Pacific MusicWorks Programs
Programs
- The annual professional concert season from October to April
- The annual summer workshop (Accademia d’Amore) 10 days in mid-August
- The program for primary school children (Early Opera). 10-week programs made by arrangement with the schools
Concert Season
2011/2012 was our first full subscription series. The offerings vary from pure concert performances – mainly baroque vocal repertoire at Daniel’s recital Hall - to staged performances in theaters and churches.
In building up to this first full season we have presented many individual productions including:
- 2009 – Monteverdi’s Ulysses production by William Kentridge with the Handspring Puppet Company of South Africa at the Moore theater for 5 performances.
- 2010/11 – Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers and Handel’s Esther both at St. James Cathedral. Heiner Goebbel’s Songs of Wars I have seen in a double-bill with Monteverdi’s Combattimento at On the Boards. Also a production of Handel’s Acis and Galatea in a staged roduction at Town Hall.
Accademia d’Amore was founded in Bremen in 1997 and transplanted to Seattle in 2005. Each year it gives professional training to 30 qualified singers and 10 instrumentalists in the skills they need for a career in baroque opera. Many graduates have gone on to successful careers in this field.
Early Opera was established with a pilot project in the spring of 2011 at Sacajawea primary school. A composition by Carol Sams (originally written for Sacajawea in 1985) called Chicken Little was successfully revived with the Kindergarten class of 2011. There over 30 further works by Sams - these will form the core of this program as it expands.
Recent Successes and Current Challenges
The August 2011 version of the Accademia d’Amore was the best so far. We had the largest student body ever (we have reached the absolute maximum on that front) and we expanded the faculty from 9 to 10 and we drew two capacity crowds to the two performances at the end of the workshop. The improvements in the course itself are due to constant tweaking of the organizational formula, and the outward success that led to the large pool of applicants is mainly through word-of-mouth from enthusiastic graduates of former years. Also there were a significant number of students returning for a second or even third year. Our impact and profile in the community have been raised since taking up residence at the Cornish College of the Arts – also through the fact that many of our faculty are directly involved in the new Early Music faculty at Cornish, directed by our director, Stephen Stubbs.
This summer we employed a videographer to follow the course through the rehearsals and classes up to and including the final performance. The results will be a way of spreading the word more effectively to the next generation of students.
Our present needs are mainly for infra-structure to support the hiring of our executive director in July 2011. We need rented office space and several pieces of office hardware such as a printer and a telephone. For performances we also need to acquire a projector for use with sur-titles and other projection needs. The new initiative of music-theater in the primary schools will need to find ways to subsidize the schools to be able to afford this program. Particularly in the face of global budget cuts in the schools – which have a disproportionately negative effect on arts education.