by Daniel Hathaway

Kent State music education major Scott Little’s new opera, The Story of an Hour, has inspired KSU opera director Marla Berg to take her annual fall opera scenes program to a new level this year.

“Although I didn’t hear the portion of Scott’s piece that was workshopped during Cleveland Opera Theatre’s {NOW} Festival, Tim Culver thought it was really good. Then I heard a reading of some of the work at Kent. But what really spurred me on is that Scott wrote a short piece for the Kent orchestra and choral concert last spring, and I really liked it. He came in to talk with me about what it would be like to produce an opera and I thought, you know what? It’s a 40-minute piece. Wouldn’t it be an extraordinary experience for everybody involved if we did it.”

Berg’s decision to mount the premiere ramped up the usually modest fall opera scenes program considerably. “I normally do a montage of eight to ten small scenes, and I thought, I’ll just match Scott’s piece up with two bigger scenes,” Berg said. Although she’s always promising to make things easier on herself the next time around, the director ended up choosing Act III of The Marriage of Figaro and scenes from Berlioz’ Beatrice and Benedict with spoken dialogue from Shakespeare, all of which share the theme of marriage. [Read more…]