Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Florida Grand Opera’s double bill at Broward Center has quite a story behind it
Composer Michael Ching’s first job in opera was with Florida Grand Opera (FGO) in the early 1980s. It was then known as the Greater Miami Opera, he remembers.
“I was called the music assistant at first and then I was the music administrator,” he says. “I conducted the chorus and coached singers, that’s how I came up.”
Now after almost 40 years, Ching returns to FGO as composer and conductor of “Buoso’s Ghost,” a sequel to Giacomo Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi,” which is headed to Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday, Feb. 9, and Sunday,
Feb. 11, after three days at Miami’s Arsht Center.
The double bill features Puccini’s classic in Italian in the first half and Ching’s original in English during the second half. Both have English and Spanish supertitles.
We all know how you can write a sequel to a blockbuster movie, but a sequel to an opera completed in 1917, which takes place in the 13th century?
Ching explains that his opera begins with the last 20 seconds of the music from “Schicchi” and is based on the premise that the character of Buoso Donati did not die of natural causes but under more sinister circumstances. In “Schicchi,” Donati’s will has left everything to the church, but Schicchi finds a way to inherit his wealth.
Ching remembers the conception of “Buoso’s Ghost,” which happened during auditions while he was artistic director at Opera Memphis.
“We were just shooting the breeze about what happens to our favorite operatic characters when the opera ends: the Germont family in ‘La Traviata,’ the young lovers in ‘Così fan tutte,’ Cio-CioSan’s son in ‘Madame Butterfly,’ ” he says. “The subject of ‘Schicchi’ came up and what happens next.”
It’s comic and eclectic, Ching says, with the absurdity of his writing the score by borrowing various American musical styles and quotations.
“If someone in the audience hears something that they think they recognize, there’s a fairly good chance that they are correct,” says Ching, adding that he took Puccini’s motifs and intertwined them with the styles of Sondheim, for instance.
“You know, it’s a perennial subject, the mix of greed and family relations. It’s a subject that never ages.”
Ching says he enjoys the collaborative process of opera and welcomes ideas from directors and actors, but “one of the things that I did request was that I wanted the pairing done in a traditional Florentine setting in the Middle Ages and they honored that.”
The piece premiered at Opera Memphis on Jan. 25, 1997, and was last performed by the Detroit Opera just before COVID19 hit, he says..
“The thing that you have to remember, of course, or you want to remind your audience, is that ‘Schicchi’ features one of the five best well-known arias in all opera, ‘O mio babbino caro,’ ” he says.
While it is frequently performed as a solo, Ching says part of the fun of hearing the famous aria is experiencing it in the context of the opera where it originated.
“Gianni Schicchi” is the only comic opera in Puccini’s repertoire.
“There are comic operas. ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ for instance, has charming, funny bits, but it isn’t laughout-loud funny. I think ‘Gianni’ is just laugh-outloud funny and hopefully audiences will think so, too,” Ching says.
After all, the time is right for audiences to see a comic opera, to leave the problems of the world outside of the theater door.
“A lot of arts organizations have been asked to do light programming for a while,” he says. “It is certainly a reaction to the times, where you know audiences are looking to forget about the news and to have a fun time.”
What: Florida Grand Opera’s “Gianni Schicchi” and “Buoso’s Ghost”
When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 9, and Saturday, Feb. 11 Where: Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale Tickets: $70-$200 Information: 800-741-1010; FGO.org