6 days to the Hansel premiere!

Elena Doria, the Met’s Children’s Chorus Director, started teaching the music for Hansel and Gretel to her charges last spring. She says that, unlike most of the other operas that the Children’s Chorus members appear in, this one is a bit easier for them to learn. First of all it is in English so they don’t have to spend as much time working on the language, and secondly they come to the opera knowing what it is about. Doria says that she generally works with about 110 children throughout the course of the year, however she gets calls from parents all the time about hearing their children. So, every Thursday she holds auditions for promising six, seven, and eight year-olds. “I don’t generally audition children beyond the age of ten. Of course there are exceptions, and we always need more boys.”

For Hansel and Gretel she has selected 29 youngsters from the chorus—mostly ranging in age from ten to thirteen, with one girl who is sixteen. While both Carmen and La Bohème have as many as 35 children in each performance, this is one of the few operas in the repertory that feature children as a major part of the story line. In explaining how she decides who to cast, Doria says, “I’ve worked with so many of them for so long, by the time they are ready for a show I just know who sings better and who can handle it!”

There’s no fooling around when you are working in the Met Children’s chorus. Elena clearly loves what she is doing and passionately imparts that love and respect for the art of opera into her students. “I don’t ever want to hear ‘I can’t,’” she says. In fact, her students sometimes refer to her as “Judge Judy” after television’s Judy Sheindlin, the no-nonsense star of the syndicated courtroom reality show, Judge Judy, and whose signed photo adorns the wall of the chorus room.

Doria explains that the number one lesson she wants to teach her kids is to never give up, a lesson she learned for herself early in her career when she went to an audition and was rejected. The next day she found that they were still auditioning, so she changed her dress, used a different spelling of her name, and went back and auditioned again with a different song. That time she got the job. I think it is safe to say that with Elena Doria’s students on stage the Witch just doesn’t have a chance.

This entry was posted by Charles Sheek on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 6:52 am and is filed under New Production Countdown. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.