Eight minutes before a 2 p.m. rehearsal, the students started filing into the large orchestral classroom on an upper floor of the Governor’s School for the Arts in Norfolk.
A group of about 10 girls carrying violins and violas strolled in toward several semicircular rows of seats and music stands.
They were followed by a couple of string bass players who eyeballed the doorframe while navigating inside with their unwieldy instruments.
And a percussionist was near the last of the about 30 musicians to take his seat behind timpani drums. Then, the conductor arrived.
Alma Deutscher, 20, walked to the front of the room. The chattering class, all at once, went sharply quiet; the students wanted to hear what the music prodigy had to say.
Deutscher will be conducting the Governor’s School students’ Saturday performance of “Cinderella,” an opera based on the classic fairy tale that she started writing and composing the music for at the age of 8.
At the Sandler Center for the Performing Arts in Virginia Beach, it’ll be the first time her opera has ever been performed by amateurs, or nonprofessionals.
Deutscher has been a professional since childhood, traveling the world as a pianist, conductor and composer. She’s been the subject of BBC and CBS “60 Minutes” documentaries, with The New York Times once calling her “one of the most gifted musical talents of her generation.”
Her parents are British and Israeli. She now lives in Austria, but her “Cinderella” has been performed on three continents, including productions by Opera San José and at the Galway International Arts Festival in Scotland.
She’s spent the past week teaching her show’s music and coaching Governor’s School vocal students. It’s not the easiest show to play or sing.
“Alma’s compositional style is very tonal,” Shelly Milam-Ratliff, vocal music chair at the Governor’s School, explained in an interview. “It’s very melody driven, but being a virtuoso at such a young age, in both piano and in violin, there are a lot of flourishes that are very technically demanding in all parts.”
Last week, the students in the rehearsal room sat at attention as Deutscher lifted her baton. The conductor flicked her wrist. The students, on cue, struck up — their music filling the space.
Before long, Deutscher waved the baton and everything stopped.
“Clarinet,” she asked, “can you play a little louder?“
“Yeah, sure,” clarinetist Elizabeth Wittenberry said with a burst of short, quick and nervous little nods. “Yes.”
Everyone started again.
“Good,” Deutscher said over the music and to Wittenberry, whose eyes — above her instrument — seemed to smile.
The song switched, and the sound of trumpets came from a back corner, but Deutscher fluttered the room to another stop with her hand.
“Just strings, for now, please,” she said.
In the show, Cinderella is a composer being held back from fulfilling her dreams of crafting beautiful music by her stepmother, who owns an opera house. And it’s music that brings the tale’s heroine together with her princely love interest.
Deutscher began writing it when she was 8. An instrumental chamber version was first performed by a professional string quintet when she was 12, and she’d completed the final full version of the two-hour opera at 16.
Abigail Bodvake, an 18-year-old senior at the Governor’s School and Maury High School who plays Cinderella, has been listening to the show’s music for years. She described working with Deutscher as feeling neither overly formal or informal but rather “the perfect balance.”
“I’m a great admirer of hers,” Bodvake said.
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, [email protected]
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IF YOU GO
When: 7 p.m. Saturday
Where: Sandler Center for the Performing Arts, 201 Market St., Virginia Beach
Tickets: Start at $25
Details: vafest.org
