Annual Kids Euro Festival: Mozart's opera "Bastien und Bastienne" with the DC Youth Orchestra and soloists
Young musicians in formal wear, with a serious mien, holding violins upright, marched to their chairs. The conductor called for quiet, in preparation for the music to begin. This wasn’t easily achieved. Surrounded by colorful surges of small and a little bigger children, the proceedings sometimes felt like a pre-school time out, or the restless energy displayed by pre-adolescent children forced indoors during lunch time. The smallest among them sometimes fell asleep in the arms of young mothers. First and second grade girls sometimes gathered at the foot of the stage, entranced like High School Musical fans. Periodically, one small girl or another, in her Saturday best, would get up and deliver an impromptu dance recital.
Adults, from parents to ambassadors sat attentively, one eye on the stage, the heart open to the music, and another eye nervously watching the travels of their children. The children eventually slowed down, lay, sat or stood still, finally captured by beautiful voices, a handsome lad, a pretty girl, and, oh yes, a magician, two of them, actually.
And so they gave in, persuaded, entranced, listening to the music of a kid, one of their own, the 11-year-old small boy named Wolferl.
As a kind of climax to the two-week holiday package of performance and cultural events surrounding the annual Kids Euro Festival, “Bastien and Bastienne”, the Embassy of Austria’s contribution to the festival, was almost a perfect example of what characterized the festival in miniature. The third magician present, a kid by the name of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who composed this children’s opera when he was a child himself, didn’t hurt.
Here, after all, was one of a number of European nations presenting its culture to young children in a way, a setting and a process that the children could inhale it in a way that they would remember long after their natural restlessness was forgotten. Here was a work by an iconic composer who understood children long after he became a quasi-adult in the way that geniuses often are as any performance or hearing of “The Magic Flute” will tell you.
Here were Washington cultural institutions--Jerome Barry and his Embassy Series and the D.C. Youth Orchestra conducted by Jesus Manuel Berard--joining with the Austrian Cultural Forum at the airy, beautiful Embassy of Austria to stage a precocious work by Mozart in two performances for the benefit and appreciation of kids and those responsible for their enlightenment. The kids took the music and magic as if they were party favors.
Here were locally trained musicians playing Mozart’s beautiful music flawlessly, and here two young singers and performers, the stage savvy 17-year-old soprano Katherine Mariko Murray and 13-year-old Noah Noah Winston Donahue (a student of Barry’s), playing the star-crossed, worried lovers Bastien and Bastienne, each unsure of the other’s love, each smitten, just the kind of thing even pre-adolescents understand perfectly.
The two shared the stage with the imposing Steven Scheschareg, the tall Austrian baritone with a very large wizard’s conical and starry hat, who worked his magic with spells to unite the young couple. Children love wizards: they make them gasp and oh and ah, and they express a deep desire to wear the hat. Marc Cioffi and Matthew August shared the role of the narrator, who called himself Wolferl, alias Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as in “I am now twelve years old and I am a composer. You don’t believe me, you say?”
Well, needless to say, they did by the end of the performance, by the end of the morning, the end of the day, and took the notes, the story, the pre-opera work of magician David Morey, he of the disappearing coins and string work, home with them.
The performance was an exemplary, in-the-flesh idea of what the Kids EuroFest 2009, or any time was about. It was European embassies--in this case the Austrian Cultural Forum and its director Andrea Schrammel and ambassador Christian Prosl joining up with Washington institutions--in this case the Embassy Series and the DC Youth Orchestra--to engage Washington area children with offerings of European culture.
Contributed by Gary Tischler
