New theater sharpens vocal-symposium sound

Colorado College's new Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center has already been one star of the college's Summer Festival of the Arts. Both the Summer Music Festival and the Extraordinary Dance Festival held performances in the new south theater.

But no group stands to benefit more from the new space than the Vocal Arts Symposium, which has its first performance today and continues through Aug. 10.

"We're excited about giving its stage a test run," said Martile Rowland, the symposium's artistic director.

"We love Packard Hall - our first and last concerts are there - but this theater has actual lights, dressing rooms and TV monitors backstage."

That's good for the opera and musictheater scenes that make up most of the symposium's seven programs.

But another difference is just as important: Packard Hall was designed for instrumental music, and words are difficult to understand in its reverberant acoustics.

Not so in Cornerstone, which is electronically tunable to create any type of acoustic environment. Rowland said that the symposium's informational audition - during which Rowland and the faculty evaluate the 50 student singers - showed that the acoustics are good for the voice even with minimal enhancement.

"You could hear every word, if the singer sang it," she said.

This year's students come from all over the country, as well as China and Mexico.

Each of the four programs of scenes is approximately three-fourths opera and onefourth musical theater. Music-theater scenes range from Leonard Bernstein's "West Side Story" to Cy Coleman's "City of Angels." Opera scenes range from Gluck's pastoral "Orfee et Eurydice" to Poulenc's tragic "Dialogue of the Carmelites," with a heavy dose of Puccini - the only composer featured on all the scenes programs.

Singers - and audiences - love Puccini, but Rowland said that wasn't the reason for including scenes from "La Boheme," "Gianni Schicchi," "Madame Butterfly" and "La Rondine." Those choices were made after the informational audition.

"We don't choose our repertoire before the symposium," Rowland said. "We pick it based on the people we have. This year we just have a lot of people with Puccini voices, and I wanted to give them a taste of this music."

details
VOCAL ARTS SYMPOSIUM

When: Today-Aug. 10
Where: "Death by Aria" and "Salute to Disney" at Packard Hall, Colorado College; all other performances at Edith Kinney Gaylord Cornerstone Arts Center, Colorado College
Tickets: $15 general admission/$10 CC ID/$5 students; 520-7469, 1-866-464-2626 or www.ticketswest.com; no additional fees if purchased at the Pikes Peak Center box office, 190 S. Cascade Ave., or at Worner Campus Center, 902 N. Cascade Ave.

• "Death by Aria," 7 p.m. today
• Jazz Sundae Sunday 3 p.m. Sunday
• Let's Make a Scene, 7 p.m. Aug. 1
• Scene-O-Rama, 3 p.m. Aug. 3
• Scenic View, 7 p.m. Aug. 6
• The Scene Stealers, 7 p.m. Aug. 8
• Grand Finale, "Salute to Disney," 3 p.m. Aug. 10