Opera-Tunity

When St. John Bosco Interparish School’s director of performing arts, Roberta Hamilton, introduced the idea of opera to her students she discovered that many thought she was referring to Oprah.

Not surprisingly, she said, Oprah was more familiar to them than opera.

“It was a lot easier to get opera here than Oprah,” principal Shelley Connor said Tuesday morning as she introduced the group Opera-Tunity to students.

Through a grant from the Wells Fargo Teacher’s Partner Program, the school was able to have the Arizona State University alumni performers of Opera-Tunity present the Three Little Pigs to kindergarten- through third-graders and Opera 101 to fourth- through eighth-graders that morning.

“We found that teachers just don’t have the money for what they need now,” said Patricia Cusick Tanabe, vice president and manager of government banking at Wells Fargo in downtown Phoenix. “We give up to $500 to teachers for things like this, equipment for classrooms, books, field trips, things of that nature.”

The Wells Fargo Teacher’s Partner Program has donated $1.5 million to teachers throughout Arizona in the last 10 years.

From 8:30 to 9:15 a.m. 250 kindergarten through third-graders laughed and bounced around in their seats as pig-nosed performers taught them why it is important to read and learn new things, like how to build a house, at the library.

“We took the story of the Three Little Pigs and smooshed it down and added a little of Mozart’s music to it,” said instrumentalist Mark Fearey of Opera-Tunity.

Fourth- through eighth-graders chuckled from 9:45 to 10:30 a.m. as the same performers, sans pig noses, taught opera vocabulary like cadenza, aria, recitative and bravo by singing.

“I want to be in an opera,” students said to each other after the performance.

“I liked it how their voices blended,” 13-year-old Casey Schores said. “The tenor sounded really sweet and the baritone sounded like a bad guy.”

Ally Hydrick, 12, said the performance was unlike anything she’d ever seen before.

“It wasn’t just the singing, it was the words that made it interesting,” she said.

Opera-Tunity is a performance group formed by 1957 Arizona State University graduate Arlyn Brewster in 1986, and is part of the Arizona Commission on the Arts. The group travels throughout Arizona and surrounding states, enabling students to learn about opera with their in-your-face tactics.

“At a time when other schools are having to cut fine arts, we are very fortunate,” Connor said.

Corinne Frayer can be reached at (480) 898-7917 or cfrayer@aztrib.com.