• Courtesy Of Youth Opera Company Of Vermont
• Members of Youth Opera Company of Vermont

Vermont's small opera world currently encompasses two professional companies — Barn Opera in Brandon and the Opera Company of Middlebury — and the Youth Opera Company of Vermont, a training program for teenagers based in Chittenden County. All three entities recently made significant announcements.

On September 1, the Opera Company of Middlebury officially adopted the teen program, which will become the Youth Opera Company of OCM. The Middlebury company has successfully produced at least two operas a year for 20 years and already runs a three-and-a-half-week young artists program during its spring opera, for singers in their twenties and early thirties. Youth Opera will become the third — and youngest — tier of singers in the company each spring.

The teens will participate in the young artists' high-level professional training, which includes workshops and master classes given by OCM founding artistic director Doug Anderson, music director Filippo Ciabatti, professional singers in the cast and their agents. They'll also have a chance to perform in the ensemble cast (aka the chorus).

Soprano Sarah Cullins, who founded Youth Opera in 2019, began directing Middlebury's young artists program last year. She realized the merger "just made sense — in terms of reducing administration costs, grant writing, and our shared vision and passion."

Additionally, both the young artists and Youth Opera students essentially do the same things, if on different levels: get professional-grade training and perform outreach concerts at local schools and senior centers. With the merger, the Youth Opera students will be able to join the young artists in those performances while also getting a glimpse of next steps in a professional career.

Cullins' students experienced the merger's benefits during the Opera Company of Middlebury's spring 2023 opera, Ludwig van Beethoven's Fidelio: Three sang in the ensemble, and one learned to cover a role. "It was so amazing for them and so challenging [with] the late nights at the end of the school year while doing final exams," Cullins recalled. "But they just absolutely loved it."

Youth Opera will still operate its own programs, including two semesters of afterschool training in Waterbury and South Burlington churches that each culminate in group performances. (A new language is tackled each fall semester; this year it will be Spanish.) But the merger with the Middlebury company adds an unusually high-level opportunity for the kids.

Meanwhile, Brandon's Barn Opera is embarking on a venue expansion. The company is something of a younger cousin to OCM: Founding tenor Josh Collier fell in love with Vermont after singing with the Middlebury company, located 25 minutes north of where he would start his own. Barn Opera is housed in a circa-1850 barn that a small crew of helpers has spent the past four years turning into a performance space while also using it. The rehab is "97 percent finished," Collier said, but opera enthusiasts have lamented the venue's distance from more populous areas. And the intimate stage has no pit; it can accommodate only a piano.

So Collier is producing full operas in two larger venues located at the state's northern and southern ends: the Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro and the Arkell Pavilion at the Southern Vermont Arts Center in Manchester. At the 300-seat Highland, in February, the company will mount a production of Tosca to honor the centennial of composer Giacomo Puccini's death. In May, it will present Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto at the 400-seat Arkell.

Both venues have a pit — allowing Barn Opera's music director, Cailin Marcel Manson, to bring in the New England Repertory Orchestra of Westborough, Mass., of which he is artistic director and CEO. Both have good acoustics, too, according to Collier, who test-sang on the SVAC stage and was the lead in OCM's 2018 production of Gaetano Donizetti's Elixir of Love at the Highland — the last time an opera was performed there, he noted.

The company will operate as Opera Vermont at the Highland Center and SVAC. The name reflects the new reach of Barn Opera to "parts of the state that have been neglected operatically," Collier said. No Opera Vermont production, however, will be repeated in Brandon. The home venue will instead present Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella in October, and Collier is exploring renting out the space for community uses such as workshops, company events and studio album recordings by local ensembles.

The new audiences Opera Vermont hopes to attract can get a taste of what's to come at two inaugural concerts of opera arias, at the Highland Center on Thursday, September 14, and SVAC on Friday, September 15.