conductor is staggering. In addition to all the set pieces we mentioned above with the chorus, he will have to be ready to conduct the full orchestra in any of the 16 pieces, from many different operas by many composers, that the semi-finalists have chosen, although only three will be performed by the finalists in the concert. The 50-piece orchestra will have two short rehearsals with Nance the day before. 

Nance is working closely with music librarian, arranger, and bass player Adrian Mann to make sure their orchestra is ready for anything.

I had a long conversation with Nance about the motivation behind all this. I wish I had a podcast where you could hear how eloquently he talks about his life’s work and his imperative, through Heartland Sings, to make a contribution to Fort Wayne’s evolution as a music destination. They are building a platform where singers of many styles of music can have a sustainable career and earn a full-time living making art that enriches peoples’ lives; opera is only one phase of that. Heartland Sings hopes that this event will influence world-class musicians to make Fort Wayne their home.

So, come on out to PFW on May 22 to hear what’s guaranteed to be an astonishing display of vocal talent on an amazing scale. Tomorrow’s opera stars may well be on stage in Fort Wayne today.