On a cloudy Saturday afternoon in Seattle in April, members and friends of SOG arrived at the beautiful and spacious home of hostess Pam Johnson. We were welcomed by Barbara Stanton at the door and Marilyn Leck, Guild President. We were first shown into the dining room, where exquisite catering by Nola Nevers was featured. The menus featured a variety of hors d’oeuvres like the tapas you might find in restaurants in Barcelona. These included plates of skewered shrimp, cured and smoked meat, fresh vegetables and olive medley, artisan cheese platter with fresh fruit, and meat and cheese filled turnovers. Wine and non-alcoholic drinks were served at a nearby table. The dining area has a lot of wall seating so groups easily gathered to visit. After an hour of enjoying the tapas and the conversation, we were ushered into the living room to enjoy the preview of The Barber of Seville.
Glenda Williams served as our narrator and had assembled three singers new to us, each with very extensive presentation resumes. Glenda goes through a careful process to choose singers for each role, looking for just the right voice type. She also looks for singers who have some familiarity with the opera, or have time to learn the music if it’s new to them. The three roles are Count Almaviva (tenor, sung by Zach Fitzgerald), Rosina (mezzo soprano sung by Clarice Alfonso) and Figaro (sung by Mark Davies).
Clarice has sung in many opera venues, such as the Seattle Opera Creation Lab, Northwest Corner Chamber Orchestra, Puget Sound Concert Opera and Lisa Bergman’s Northwest Opera in Schools. She easily captured the role of mezzo-soprano Rosina. Baritone Mark Davies (Figaro) has performed before for the Seattle Opera Guild in previews of Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers. He has also performed with Pacific Northwest Opera and Vashon Opera. He will be joining the Seattle Opera Chorus for their upcoming performances of Pagliacci. He is also a highly regarded pianist and vocal coach, and is an instructor of voice and music director of the opera program at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Zachary Fitzgerald, Count Almaviva, (new to Washington State), has completed two Master’s Degrees in Vocal Performance and Choral Conducting from Kent State University in Ohio. He is completing his Doctorate in Vocal Performance at the UW studying with professor Tim Harper.
The comic opera of Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville is a bit complicated, with a lot of comic roles and high energy on stage. The opera is based on a novel by the French writer Beaumarchais, who also wrote the novel from which Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro was written. It you have seen Figaro, then Barber of Seville makes more sense. In this opera, Count Almaviva has fallen in love, at a distance, with the beautiful and wealthy Rosina. Her elderly guardian wants to marry her himself, although he’s not at all to her liking, so he does what he can to block Count Almaviva’s attempts. Figaro is the town barber and plots with Count Almaviva to win the hand of Rosina. Our preview of Barber of Seville was a great way to prepare us to thoroughly enjoy Seattle Opera’s production of one of the world’s most famous operas with its high energy, madcap plot, and gorgeous music.
One other highly successful aspect of this preview was a fundraiser for the Singer Development Awards fund. The generous attendees and others who couldn’t make the preview but also contributed ended up donating $6,100 to the SDA fund. Bravo, Seattle Opera Guild!
— Suzy Wakefield