Pittsburgh Opera is used to holding free concerts in the chamber space within its historic Strip District headquarters. Due to the pandemic, those offerings have moved online with concerts celebrating Valentine’s Day and Black History Month.
“Songs from the Heart: A Valentine from Pittsburgh Opera,” features the company’s resident artists performing a variety of duets, arias and ensemble numbers chosen for a romantic musical evening. The concert begins at 5:30 p.m. Sunday and will be broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook Live.
“In the past, our Valentine’s Day brown bag operas have been enormously popular,” said artistic director Christopher Hahn. “We would oftentimes have 300 people in the actual space with kids and families and older folks. Now we’ve got an even wider range because of the online platform that we’ve got. It’s a great opportunity.”
The concert will include decorations and costumes as the resident artists bring to life such classics as Fenton’s aria from Verdi’s “Falstaff,” “Make Believe” from “Show Boat,” and “Sing to Love” from Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus.”
As part of the celebration, viewers can order personalized Valentine video-grams with greetings from one of the resident artists and chocolate caramels from Edward Marc Chocolatier. They can also sponsor on-screen dedications for someone special during “Songs from the Heart.” For more information or to stream the concert, go to pittsburghopera.org/valentine.
For Black History Month, Pittsburgh Opera will host “I, Too, Am America,” a program of music from African-American composers Florence Price and William Grant Still. Price was the first African-American woman to have one of her works performed by a major orchestra when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra played her first symphony in 1933. Still remains one of the most prominent Black composers in the opera world.
The concert features the opera’s head of music, Glenn Lewis, on piano and baritone Yazid Gray. The live broadcast begins at 7 p.m. Feb. 26, on YouTube. Register at pittsburghopera.org.
Hahn pointed out parallels between Pittsburgh Opera, founded in 1939 by five local women, and the National Negro Opera Company, formed two years later by Mary Cardwell Dawson in Homewood. He noted a photo of Dawson and Price together.
“This is not a camera trained on the keyboard and the singer,” Mr. Hahn said. “This is a program we wanted to use to elevate our relationship with the National Negro Opera Company and elevate the story of William Grant Still and Florence Price’s struggles in their careers.”
The concert will feature Still’s Three Visions for piano solo and Price’s piano sonata in E minor as well as several of her songs set to poetry by celebrated African American writers including Paul Laurence Dunbar, County Cullen and Langston Hughes.
The broadcast of “I, Too, am America,” will be followed immediately by a live Meet the Artist Zoom meeting with Hahn and the performers discussing the music of the concert.
“Part of my mission as the artistic leader of the company is to ensure that our audience is offered as wide a variety of music and opera as possible,” he said. “That encompasses both the most familiar, the most loved, the most recognizable tunes and pieces to the newest and the most unrecognizable, the rarest.
“We’ve got a lot in the Valentine’s Day program, which is very familiar and warm and celebratory and part of our heritage almost. And then the ‘I, Too, am America,’ a completely different challenge. This is discovery for our audience.”
Tyler Dague: rdague@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1569 and on Twitter @rtdague.
First Published: February 12, 2021, 12:00 p.m.
