Chautauqua School of Music Artistic and Music Director Timothy Muffitt leads the Music School Festival Orchestra in a performance of “Gathering Together, 1995” by Roger Briggs during its opening night July 15 in the Amphitheater.
In an evening full of music and storytelling, the Chautauqua Opera Conservatory and the Music School Festival Orchestra under the baton Maestro Timothy Muffitt and direction of Conservatory Interim Director John Matsumoto Giampietro will join forces to perform Nino Rota’s one-act opera I due timidi at 8:15 p.m. tonight in the Amphitheater. This program will honor the legacy of the late Opera Conservatory Director Marlena Malas, who led the Voice Program at Chautauqua for over four decades, and passed on Dec. 4, 2023 at 87 years old.
Marlena Malas works with a Chautauqua Voice Program student in 2013.
Divided into two portions, the program will first honor Malas with remarks from Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill and Deborah Sunya Moore, senior vice president and chief program officer. A tribute video will be screened in the Amp, and the Opera Conservatory and MSFO will perform an orchestral suite from Malas’ beloved Der Rosenkavalier.
Matsumoto Giampietro said the evening is a tribute to Malas’ dedication over 40 years to instructing and inspiring generations of young singers at Chautauqua — upwards of 2,000 — and her dedication to the growth of the Voice Program and Opera Conservatory.
“It fulfills her one unwavering mission for the conservatory to feature young voices singing beautifully, and this opera allows all of them to do that,” he said. “That’s the only thing she wanted from this — to develop young voices and get them to sing beautifully, and we’re fulfilling that mission.”
Muffit and Malas conceived of a collaboration between the MSFO and what was then called the Voice Program shortly after Muffitt took his position 25 years ago. On top of being one of the most influential voice teachers in the country, Muffitt said, Malas also brought an extraordinary mix of artistic vision and sensibility in understanding how the human voice can achieve its highest potential.
Marlena Malas works with baritone John Autry during a masterclass in 1995.
“Most important was her unwavering dedication to her students,” Muffitt said. “When you came into my Marlena’s world, you weren’t just showing up for a lesson once a week. You were entering her world. She enveloped her students and cared for them in every way possible.”
After honoring Malas, the MFSO and Opera Conservatory will perform Rota’s I due timidi, a one-act romantic-comic opera composed in 1950 that follows two young people who have fallen in love and are too shy to reveal their true feelings to each other.
“The music is actually the magic of what spurs the imagination, because this is done with very minimal sets, props and costumes,” said Jen Pitt, the opera’s stage director. “The music brings the different colors and exciting events in the opera to life.”
Putting together an opera, with a live orchestra, in one week is a “big undertaking,” Muffitt said, “and everyone has to be 100% in the game all the time.”
“Anytime we can have intimate exposure to how another artist in another art form approaches the creative process — or the recreated process, in the case with music — we have opportunities to learn,” Muffitt said. “Singing is the most natural way of making music. So as instrumentalists get an opportunity to make music with a singer, they can tap into that fundamental element of music making and have that inform the way they approach their own instrument.”
The Conservatory has been rehearsing for three weeks, and though the cast began rehearsing with the orchestra on Friday, Pitt said the vocalists have taken ownership of the process and brought their own fresh ideas to the opera while working through scenes.
Marlena Malas receives a standing ovation during a reception in her honor Aug. 5, 2022, in McKnight Hall.
Giampietro, who directed I due timidi last year at Juilliard, where he’s stage director and a vocal arts acting faculty member, said the conservatory’s faculty and students have been vital to bringing the story to the Chautauqua audience.
“What I want people to understand is that what they see up on stage is the result of these world-class faculty and coaches who have prepared the students working at such a high level,” he said. “This cohort, in particular, is one of the strongest groups that we’ve had, and it really is a showcase for the entire conservatory and everything that it takes to give this gift to the Chautauqua audience.”
For Muffitt, both Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier and the Nino Rota work are about passion — they are love stories, after all. There’s a lot of drama with a comedic element in I due timidi, he said, but “it’s also deeply tragic because it’s a pure love that goes unrealized.”
“Der Rosenkavalier has to be some of the most sublimely touching music in the repertoire,” Muffitt said. “It is almost its own musical language even compared with (Strauss’) own works; this is a piece that stands alone in its emotional vocabulary. It has an extraordinary power to reach right into the heart of the listener.”
