ShawU music professor featured during ‘HBCU Night at the Opera’

RALEIGH — Even without a single opera tune on your playlist, chances are your familiar with, “Figaro! Figaro! Figaro! Figaro!”

Granted, you may remember Alfalfa singing the refrain on “The Little Rascals,” but you know it, the earworm from Gioachino Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.”

Stephen Armstrong, Ph.D., who teaches music appreciation and piano in the music department at Shaw University, will provide background on that particular opera before the curtain rises on it Feb. 2 during “HBCU Night at the Opera” in Raleigh Memorial Auditorium. Armstrong’s 6:30 p.m. talk in the lobby is for ticket holders. Discount tickets for alumni of historically Black colleges and universities are at ncopera.org/hbcu. Student tickets are available for $15 through the North Carolina Opera box office at 919-792-3853.

“People of all ethnicities, races and income levels participate in the opera experience as performers, producers and patrons,” said Valerie Johnson, Ph.D., dean of the Shaw University School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities. “What we are doing with ‘HBCU Night at the Opera’ is reminding our HBCU community that opera does not have to be viewed as inaccessible.”

Armstrong’s remarks before the show will touch on the role of the opera in romantic celebrity culture and opera as mass entertainment in 19th-century Italy.

“The Barber of Seville” is a musical comedy brimming with bribery and mischievous deception in the name of love.

“There is a Bugs Bunny cartoon, ‘The Rabbit of Seville,’ that riffs off of ‘The Barber of Seville,’” Johnson said. “Anyone familiar with Looney Tunes will recognize the bits of opera that help drive the action in these cartoons.”

The past two Shaw University homecomings have included pop-up opera performances on the lawn next to Estey Hall.

“That has been an intimate opportunity for our students to experience the musical talents of young Black and Brown artists trained as opera singers,” Johnson said.