A rarity unto itself

On a warm Friday evening, the soaring harmony of four female sopranos spills through the open auditorium doors of Kennedy Elementary School into the quiet streets of the surrounding residential neighborhood.

Just a few miles from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion but a cultural world away in East L.A., this makeshift rehearsal space doesn’t bode the big time: A mop and bucket stand in one corner of the linoleum floor, and the bright fluorescent lights overhead only highlight the drab institutional tangerine-colored walls. Even so, for the company of Lyric Opera of Los Angeles, it is the place to be.

In their first rehearsal of their latest production, “Cendrillon” (Cinderella), the passionate voices of these volunteer singers transform their surroundings. They intend to do the same Saturday when they give the first of six performances for schoolchildren, the kids’ teachers and families, and, they hope, opera lovers drawn to unusual fare.

LOLA, as its members call it, was founded two years ago by artistic director and singer Laura Ruiz, whose father, Robert Sage, is the company’s music director and a professor of music at Azusa Pacific University. (He will provide the piano accompaniment for “Cendrillon.”) A violinist before she began singing professionally, Ruiz wanted to stage rare operatic works with professional standards but at affordable prices. “I was interested in performing little-known genres and rarities that have interesting and enjoyable music,” she says.

To kick-start her endeavor, the company first mounted a non-rarity, Mozart’s early “The Abduction From the Seraglio.” Then, last year, it staged “Der Vampyr” (The Vampire) by Heinrich Marschner, a German contemporary of Wagner whose reputation was overshadowed by that of the composer of the “Ring” cycle. According to Ruiz, opera devotees came from as far away as New York to see it.

“There is a plethora of buried operatic gems for a company like LOLA to unearth,” says Rachel Evans, who will play Armelinde, one of the heroine’s stepsisters, in “Cendrillon.” “In the case of Heinrich Marschner, he couldn’t be heard above the frenzy for Wagner. Operas can be ignored because of bad reviews or for not fitting in with the musical movement of the time. So many of the composers that now make up our definition of classical music were not popular during their lifetime.”

“ ‘Cendrillon’ fits squarely into our mission,” Ruiz says. “Pauline Viardot composed this to be performed in her salon in Paris. It was never intended to have an orchestra -- it’s for piano and a handful of voices. It’s a very simple but incredibly charming piece.”

A comedic opera based on the 17th century fairy tale, “Cendrillon” is unusual for several reasons: Though it premiered in Paris 100 years ago this month, it has been performed only rarely in the U.S. (1985 was the last staging in Los Angeles), it is virtually unknown even to opera aficionados, and it was written by a woman. “Viardot is the only female opera composer I know of,” says Ruiz, who will play Cinderella and three other roles in different performances.

Born into a musical family in 1821, Viardot was the younger sister of the famous opera singer Maria Malibran (the 1985 production of “Cendrillon” was mounted in Beverly Hills by a group known as the Malibran Society). Her circle of friends included George Sand, Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod, Hector Berlioz and Charles Dickens. She studied piano with Liszt and was a muse and longtime lover of Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (she nursed him in his old age). Dickens called her “most extraordinary” in her performance as Orpheus in Gluck’s “Orfeo et Euridice.” Robert Schumann’s Opus 24 and Saint-Saens’ “Samson et Dalila” were dedicated to her. Though she composed many original works for piano, two volumes for violin, 100 songs, one opera and four operettas with librettos by Turgenev, few people know her name today.

So rare is “Cendrillon,” in fact, that after deciding she wanted to produce it, Ruiz found she couldn’t locate a copy of the score just weeks before the singers were to start learning their parts. Two months after initiating an interlibrary loan of the score from the Library of Congress, she had received a reply that it couldn’t be sent out -- the library had only one copy, and it was in fragile condition. Although she subsequently located three university libraries that had it, she finally discovered that the British opera company Opera Rara (which, as its name suggests, also performs little-known operas) had recently staged and recorded it.

Another problem of performing unknown operas is that, by definition, they’re unfamiliar to most opera-goers. As a result, Ruiz decided to mount Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore” (The Elixir of Love) last fall to help build LOLA’s audience and generate visibility for the company.

“ ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’ is a very well-known and oft-performed opera,” she says. “As such, it didn’t fit into our stated mission. However, people love it, it’s fun, and we hoped it would bring people to our performances that hadn’t heard of us before and thus bring them to our more obscure productions as well.”

All of LOLA’s performers work for free, and often more than one singer has to be cast in a part to fill all the performances. For “L’Elisir d’Amore,” Ruiz says, she spent months trying to find a second singer for one of the lead roles, the comic bass part of Dr. Dulcamara. “I finally found someone who knew the part, but he had only performed it in Korean! He was willing to learn it in Italian, but he couldn’t make Sunday rehearsals or performances, while the other singer for the part could. This left us with the difficulty of having to redo staging all the time because I couldn’t get both of my Dulcamaras together at the same time to rehearse.”

Yet Ruiz remains determined that LOLA serve the public by making opera, usually reserved for upper-income audiences, accessible to the masses. “A good audience will be 75 people who each paid $15 a ticket,” she says.

Not surprisingly, the company operates on a shoestring. Ordinarily, opera singers don’t pay to audition for a part, but LOLA has to charge them $10 each to cover the expenses of booking an audition room. When the company’s phone rings in the morning, Ruiz answers it in her kitchen while she fixes breakfast for her two toddlers, and she spends hours scouring EBay or thrift stores for costumes. To outfit Cinderella and her stepsisters in “Cendrillon,” she found a leftover supply of flocked dresses and matching hats -- in colors like sherbet orange -- from a 1970s wedding store.

Indeed, Ruiz had so many problems producing “L’Elisir” with so little money, she says, that the company is still paying off expenses from that production. Those include her cellphone bill, which climbed so high she is now without calling privileges.

Opera for the masses isn’t a new idea. At its inception in the 16th century, the art form was exclusively for the upper classes, but by the 19th century operas were attended regularly by the working classes as well as the wealthy. “Operas were for the average person,” music director Sage says. “At the turn of the century, Venice, Italy, had the same amount of opera theaters relative to its population as Los Angeles has movie theaters today. Operas were performed frequently, and though they were never cheap, $10 to see a movie isn’t cheap either.”

LOLA’s performances at Kennedy Elementary will be the first of what Ruiz hopes will be many exposing children to opera. Though companies like Los Angeles Opera do offer performances to schools, they charge a fee, which, Ruiz says, some public schools cannot afford. The “Cendrillon” performances will have a ticket price of $10 per family. In addition, after searching the Internet, Ruiz found a way to have the libretto translated from the original French not only into English but also into Spanish supertitles for free, so many of the Hispanic children who attend Kennedy will understand the words.

“I think opera-goers are a dying breed and opera companies are hesitant to put on anything out of the ordinary for fear that no one will want to see it,” singer Evans says. “But that can make opera stagnant and repetitive. We need controversial new productions, and new music, like the kind LOLA chooses to showcase, in order to cultivate new audiences. There is no opera if there is no audience.”

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‘Cendrillon’

Where: Kennedy Elementary School, 4010 Ramboz Drive, L.A.

When: Saturday, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m.; April 23, 7:30 p.m.; April 25, 2 p.m.; April 30 and May 1, 7:30 p.m.

Price: $10-$15

Contact: (323) 262-0569