Sinfonietta will close season with mini opera

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Apr 20, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The last will be a first for the Louisiana Sinfonietta.

For it’s in the final concert of the season when the Sinfonietta will perform its first opera. Or mini opera, as Dinos Constantinides calls it.

“This opera will have a very little stage,” he said.

“I would call it semi-staged, because it’s not played up high on a stage, and we’re not in an orchestra pit. The opera will be on the left, and we’ll be on the right.”

And it will all take place at 2 p.m. Sunday, April 27, in First Baptist Church of Baton Rouge.

Constantinides conducts this group, which usually performs concert music. But the conductor also is a composer.

“And I wrote this opera,” he said.

“It’s been performed many times in New York, and it’s won a couple of awards.”

The opera, Imitations, is based on a text by author and LSU English professor David Madden. Constantinides describes the scene as simple — two women chatting at a table.

There are no scene changes, and the characters remain on stage for the entire performance, which is about 35 minutes.

“This will be the first part of the concert, and First Baptist Church is really a wonderful place for us to perform this opera,” Constatinides said.

Constantinides’ composition was first performed in 1975 with a slightly different format requiring a dancer. He originally titled the piece Fugue for Two Voices, and it was performed twice in Baton Rouge as a part of the city’s Festival of the Arts.

The composer then reworked and retitled the piece, which won the Brooklyn Chamber Opera Composition Contest in 1981 and the Outstanding Achievement Award in the first Midwest Chamber Opera Festival in Ohio in 1985. It has since been performed in Carnegie Hall.