Restored southeastern Ohio opera house now thriving cultural arts center
By Susannah Elliott, Entertainment Editor
March 17, 2006 | 12:33 p.m.
Lora Lynn Snow decided in the late 1980s to form a professional orchestra in Gallipolis and transform the old Ariel Opera House into its performing space. Even some of her recruited musicians doubted that it would ever happen, but a group of determined volunteers began restoring it in Fall 1988. The Ohio Valley Symphony (OVS) performed its inaugural concert on April 1, 1989. By January 1990, the theater opened as a fully functioning cultural arts center and the home of the only professional symphony in southeast Ohio.
Members of the OVS now vary from freelance musicians who play in several orchestras to music teachers, several of whom are instructors at Ohio University. John Schlabach, Dorothy Bryant, Chris Hayes, C. Scott Smith and Roger Braun are all familiar names in Robert Glidden Hall.
Since the theater’s opening, Snow has been awarded the Ohio’s Hill Country Arts and Outstanding Leadership and Heritage Award, and the Ariel has become a bona fide cultural arts center. It is home to the OVS as well as the Ohio Valley Youth Orchestra, the Ariel Players and the Ariel Jr. Theatre, among other groups.
“We’re trying to do something new this year,” said Scott Michal, the Ariel’s Composer in Residence. “We coordinated our programs so that, for instance, when the theater is getting ready to do the ‘Diary of Anne Frank,’ the youth orchestra is doing ‘Armed Forces Salute,’ and the symphony is doing ‘Schindler’s List’ and ‘Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony.’ The coordination of all these events will all build upon one another.”
“Michal’s Chats,” so named for their casual and intimate nature, are one of the aspects that make the Ariel unique. An hour before every symphony performance, Michal invites listeners to the banquet hall upstairs to hear his highlights of the night’s concert. Usually, at least a dozen audience members gather in folding chairs for his enthusiastic storytelling. Saturday, Michal introduced the pieces for the night and gave backgrounds that maximized the audience’s understanding and enjoyment of each.
Saturday’s concert, titled “Broadway & Bizet,” featured pieces from several operas, including the works of Mozart, Gershwin and Hammerstein. The internationally known bass baritone John Shuffle, the night’s guest performer, sang opera-style throughout most of the pieces. After shouts and whistles of praise, Shuffle and the OVS even graced the audience with an encore of “Old Man River” before intermission. After the break, he returned in costume for Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and performed on viola with the symphony for the rest of the night.
The Ariel stage welcomes tremendously talented guest performers for all of its performances. “On April 22nd — 110 years almost to the day of when the Ariel was first dedicated — we’re having an incredible guest soloist, Cecil Licad,” Lora Lynn Snow said Saturday. “She’ll be playing the most requested classical piano piece we have, the ‘Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto.’”
The April concert will be the last of the 2005-2006 season and will follow dedication ceremonies for the new Ariel Ann Carson Dater Performing Arts Center. In 2004, Ann Carson Dater purchased the building and gave it to the OVS as a permanent home, guaranteeing that the organization would forever have the means to exist. Dater, a native of Meigs County, Ohio, moved from southeast Ohio long before she even knew of the symphony. Despite this, she realized that the group was a cultural gem the area could not afford to lose; she gave the gift without hearing a note of the symphony’s music.
“We’re going to be unveiling the new marquee out front which will bear the name of our benefactor,” Snow said. “It will now be called the Ann Carson Dater Performing Arts Center. We’ll be unveiling that and a plaque that will tell the story, and also a sculpture [commissioned by Dater] that has been installed in the banquet hall upstairs.”
The dedication will be held outside on Second Avenue in front of the Ariel Theatre at 6 p.m. All are invited to attend the ceremonies and the reception, which will be held in the new facilities there. The OVS concert will follow at 8 p.m.
Tickets for the April concert can be ordered from the Ariel box office at (740) 446-ARTS. Subscriptions are also already on sale for the 2006-2007 season.
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For more information, visit the Ohio Valley Symphony official Web site at: http://www.ohiovalleysymphony.org