Tag: Des Moines Metro Opera
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Earlier this year, I experienced Des Moines Metro Opera for the first time. It is a smaller company, born in the same era and with a similar mission to Chicago Opera Theater and Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and one that occupies a particularly brave space in Iowa and the larger Midwest cultural landscape. Last…
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An immense censer hung motionless over the stage, illuminated by four standing candelabras and suspended above the pit orchestra. The scale of it was unsettling. For a long moment, those were the only visible objects. Then, one by one, members of the chorus filed stately into the Pote Theatre, their measured procession lending the scene…
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I am headed to Indianola this week for Des Moines Metro Opera’s production of Szymanowski’s King Roger, a piece I recently previewed for Seen and Heard alongside the rest of the company’s festival season. There is a small irony in this trip. I spent seven years in central Iowa, four at Iowa State and three…
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Central Iowa in July is not a place most people associate with opera. The corn and soybean fields south of Des Moines run flat and full beneath a wide sky, the heat presses down, and the towns along Highway 69 move at the pace of a long summer. Indianola has a grain elevator, a small…