One-Act and Action-Packed

Those who aren't familiar with opera, said young composer and Yale graduate student Zachary Wadsworth, can think of his one-act "Venus and Adonis" as "a 45-minute action-packed musical drama: Venus loves Adonis, but Adonis is more interested in hunting. It's like Jim and Pam on NBC's "The Office," only 15 minutes longer, with no commercials, and much, much more singing."

And for those who already know and love opera, he added, "It's a mix of old and new: Handel meets Britten meets Wadsworth."

Wadsworth's opera was selected from dozens of entries from around the world in Long Leaf Opera's inaugural One-Act Opera Competition.

"We received entries from composers who were heads of composition departments at major universities, but the winner was a grad student at Yale University, one of the youngest composers to enter," noted Jim Schaeffer, executive director of Long Leaf.

Tonight and Sunday, in the second week of its new summer festival, Chapel Hill's nationally recognized opera company will premiere the "Venus and Adonis," which brings Shakespeare's erotic love poem to the stage through a combination of lyric singing and sensous ballet. The second half of the program will be Sir William Walton's seldom heard 1967 comic opera "The Bear."

And while both operas are joined by the theme of love, said conductor Al Sturgis, "The nice thing is that they're so different stylistically." He noted that the "Venus and Adonis" has a baroque sensibility joined to contemporary harmonic and melodic styles. He called it a smaller, more intimate piece than the more obvious and comedic style of "The Bear."

Completely operatic

Wadsworth's Venus is his first opera, written for a senior project at the Eastman School of Music in 2004. In Shakespeare's poem about the Goddess of Love and the beautiful hunter Adonis, Wadsworth found "everything from affection to hatred. What could be more operatic than that?" He avoided listening to other settings of the poem, instead turning to baroque opera for ideas. "The sheer age of the text can't be glossed over, so I tried to evoke the sound of older opera, with continuo instruments and a Greek chorus, among other things."

But the work is decidedly modern as well.

"Several new sounds found their way in, like an alto saxophone and a modern piano," Wadsworth said. "I like to think of the opera as a kind of middle ground between old and new, using the characteristics of older music in a way that will hopefully speak to people living right now."

To add an extra level of expressioin to the work, "an artistic physical presence for the opera's action," said Wadsworth, he created significant roles for two dancers who will shadow principal singers Andrea Edith Moore and Tim Sparks.

The dance for Long Leaf's production was choreographed by Legacy Studios director Boleyn Willis; dancers are Carmen Borders and Erick Uphoff. Geoff Zegler is the stage director.

"Dance is integral to the story that we're telling with our voices," said Moore, a Chapel Hill native who now sings professionally in Manhattan. "I'm the immortal Venus; the mortal part is the dance."

Sparks, a Long Leaf veteran who teaches voice at UNC, described the work's setting as "a surreal world, full of youthful eroticism."

While Adonis is drawn to Venus' beauty and femininity, said Sparks, he is "awkwardly afraid" and resists anything that interferes with his love of the hunt.

Challenging music

Audiences unacquainted with modern music may find the opera musically challenging, added Moore, "but it's very beautiful. You might not walk away humming, but the music is accessible, and you'll definitely get something out of it."

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"Opera is a loaded term these days," noted Wadsworth. "People who haven't heard a lot of it often associate it with huge divas singing in German for four hours with very little happening onstage." He applauded Long Leaf for offering works in English that are "relevant to topics we experience every day: love, loss, happiness. Finding a way to speak to people, through music, is still my primary interest. Otherwise, it's just shouting into a megaphone in the middle of Antarctica."

— Rebecca Bailey