Opera is, by its nature, larger than life, but are you ready for a Queen of the Night with a head the size of an Olympic swimming pool? That’s what you’ll see in the Butler Opera Center’s new staging of The Magic Flute, opening this weekend in UT’s McCullough Theatre. The wicked queen’s countenance dwarfs the human figures before her in a production that employs the wonders of technology to make The Magic Flute more, well, magical. Lighting designer Amarante Lucero, a professor in the UT Theatre & Dance Department, is the man responsible for this colossal queen, creating her with the help of a new lighting system named DL.2 Digital Light, which can project a live camera feed of performers onto a screen and allow 2-D characters to interact with a 3-D live cast. In this show, only five performers appear in the flesh before the audience; the rest are backstage, acting and singing before cameras and relying on monitors to see the conductor and cast onstage that they’re playing off of. Their images, along with all the scenery, are fed into DL.2, which manipulates them for large-scale projections. The result is a kind of flat, storybook fantasy world into which these few living humans have been dropped.
This 21st century approach to Mozart is augmented by a similarly modern remix of the opera’s orchestration, with all the strings, horns, and percussion of an orchestra replaced with a string quartet and two players on Musical Instrument Digital Interface keyboards. UT School of Music professor Russell Pinkston, an expert in electronic music and composition, was charged with reworking Mozart’s instrumentation into a form that sounded like the original but could be performed by two keyboardists playing several different instrumental parts at once. Doctor of Musical Arts student Jonathan Kolm helped divvy up and assign the musical parts to the two keyboards, and Pinkston channeled the sound through a system involving a Kurzweil MIDI keyboard controller, a Dell Inspiron laptop, M-Audio FA-66 FireWire Audio/MIDI Interface, and Kontakt II and Ableton Live software.
Now, all that technospeak doesn’t mean you have to have a code monkey to appreciate the production. The Mozart is still Mozart, as audiences in San José, Costa Rica, and Mazatlán, Mexico, discovered when the production premiered there earlier this summer and as hundreds of area middle schoolers and high schoolers will discover when they see special performances of the production this month. And as you’ll discover if you visit the McCullough this week or next. When new tools become available, we use them to enliven the audience’s experience of a work onstage. But the story – and the magic – is the same as ever.
The Magic Flute runs Sept. 14-16, 21, and 23; Friday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 7pm, at the McCullough Theatre, UT campus. For more information, visit www.utpac.org.
This article appears in September 14 • 2007.