The composer and librettist play essential roles in helping Osgood and the cast discover the heart of the piece. So the building process of the piece is about discovering what that unifying style is,” he said. “For the performers, you can fairly safely assume that nobody’s ever done (the opera) before. When it comes to new opera workshops, however, his approach must be different. When he conducts standard repertoire, such as Puccini’s Tosca, which the Chautauqua Opera produced this summer, his job is to unite everyone’s vision for the piece, as people normally have interacted with those operas before and even performed in them for other companies. From there, Santa Fe Opera showed interest in his work, and he eventually joined their music staff. The first workshop opera that he conducted premiered in the mid-1990s. Osgood lived in New York City where he produced many contemporary plays, but with opera entering a new era and composers creating new pieces, someone had to conduct them. “It’s been the core, in many ways, of my career (working) on new pieces with composers and librettists.” “I have a ton of experience doing this,” he said. General and Artistic Director of Chautauqua Opera Steven Osgood will conduct for the workshop, and he holds the baton in his very qualified hands, as he has interacted with opera workshops for the past 30 years.
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