CSUN Showcases Emerging Opera Talent in Sunday Concert

Opera is rarely designed as an intimate affair, more often embracing the scores of performers, musicians and others that bring the huge productions to life. So Sunday’s “Operatic Excerpts” concert in Cal State Northridge’s Little Theater might seem a distinct change of pace for the school’s venerable opera program.

Unlike this semester’s upcoming full-scale production of Kirke Mechem’s “Tartuffe,” the 90-minute “Operatic Excerpts” show is designed to spotlight the emerging vocal talents of senior and graduate CSUN opera students. Five singers will perform a program that includes excerpts from Handel’s “ “Rinaldo,” Puccini’s “La Boheme,” Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” and works by Mozart, Bizet, Mussorgsky, Donizetti and others.

“It’s really a concert, as opposed to a full production of an opera,” said David Scott, a CSUN music professor and longtime director of the school’s opera program. “But we hope to make it have the polish that it needs to be a very attractive program. I think it will be.”

Performing the collection of solos, duets and trios will be sopranos Janet Momjian and Barbro Johansson, tenor Daniel Plaster, and baritones Jason Daniel and Roberto Gomez. Gomez is also a singer with Orange County’s Opera Pacific. Piano accompaniment is to be provided by CSUN opera coach Maro Donabedian.

The event is co-sponsored by the Opera Buffs, a 6-year-old nonprofit group that supports opera in the Southland with funding, scholarships and awards to local companies and singers. Rena Cohen, president and co-founder of the group, said the “Opera Excerpts” show is just the sort of program for which the Opera Buffs were created.

“We decided in 1984 that what this city didn’t have was an organization which was geared to give excellent young singers the kind of push they needed to get into the opera companies,” Cohen explained. “We try to give a platform to singers that have real talent and who would really benefit from getting some exposure.”

Support for Sunday’s CSUN concert adds up to only a small part of the Opera Buffs’ more than $35,000 annual budget. Another recent outlet for its support was an award of $15,000 to the L.A. Opera to help finance bringing San Francisco-based teacher Vickson Titus to coach and train young singers in the L.A. Opera’s repertory company.

But Cohen expressed a particular appreciation for the CSUN opera program, and said she hopes to work to provide more performance opportunities there in the future. The Opera Buffs’ participation enables the singers to be paid for their performances, while providing the “dignity” of a full audience made up in part by the group’s members.

“One of the advantages to the CSUN program is that David Scott has an enormous amount of leeway and production freedom, so that he is able to commandeer singers, train the orchestra, oversee the sets,” said Cohen. “He does manage to bring together an integrated production. And he does seem to have a great deal of imagination.

“I think the university programs are of enormous value to the singer, because it gives them opportunities to perform.”

The CSUN opera productions have built a steadily growing audience since the department’s modest inception in the mid-1960s. As one the few programs in the Cal State University system that can regularly produce operas on a large scale, the CSUN Opera Theater has produced a healthy number of opera singers now performing in such professional companies as the L.A. Opera. And award winners have included Momjian, who is to perform Sunday and was a 1988 regional winner of the New York Metropolitan Opera Auditions.

And all along, San Fernando Valley opera lovers have been provided somewhere to go that’s closer than downtown Los Angeles.

“Over 25 years, we’ve built a good audience with this,” said Scott, who arrived at the school’s music department in 1963. “People like to go to our productions, and, of course, they’re less expensive than spending $75 or $80 at the Music Center. So it’s an alternative.”

“Operatic Excerpts,” a concert by senior and graduate CSUN opera students, including performances of works by Handel, Mozart, Offenbach, Bizet and Puccini; 3 p.m. Sunday at the CSUN Little Theater, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge. Tickets are $6 general admission, $3 for students and senior citizens. For more information, call (818) 885-3093.