This week JustArts had a conversation with Pamela Dellal, mezzo-soprano and voice instructor at Brandeis. Dellal conceived and directed the folk opera Love in Schlossberg Village, which made its once-in-a-lifetime debut at Brandeis this weekend.

JA: Would you please tell us a bit about your start in music?

PD: I think, like a lot of the Brandeis students, I was in love with music as a child, and found ways to perform. I was in my high school choir and was a flute player so I had an instrumental background as well as a singing background. It was what I wanted to do, so I made a way to go to college to study music, which I did at Boston Conservatory, and started a career in Boston.

JA: Was there a mentor or musical figure who inspired you to choose music, and this path especially?

PD: Absolutely! I can attribute many people from my early training, certainly one very inspiration person was my high school chorus director, who was absolutely brilliant. I also have to point to my flute instructor in high school, who was just brilliant - she played with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

JA: Wow!

PD: Yes, well I come from the New York area, like so many of our Brandeis students do, and I was very fortunate to have access to musicians of that caliber. She was incredibly inspirational to me. When I came to Boston, the woman that I studied voice with was a huge inspiration to me, and the major figures after that were the conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society at the time, who was Thomas Dunn, who took a chance on me when I was a very young singer and put me in the professional choir, and also, slightly later than that, the musical director of Emmanuel Music, Craig Smith, who hired me when I was 24, and the ensemble at Emmanuel Church still is my musical home. We do Bach cantatas every weekend. It's incredible. And over the course of 26 years, I've sung almost every piece by Bach. And it has just been the most tremendous education that a musician can get. Those are certainly the people whom I credit with my knowledge and my gifts.

JA: What was it that brought you to Brandeis?

PD: It was interesting - I was putting together a kind of crazy life where I was doing a bunch of performances but I had some part-time nonmusical work, as many musicians do, and it was around the time when I realized that my professional life was busy enough that I really needed to let go of my office work. And kind of serendipitously, James Olesen, the Director of the Choruses at Brandeis, asked me: would I be interested in teaching voice? And the irony was that I really hadn't done much teaching at that point. And at that very same time I was thinking I need to no longer hold any kind of a musical job, I need to start becoming serious about teaching... It's amazing how these things happen in your life! Suddenly people are saying, We're ready for you to come do this for us now and it was just when I needed it to happen. So that's when I came to Brandeis.

JA: That sounds like a fantastic career transition!

PD: Well it was! I was a new teacher and I learned so much from teaching my students and it was really extraordinary. And there are still students that I worked with at the beginning of those Brandeis years that I'm still in touch with and some of them are making lives in music themselves, which is something I'm really proud of and happy for them.

JA: On that same note, what is your impression of the vocalists with whom you have worked and whom you have taught here?

PD: I have been blessed to have some extraordinarily talented students here at Brandeis. It's interesting to see the musical students who choose to come to Brandeis because clearly they would have other options. But they choose Brandeis for the things that make Brandeis unique. And if they, at the same time, happen to be talented musicians, they have things they have to contest with. It's a small department. It doesn't offer as many performing opportunities, and it certainly doesn't offer the rigorous training that you could get in a conservatory. Particularly for singers, things like repertoire classes, diction classes, access to coaches and drama coaches and things like that. I have to say that all of the students that I've had at Brandeis-and they've had very different interests and different levels of talent- have all inspired me and have all been extremely serious about their study.

JA: Could you tell us a bit about the creative process behind your conception of Love in Schlossberg Village?

PD: For the past three years, the music department has been trying to put together these opera performances...There is no particular class that it's associated with. And to put on a production in Slosberg is difficult because we don't have the resources that the Theater department has. You know, it's not really built for that. When you do an opera...you have a certain number of really spectacular leading roles. And lots of other people who would love to have something to do - something small to do - but the piece doesn't offer it. And by doing what I've done, [with Love in Schlossberg Village] which is to create a story out of pieces of music by one composer that were never meant to be a story, I was able to create small roles for many, many students...It was kind of a leap of faith, because I didn't know when I started that I would be able to make one consistent story...But I really love that I was able to create roles based partly on who turned out to audition...I was able to create new parts for some people, which you can't do when you have an existing opera. It was quite wonderful. I have to say that really, I haven't done anything like this before. And I really don't know that there is another piece like this - this is really an original concept...I'm really tickled that this worked. And another thing that was astonishing to me was that, a lot of this music - Brahms was really interested in folk music - were either based on folk tunes, or they were just arrangements of folk tunes. So there is a beautiful simplicity to a lot of the music. It suggests a certain kind of story, which is basically a story about unhappy love, happy love. I've created a story that basically has two pairs of mismatched lovers, and how they keep breaking up and the right couple gets together at the end...The story was basically being told by all of the pieces, but they weren't meant to go together, which I thought was really delightful...It was tough on some of the students in terms of their engaging it and their memorization, but I have to say-we had our final dress rehearsal yesterday-it was so beautiful! And it was all there!

JA: This is obviously not the type of performance that has been done at Brandeis before. What do you hope the effects of opening up this genre to our musical students and to our community will be?

PD: Well, I definitely want the people who come to see it to realize that seeing a performance of a classical work, and a work in a foreign language, can be immediately as compelling as a work performed in English. The difference with our show is that it's this very beautiful music that's really telling the story. It's Brahms-so people are engaging with this great composer. And singing in a foreign language shouldn't be a barrier to engaging immediately with the characters, and their emotions and their dilemmas. I want the audience to see that there's a lot of talent in the Brandeis Music department, and that people are really enthusiastic about putting their talent out there. And I think that for the performers, I want them to realize how powerful this music can be, and how it really is a different experience singing great art.

JA: What advice would you like to share with aspiring singers?

PD: I think aspiring singers need to understand all the elements of their craft, and be very serious about building their talents in all the areas. What I mean by that is that, in addition to physically knowing how to sing, they need to be very good at interpreting music, they need to very good at reading music, being able to work with the notations and the rhythmic structure, and they need to know how to be good ensemble musicians. I would say all of my very amazing good fortune that I had building my career was partly because I was so ready...I was able to step in and say I can do this, I can sight read that aria tomorrow and things like that. And I think that a lot of young musicians are so passionate about music and they want to become good singers, but they neglect some of those tools. That will hurt them, because it's a tough business...You have to have that ability to say, "I can prepare this piece at twelve hours notice." 
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