Local man’s first major opera set for Okanagan debut
Antony Knight wrote Oh Alfred! for the Vernon Proms Classical music festival
A 23-year-old Kelowna man is happy to see his first large project come to life at home in the Okanagan as Oh Alfred! an opera he wrote will be performed Sunday at the Vernon Proms Classical Musical Festival.
“It feels really good to make for the people that were in the community I grew up and became an artist in,” said Antony Knight, who spent his younger years doing musical theatre and performing arts non-stop in Kelowna.
Aspiring to become a musical theatre performer, Knight went into Opera Performance, but fell in love with creating the art.
Knight is attending UBC, double majoring in Opera Performance and Composition.
After singing in an opera with the Vernon Proms three years ago, Knight discovered the festival was producing new operas written by local artists.
He approached them about writing an opera for the festival and they agreed.
It took Knight about two years to complete the work, teaming up with librettist Alexander Allen to make the work as entertaining as possible.
Although Knight was commissioned to write a complete two-act opera with eight or nine characters, a full orchestra and chorus of singers, because of COVID, he had to scale it back.
Sunday’s performance will be one hour, with four of the seven scenes and four singers accompanied by piano.
Oh Alfred! is loosely based on George Eliot’s the Lifted Veil, with Knight and Allen keeping the characters but writing their own story with them.
Oh Alfred! follows a clairvoyant named Latimer. After his estranged brother, Alfred, becomes engaged to Bertha, the couple requests one of Latimer’s visions as a wedding gift.
Knight describes the work as a weird mix, starting comedically and over the top as the audience is thrust into an entertaining farcical distorted world.
As the opera progresses, the sinister side of the story takes over and it finishes with a creepy, scarier ending.
Knight’s music is accessible and the audience will hear things like waltzes and Irish traditional music in it.
For Knight, opera offers the most immersive artistic experience as well as limitless stories to be told on stage.
“There’s so much you can do that hasn’t been done yet, “he said.
While the new opera scene is growing with indie opera companies trying to break barriers and give audiences fresh things with new styles of music, the large opera companies that people think of when they think of opera are still dominated by the classics.
While Knight is in love with many of the classics, he’s happy to be part of the movement that can maybe try and change that.
Oh Alfred! goes Sunday at 7:30 p.m. at the Vernon and District Performing Arts Centre.
Tickets are by donation.
For more information about the concerts at the Vernon Proms Classical Music Festival and tickets, go online to vernonproms.ca.