Contributed photos / FM Opera
If a night at the opera doesn’t sound as enticing as a night on the couch, then you should meet opera singers Julie Ly and Karly Ritland. They could well change your mind.
“Opera often gets a bad rap for being snooty or elitist, with many people feeling like they need to be experts in the genre to enjoy it,” Ritland said. ““Opera can be deeply dramatic and intense, tackling serious, real-world issues. But it can also be light-hearted, humorous, and even absurd at times.”
Both singers are in their twenties, came to the stage young, and as adults discovered a home with FM Opera where they now perform regularly in performances, including at the upcoming December 7 Snowball Gala at Avalon Event Center, Fargo.
Just like their singing voices (Ly is a Mezzo-soprano and Ritland is a Soprano), both performers’ relationships with opera is about making connections. For Ritland, opera helps her make connections in other ways, too, mostly with the symbolism, metaphor and other storytelling elements opera provides.
“Everything done on the stage as performers is reality that’s just been heightened to illustrate, in an artistic way, what it means to be human — the follies, fears, jealousy, love, grief that we all experience in our everyday lives,” Ly added.
Ritland attributes her enthusiasm for opera to a teacher who showed her the many connections between popular culture and classical music and performance.
‘You love ‘Rent,’ right?’
In middle school, classical music became a passion after Ritland started training with her first voice teacher, Maria Williams Kennedy, a former opera singer and classical music instructor. Classical music was more “exciting and relevant” than expected, Ritland said.
“I started lessons with her in middle school, and she quickly recognized my passion for musical theater,” she said. Knowing a teenager’s enthusiasm for learning waxes and wanes, Williams Kennedy found connections between popular musicals, something Ritland loved, and operatic pieces.
“She’d say ‘You love Rent, right? Did you know it’s based on the opera La Bohème? Let’s compare the two and see what’s similar—and what’s different.’ By connecting opera to something I already found “cool,” she helped me see that opera wasn’t some distant, outdated art form but something vibrant and deeply moving.”
See FM Opera in action: FM Opera Presents: Puccini’s “La Boheme” Act II
Ly is also a cosmetologist and said she enjoys making connections with people on the stage and in the salon.
Ly splits her time between the stage and the salon. She’s a professional cosmetologist and her family owns a salon. Ritland is currently an adjunct voice instructor at Concordia College.
Ly sees her opera life and her salon life—she’s a cosmetologist—as an unlikely career pairing, but it’s one that helps her see the connections between individuals.
“Cosmetology and opera have a lot more in common than one might think,” Ly said. “It’s all about sharing meaningful connections with people, whether that be with my guests in the salon or with audiences in the theater.”
She said her work as a singer is about creating connections with people, and opera is the form that speaks to her passion for language.
“My first-ever experience with opera was at NDSU,” Ly said. “As a bilingual speaker of English and Vietnamese, I really admired how opera fosters connections with international audiences in a variety of languages.”
Tenor Josh Kohl is an internationally recognized singer who is now heavily involved in FM Opera, a company he said is a great place for emerging opera artists to hone their craft.
A local company with global connections
For young opera singers, experience is everything. FM Opera has for a long time focused on helping young artists gain a foothold.
Tenor Joshua Kohl, an internationally known tenor who has made Fargo his home base, said the company intends to continue bringing younger opera talent to the region and help students and emerging singers gain experience in their craft.
“These younger artists we’re featuring at events like Snowball Gala in December are really the future of FM Opera,” Kohl said. “They are going to play a vital role in the company’s future.”
Kohl said that being a smaller company in a mid-sized community with a limited number of opera performances actually gives students and emerging singers more opportunity and experience.
“It’s a chance for them to sing for an extremely supportive audience,” he said. “It gives them a chance to collaborate with their local peers and serve those of us who are very invested in opera and enjoy it very much.”
Ritland added that the guidance and mentorship provided by the talented artists, directors, and conductors who work with FM Opera are invaluable to the development of emerging singers like herself and Ly.
“We’re truly fortunate to have such a high-caliber company in our community,” Ritland said.
Kohl said he also benefited from having access to FM Opera when he was first starting his career, and that it was the supportive individuals he met along that way that attributes to his success as a performer today.
Ly agrees. “Being able to work with professionals from all over the country that bring such a wide variety of experiences and stories and being able to follow their careers as they continue to share their talents elsewhere is really special,” she said.
All three singers also hope to bring more people into a better understanding of the artform, and to show that opera is just like any other artistic medium.
“When you open your world to experiences, ideas, and art forms that you don’t normally partake in, I think you’ll find that all the things we create and share as humans are very familiar because they’re always about something we all know deeply, and that’s the human experience,” Ly said.
Stay tuned …
FM Opera’s 2024-25 season kicked off in October with “Broadway at The Fargo Theatre.” The season continues in 2025 with performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Trial By Jury: Scalia/Ginsburg” set for the end of February/early March 2025 and Schubert’s “Winterreise” in April 2025.
The opera company is also hosting its annual Snowball Gala, December 7, at Avalon West, 2525 9th Ave. S., Fargo. Now through the end of today, FM Opera is offering a buy-one-get-one-free ticket discount, which can be purchased online at tickets.fmopera.org. Proceeds from the event will benefit FM Opera.
About FM Opera
FM Opera was founded in 1968, when it was called Fargo-Moorhead Opera Company. It has since delighted generations of families and community members by bringing opera performances and education to mainstream audiences.
The Fargo-Moorhead-West Fargo community is one of the only mid-sized communities in America that hosts a full-season professional opera company. It also offers educational and outreach activities throughout the region.
