Les Enfants Terribles is America’s only summer opera program (biannual) focused entirely on mounting a fully staged baroque opera. A small select group of singers are chosen and invited to spend three weeks coaching and staging a baroque opera. These intensive weeks focus on diction, rhetoric, vocal production, ornamentation, development of character, use of body. Much attention is given to making textual and dramatic connections with the score. Finally the respective opera is mounted as part of AOT’s summer season.
Besides work with the Les Enfants Terribles staff, a key component to the program is a series of masterclasses with leading early music professionals. These include both vocalists, but also prominent continuo musicians, musicologists, rhetoricians, and conductors. The masterclasses culminate in a public recital highlighting the Les Enfants Terribles fellows. Sometimes this is a concert version of the selected opera, sometimes it is a concert of selected vocal pieces.
Accompanied by Ignoti Dei, the fellows finally assemble for three staged performances of the selected opera in a major US city. Les Enfants Terribles is a program for young singers of high caliber, both vocally and dramatically. The programs fellows go on to active performing careers, many of them entering the AOT company.