This year, the Cape Town Opera celebrates 25 years of South African voices after cultivating a distinct local style over the past three decades, Cape {town} Etc reports.
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Since the end of apartheid, Cape Town Opera cast unique and dramatic scenes that reflect the country’s rich cultural diversity.
The company was co-founded five years after the end of apartheid by Italian-born Angelo Gobbato, a former singer. In March, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award for his contribution to South African opera.
Gobbato staged Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with international lead singers during the early years. More recently, the 25th birthday run of the same opera concluded with an all-South African cast, featuring only one white singer.
The 81-year-old told AFP the company got ‘a lot of interest from black students who wanted to be trained in opera’ after the white-minority rule was scrapped.
‘This was very unusual because, at the Cape Town opera school, we had so-called coloured students – non-white students – but no black students.’
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Over the years, Gobbato’s students included internationally acclaimed Pretty Yende and Levy Sekgapane and many others came from community choirs trained in the Western singing fashion.
‘They responded very naturally to opera and they wanted to sing it. I feel like a grandfather,’ he adds. ‘I haven’t got physical children or grandchildren, but seeing students, I am desperately proud of them and convinced that I have done something for the good of the country.’
Soprano Brittany Smith, the heroine in this year’s run of Lucia di Lammermoor, told AFP that opera in South Africa used to be a niche performing art with mainly white audiences.
‘Now, Cape Town Opera is standing on the forefront of reintroducing opera and making it more accessible to everyone, and that makes us relevant.’
Critic and author Wayne Muller says stagings of classic European operas after apartheid have shaped a style that is uniquely South African in the way characters and music are portrayed and with locations that are identifiable to local audiences.
‘This process of transforming the arts and opera in South Africa has not ended by any means,’ he adds. ‘Nonetheless, there is an ease with opera as being African and the possibilities that even the standard Western European repertoire brings to make opera relevant here.
‘Opera, as scholars and artists have expressed, has become a South African genre – an art form that is also from here.’
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