Parea Virtual Recital Series Co-Founders Will Meinert and Emily Misch.
(Santa Fe, NM) - As the pandemic continues to interrupt our ability to gather for live performance, opera singers around the world are actively meeting the moment. Over the last six months, many have applied their energies and imaginations to various virtual initiatives that, in no uncertain terms, pave the way to what could become standard across the performing arts - equally-weighted live and virtual programming running side by side. The Santa Fe Opera’s General Director Robert K. Meya said as much in a recent Associated Press article, highlighting the company’s well-received Songs from Santa Fe virtual opening nights.
Two singers who’ve taken up this digital / virtual challenge are soprano Emily Misch and bass Will Meinert. Based in Herndon, Virginia, Emily was set to be a Glimmerglass Festival young artist this summer, while Will was scheduled for his second season as a Santa Fe Opera apprentice artist. As their summers and lives changed, they began executing an ambitious plan. The results thus far are impressive; as of this writing, the Parea Series format appears to be the only one of its kind online. Viewers are treated to wonderful, longer form recitals with expert guest conversation around a given topic. Parea’s shorter form Instagram promotional videos also deliver maximum interest - and bang - at around three minutes (see below). If you’re seeking classical music entertainment with interesting, connected conversation in uncertain times, look no further. - JM
By Emily Misch and Will Meinert
How do we maintain personal connection without personal contact?
As opera singers, my partner Will and I have become experts at nurturing connections over physical distance. Our biggest success story may be our relationship: we met while performing Derrick Wang’s Scalia/Ginsburg together in 2018, then spent most of our first year as a couple on opposite sides of the country in different opera residencies. But we stayed connected.
Musicians get to be very good at this. One of the most maddening but also wonderful aspects of our profession is how we’re constantly traveling and forming new communities. It’s maddening because these communities are physically fleeting—at the end of a production, we generally go our separate ways—but wonderful because the ties we create often grow and strengthen over years of working together in different contexts.
However, with the current public health crisis, those same ties can feel stretched thin. We no longer have the promise of “see you next season,” because none of us know when we’ll really be back in the theater. As the distance settles in and begins to seem more permanent, how do we nurture these personal connections?
For Will and me, the answer was to create something new: virtual recitals in a unique format that allows us to look deeply and differently at the music we perform, safely collaborate, and strengthen our connections with musical friends.
In our Parea Series, Will and I perform music and then discuss it with expert Guest Artists in short video interviews. Our full-length recitals put these different perspectives in conversation to create a concentrated fusion of music and discussion available on a “pay what you want” and “watch when you want” basis. No in-person contact is involved in our work; our productions are completely COVID-safe for both audiences and artists.
We believe that the personal connections involved in making music are just as interesting and important as the music itself, and that these ties bring us closer together, even while we’re physically apart.
CLICK IMAGE TO WATCH: Parea Series’ “Crisis as Catharsis” virtual recital promo and preview via Instagram.
Our Guest Artists are friends and mentors from a wide variety of our musical communities; while it would be rare for these people to all meet in person, our remote format allows us to have deeper conversations with a wider range of perspectives than would be possible at an in-person recital.
In case you’re wondering, we’ve taken our name from the Greek word parea, a concept deeply rooted in Greek culture. Parea suggests that personal connections and lively conversations with circles of friends are meaningful, valuable, and indispensable parts of life. In our work so far, this has proven to be very true.
In our first recital, we performed music centered around themes of despair and hope, defiance in the face of oppression, and humor—all ways one might seek relief during a maddening and confusing time. We interviewed five of our musical friends: director Alison Moritz, Yale professor Richard Lalli, opera factotum Rob Ainsley, and coaches Vera Danchenko-Stern and Ken Weiss. For our second recital, we’re performing Menotti’s The Telephone, a short comic opera that, at its core, is about the ways that people communicate, connect, and adapt to reach each other. We’re interviewing friends old and new: composer Bruce Adolphe, pianist Anna Betka, baritone Trevor Neal (Artistic Director of Newport Music Festival) and, of course, our director—the phenomenal Audrey Chait, who directed us in that production of Scalia/Ginsburg two years ago!
Although we’re physically separated from our musical communities, our ideas about and passion for the music we perform keeps us in conversation, and deeply connected to each other. With the Parea Series, we invite you to join our circle of friends, and experience the personal connection that music—making it, talking about it, listening to it—can bring.
Visit Emily and Will at Pareaseries.com
Follow Parea Virtual Recital Series on Instagram.