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Date: 11/6/2023
NORTHAMPTON — After dealing with the effects of the coronavirus pandemic head-on, PanOpera is returning to the community fold as a registered nonprofit.
In a post to its Facebook account, the artist-led Western New England opera group announced that they are officially back with a free concert on Jan. 27 at the Northampton Center for the Arts titled “In Our Opera Era.”
“PanOpera is now officially PanOpera Inc, a registered 501c3 nonprofit,” read the post. “This business structure is deeply connected to our mission, which at its core is about making professional quality opera available to everyone. By relying on grants and donations instead of ticket sales, we are able to produce performances for little to no cost to audiences. It is our hope that this will expand access and exposure to opera across the Pioneer Valley.”
According to Kate DeLugan, the president of PanOpera, the goal at the moment is for the organization to create small, more accessible concerts before transitioning back to the full productions they were doing before COVID-19.
“We’re thinking our trajectory right now is going to be free concerts with professional local singers, and then probably moving from there into chamber opera, which can be done either with small instrumental ensembles or just with piano,” DeLugan told Reminder Publishing. “I think our main motivation is to bring in this idea of community support and make sure that we are accessible as an organization to people from all economic situations to folks who are retired who are not able to travel to major cities and on fixed incomes again, and to students as well, because we have really vibrant music programs in the valley.”
History behind PanOpera
PanOpera was originally run by Jenna Rae and Hugh Keelan, Brattleboro, Vermont-based performers who founded the company almost a decade ago. After producing a couple concerts, Alan Schneider, an operatic tenor and longtime educator in Smith College’s theater department, took the company’s reigns and re-imagined it as a sole proprietorship.
During his time as the lead, PanOpera spearheaded a lot of full productions, mainly with orchestras on the stage at the Academy of Music and in collaboration with the Northampton Arts Council. DeLugan said they also partnered with a lot of local performing arts groups for productions, like the Pioneer Valley Ballet.
DeLugan, who has performed in many productions and also handled a lot of the daily tasks with the company, said there was considerable enthusiasm in the community for a group like PanOpera.
“Northampton is a very educated area with a lot of current and former professors, people who really have an appreciation for classical music and the arts,” said DeLugan. “We have tons of classical music organizations, chamber groups, full orchestras, so culturally, there is a demand for it.”
As with anything else involving live theater, PanOpera eventually had to navigate through turbulent times during COVID-19.
DeLugan said they produced a couple of virtual recitals utilizing a warehouse, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to forge on without being able to perform in a live setting.
“Those [productions] were great, the output was great, but the energy sort of dropped, the funding dropped, the momentum sort of dropped, and we kind of didn’t know what to do at that point,” DeLugan said of that time.
Despite those tumultuous times, DeLugan and she and her colleagues Emily Baker and Ramsey Kurdi decided that it was important to carry on the legacy of PanOpera, so they asked Schneider if they could continue the company as a nonprofit. Schneider was enthused.
“Because the classical music world just nationwide is so small, especially in Western New England, where everybody knows everybody, we wanted to find a way to continue on together,” said DeLugan, a member of PanOpera since the beginning.
The present and future of PanOpera
Because DeLugan, Baker and Kurdi are all full-time music teachers in different cities, DeLugan said they are trying to ease the company back into the limelight.
“We didn’t feel like we had the time to do the fundraising necessary to jump right back into producing full-length operas, so what we’re hoping to do is just create smaller, more accessible concerts for the time being,” DeLugan said.
The organization’s current trajectory includes spearheading free concerts with professional local singers before transitioning to chamber opera performances. Eventually, it hopes to stage those full productions again. For right now though, its focus is on creating smaller-scale concerts for people in all economic situations as well as for those who are studying music in the area.
“I think is really important to be able to present to those studying music and who might graduate and go on to cities or hopefully even stick around and sort of enrich the cultural tapestry here in Western Mass,” said DeLugan, who also teaches music at Smith College.
One aspect of PanOpera that they continue to pride themselves on is being an “artist-led” organization where a lot of what they create is driven by each individual artist’s perspective and strengths.
Take the upcoming January concert, “In Our Opera Era,” as an example. According to PanOpera’s social media, audiences will experience scenes, arias, duets and trios spanning opera’s many eras including the intricate counterpoint of Mozart, the virtuosity of Italian Bel Canto, the soaring lyricism of Verismo and the complex harmonies of the 20th century.
With such a diverse palette of opera styles, taking an artist-led approach, as PanOpera has done so many times before, is important.
“We’re not coming from it from the standpoint that’s more typical where we pick an opera or a list of repertoire and then go and find people to fill in those roles,” DeLugan said, of the January show.
“We build it out from the people that we have. And I think that the result of that is that you end up with really, really high-quality performances because the repertoire is matched to the people.”
PanOpera used to be much larger, but DeLugan said only she, Baker and Kurdi are currently running the company, but the performers they are bringing in for the January show have been involved with the organization one way or another over the years.
Eventually, DeLugan said they would love to explore the idea of becoming a repertory company, where they would have a core group of performers for shows, but that idea is not set in stone yet.
They also hope to have other concerts and collaborative opportunities, but for now, the focus is on the January concert and solidifying the nonprofit approach, while continuing PanOpera’s legacy as a place where a classical art form can live on.
“We have these skills, we have this training, we have this love of this art form that we just want to share with people and give them an opportunity to experience, no matter how familiar you are with it or your income level,” DeLugan said. “It’s a labor of love, and we’re really excited to just share it with folks.”
The Jan. 27 concert is at 6 p.m., and DeLugan said more information about the show will come out soon.
Readers can visit PanOpera’s new site, panopera.us, for more information. They can also donate to the organization by visiting its Paypal link, paypal.com/paypalme/panopera?.