The East Village Opera Company 'The East Village Opera Company' album

You’ve heard opera, and you’ve heard rock—but you’ve never heard opera rocked like the East Village Opera Company. The East Village Opera Company —a powerhouse five-piece band, a string quartet, and two outstanding vocalists—brings the towering emotion and timeless musicality of opera into the 21st century on its Decca/Universal Classics debut with its inventive, hard-hitting arrangements of the music’s “greatest hits”—including “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto, “Habanera” from Carmen, and “Nessun dorma” from Turandot — performed at full length and in the original languages.

The concept of the East Village Opera Company is totally fresh, but not unprecedented in pop. In 1985, for example, former punk-rock impresario Malcolm McLaren released Fans, an album of “hip-hopera” that brought funky beats and electronic programming to the works of Puccini and Bizet. But EVOC is a whole new thing: an integrated, eleven-strong working band dedicated to rocking the opera and electrifying the classics, as the ensemble has been doing to spectacular effect ever since its New York stage debut in the spring of 2004.

The East Village Opera Company was co-founded by lead singer Tyley Ross and arranger/multi-instrumentalist Peter Kiesewalter. They assembled a full-on rock band, adding two guitars, bass, and drums to Peter’s keyboards, then synched it to a string quartet. A second superb vocalist, AnnMarie Milazzo, was recruited for impassioned duets with Tyley Ross (cf. "Au fond du temple saint," from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers) and soaring solos like “Ebben? — Ne andrò lontana” (from La Wally by Alfredo Catalani).

EVOC’s Decca/Universal Classics debut was produced and recorded in April-July, 2005 by Neil Dorfsman, a three-time Grammy Award winner whose credits include international bestsellers by Sting, Dire Straits, Paul McCartney, and Bjork. The string arrangements were recorded in Prague by the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra featuring lead violinist Pauline Kim.

By embracing what Peter Kiesewalter calls “the pomposity of rock and the pomposity of opera” without demeaning or satirizing either form, the East Village Opera Company flies where countless other “classical-crossover” efforts have failed.

“We have a profound love and respect for the opera,” Peter insists. “But it’s so dramatic, so over the top by today’s standards, that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. You need a little bit of irreverence in it.”

“With modern recording technology and a wide variety of musical styles at our disposal, our goal has been to approach these songs the way we feel the composers would were they alive today,” says Tyley Ross.

Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter on
The Songs of The East Village Opera Company

“Nessun dorma,” from Turandot
Music by Giacomo Puccini;
libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni

TR: This song is a virtual requirement in the repertoire of operatic tenors. Pavarotti’s recording of this song still blows me away.

PK: With a lot of the late Italian and French operatic repertoire, I don’t feel that the orchestration is as important as the melody, the words, and the emotional core. That’s why I feel like I can take great liberties in arranging a song like “Nessun dorma.” We tried for simplicity while
maintaining the air of hushed secrecy—until, by the end, it becomes something massive – his impassioned cry of victory.

"Au fond du temple saint," from The Pearl Fishers (Les Pêcheurs de perles)
Music by Georges Bizet; libretto in French by Michel Carré and Eugène Cormon

TR: This one was composed for two guys who are singing about being in love with the same woman. But we have a guy and a girl singing about how they’re in love with the same woman—which is a whole lot more East Village as far as I’m concerned.

PK: This song is a prime example of a weak libretto but a great composer and a beautiful piece of music. It’s another reason why we don’t perform the English translations of these songs! The original is a lot gentler—we took quite a few liberties in the grandiosity of our treatment.

“Che gelida manina,” from La Bohème
Music by Giacomo Puccini; libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica

TR: There is something about the way Puccini composed that lends his music extremely well to rock treatments. It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album.

PK: The two characters meet, and at the end of the aria the guy who’s introduced himself asks, who are you?

“La donna è mobile,” from Rigoletto
Music by Giuseppe Verdi; libretto in Italian by Francesco Maria Piave

PK: I reharmonized this song to create a somewhat darker, almost Middle Eastern element. I changed the time signature from three to four and just gave it a bit more heft.

TR: Some people want to know what these songs are all about, but in this case - the lyrics are pretty misogynistic- it’s probably best not to know.

“Habanera,” from Carmen
Music by Georges Bizet; libretto in French by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy

PK: I met AnnMarie Milazzo when we both appeared in The Bottom Line’s Downtown Messiah in New York. In Carmen, the heroine sings this aria. She’s sometimes coquettish, sometimes a vixen, but basically a confident, sensual woman—and that’s Annie. She’s not scared to be dramatic, and is very good at conveying emotion, character, and story…The bridge is an interpolation, the Seguidilla dance from the same opera.

TR: Most arias or theatrical songs create a kind of journey, they have an arc - but this one is a ramp that goes straight uphill! I think it was the first song Annie sang with EVOC and it continues to bring the house down.

“Viens, Mallika,” from Lakmé
Music by Léo Delibes; libretto in French by Edmond Gondinet and Philippe Gille

PK: One of the most well known arias in opera. I added a twin lead guitar solo at the end, with the first few bars based on the operatic score. [Guitarist] Ben Butler is all over this record. His incredible musicianship, flexibility, and knowledge of so many styles added immensely to this project.

“Ebben? — Ne andrò lontana,” from La Wally
Music by Alfredo Catalani; libretto in Italian by Luigi Illica

PK: Alfredo Catalani was a one-hit wonder of opera. He wrote many operas but only La Wally was a success. This is the “hit” from La Wally, and a song that every soprano loves to sing. Not much else is known by this composer, but this is an aria I’ve known since childhood.

TR: This is Annie’s tune- she takes it to a whole other level.

Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter,
Principals of The East Village Opera Company

Ottawa, Canada natives Tyley Ross and Peter Kiesewalter bring decades of eclectic musical experience to their groundbreaking new project, the East Village Opera Company (EVOC).

Tyley Ross has been performing since his early teens as a street busker, a cartoon voice-over specialist, an actor, and a professional singer-songwriter with two solo albums to his credit. He was hand picked by Pete Townshend to play the title character in the Canadian production of The Who’s Tommy, and later starred in Miss Saigon on Broadway. As the lead voice of EVOC, Tyley’s controlled power and emotional commitment reflect the early influences of impassioned and iconic singers from both the worlds of opera and pop/rock.

Peter Kiesewalter began piano lessons with his dad at age six, and was a professional musician by the time he graduated high school in 1986. He earned a classical performance degree in clarinet from Ottawa University (with a minor in jazz saxophone) while working in a dizzying array of musical contexts as a keyboardist and reed player.

“The great thing about a small city like Ottawa,” Peter explains, “is that in order to make a living playing music, you had to be very flexible.” He worked as a sideman with numerous Canadian singer-songwriters (Jane Siberry, Lynn Miles), house keyboard player at a country music studio, contributing member of a Celtic fusion band and original jump jive project, orchestra pit musician, Aquarius/EMI recording band Fat Man Waving, and leader of his own world music outfit the Angstones.

That flexibility came in handy when Kiesewalter moved to New York in 1997 to act as musical director of The Bottom Line’s Downtown Messiah, a Manhattan seasonal presentation that recasts Handel's oratorio as a setting for pop-music performers. Peter was working as a house composer at ABC-TV in 2001 when he was approached to create contemporary settings of traditional arias for Kiss of Debt—a Canadian film starring Tyley Ross as an aspiring opera singer under the thumb of a crime boss.

“Peter agreed to do one song, initially,” says Tyley Ross, “but we had such a good time that we quickly recorded 15 songs” with a 20-person musical cast that included guitarist Vernon Reid (Living Colour) and bluegrass banjo master Tony Trishka. After sitting on the mixes for two years, they finally decided in 2003 to master and self-release the first EVOC album, La Donna. The album featured brash, inventive treatments of operatic arias and Neapolitan folk songs--"Vesti la giubba," "La Donna e mobile," "Ave Maria"—interpreted as everything from disco to bossa nova to stadium-strength rock.

In March 2004, the East Village Opera Company appeared at Joe’s Pub in Manhattan for what its founders thought might be the group’s first and last live show. “We played one show to maybe 80 people,” Tyley recalls, “but among them were a number of record business folks and media types. The reaction was unbelievable—from that one show, we had national press virtually overnight.” “What was meant to be our last show became our first show. Joe’s Pub had a cancellation two weeks later, brought us back to fill in—and within a couple months, we were selling the place out. Within a year, we had signed a deal with Universal Classics.”

Do you also would like to share your opinion? If so, please register or login here.

Tags

Details

Popular Songs

New Songs

The East Village Opera Company - The East Village Opera Company