Houston voice teacher joins two Opera in Ozarks shows

Megan Gryga, a singer and voice teacher from Houston, is spending her second summer at Opera in the Ozarks for its 66th season.

Gryga grew up around music but wasn't interested in performing until her seventh-grade talent show, where she sang "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" from My Fair Lady -- in full costume and accent -- and won the competition.

"I got such a high from performing, I fell in love with classical music and performing and inspiring other people," she says. "It wasn't really a thing for me -- it was how I could make other people feel. How I could move them just by performing, or make them feel happy or whatever they need to feel."

And now she is out of graduate school, joining Opera in the Ozarks once again to move people with her performances.

People should "give [opera] a try," she says. "It's gorgeous, gorgeous music, and the themes are relevant. It hits your emotions. It's such a high art form, it's hard to describe what it does for you unless you experience it."

Gryga will perform in two of the nonprofit's four productions this summer: as Donna Anna, one of the lead women, in Mozart's Don Giovanni and as Giorgetta, the lead female soprano role, in Giacomo Puccini's Il Tabarro. While some singers learn the words of a foreign language opera without speaking the language, that process is a little easier for Gryga; she has studied four European languages.

"My university required that you also learn the language, and I think that's extraordinarily important to know how and why the composer did it like that -- it makes so much more sense. There's a difference between knowing the words and really understanding them," she says.

Just because the singer understands what she is singing about doesn't mean the audience will. Fear of not understanding the story scares away plenty of people who could potentially love the art form.

"People will come and try something when they think they know the story [like Pinocchio]," says Nancy Preis, the general director of Opera in the Ozarks. "What they don't understand is we use supertitles. It's not dumbing down opera, it's making it accessible."

Even when a show is in English, the company will still sometimes use supertitles because of the potential difficulty in understanding the words of the arias. In this way, and with outreach performances, Opera of the Ozarks is striving to be more accessible and appeal to a wider audience. Pinocchio is this year's outreach production at public libraries across Northwest Arkansas.

"We take something out to people that is easy to swallow," Preis says about bringing the fairy tale classic to the community. "Then you push [the idea] that we're not expensive, we're not haughty, we're not hard to like. The only hard thing about it is getting there."

In the six decades Opera in the Ozarks has been a summer music festival and training program for up-and-coming opera professionals, the caliber of work has only improved. Preis says that 50 years ago, the program hosted mostly high school and college-age singers. Now, Opera in the Ozarks is able to bring in graduate and post-graduate level singers more training, expanding the range of work.

"We're giving them finesse. We turn them from a singer into an artist," Preis says. "We're bringing a level of musical excellence that I think does not exist elsewhere" in the state.

Weekend on 06/16/2016