Students’ musical adventures in a Viennese café

But the University’s School of Music brought the dream alive for all who attended its two sell-out sessions of Opera Scenes, a lively and colourful production staged for the very first time last October.

Opera Scenes is a course forming part of a music degree. It is also an active experience of voice and stagecraft and plays a vital role in laying a base for students’ future success.

Tenor Manase Latu, a first-class honours graduate now strongly established in his chosen career, says he’s grateful to Opera Scenes for the skills he learnt and the memories of performing his first operatic roles.

Manase, who is now performing with the Troupe Lyrique de l’Opéra National in Paris, remembers the Opera Scenes performance as “a valuable experience” and “an academic highlight of every year”.

For Olivia Forbes, who has just completed her Bachelor of Music with Honours, last year’s production was “like a mini-opera we could all develop as a team. I felt I was bringing together my skills from all my years of study and I felt free to be bold in making creative decisions.”

Students are challenged to use their skills and stretch their capabilities by helping create a new opera that resembles one they might meet in the “real world” but carries no weight of tradition and therefore invites creative interpretation.

“For young performers,” Olivia says, “it provides a safe space to take risks, knowing they have the support of staff to guide them in the right directions. Because the story is completely different from any ‘real’ opera, this gives us all the opportunity to create our own characters and use all our knowledge of what we’ve been learning about stagecraft and production, singing and acting. Alongside the input of the creative team, it was all interactive, which was fun.”

Each year, the creative team, comprising three staff, chooses scenes from different operas and moulds them together to fit the shape of a new story line. The 2024 production was an all-Mozart programme and the newly invented story was a fantastical drama set in Vienna in 1800, in a once-fashionable café that had fallen on hard times.

A welcome innovation was the string quartet of students who provided the accompaniment for this year’s production.

Olivia, who has a light soprano voice and plans for a future in operatic performance, has performed for four consecutive years in Opera Scenes. She believes she is “set up perfectly” and has “all the tools to progress”.

Funding for Opera Scenes was from Ensemble, with additional support from the Evelyn M Harrison Trust.