Austin Living: Opening Doors to Music

Pacelli music teacher Katy Bisanti is using her opera background to invite students and public into its emotional pull

On May 24, Pacelli Catholic Schools music teacher Katy Bisanti stood before the choir composed of students for what was their final performance of the year.

It was the school’s commencement and the songs of seventh through 12th graders rose beneath the vaulted ceilings of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church.

The performance proved to Bisanti that they had reached the high bar that had been set unbeknown to the students, which includes a healthy number of middle schoolers.

“At the end of the year I told them the bar had been set at a high school level,” Bisanti said, remembering what she told them. “‘I’m really impressed that you’ve been able to get to where I wanted you to be.”

Bisanti knows what high praise is.

She has taken a path through music that has taken her through the lofty sounds of a classically-trained opera singer and along that path has come a mission to open up opportunities for southeast Minnesota talent to display their voices.

Bisanti is one of the founding members of the Hometown Opera Company based in Rochester. The company has a mission to elevate voice in our corner of the state to reach ears maybe not accustomed to the world of opera.

“Our main mission is to produce concerts and full-on shows with our local professionals as well as community members and students just to keep the genre going because it’s kind of dropped in popularity over the years. But when it is presented, people are drawn to it.”

In April of this year, Pacelli hosted a show by the Hometown Opera Company which included students from Pacelli and Lyle taking part in Bel Canto, which features the Anvil Chorus.

For the students specifically, the show introduced them to opera, which can be challenging and daunting for those not trained to sing in that style.

Still, Bisanti said the students welcomed the performance.

“I think they appreciated the challenge,” she said. “Our students want to be challenged and they take it very, very seriously. They want to present themselves and their schools as highly as possible. They do take it seriously.”

This isn’t the first time that Bisanti has been part of a project like this, but her musical story started before projects like the Hometown Opera Company.

Early on, Bisanti had the chance to train in Italy. It was a prime opportunity, but it certainly wasn’t easy. The training was rigorous and demanding.

“They want you to work hard and they’re not afraid to tell you when you’re doing it wrong. It’s a tough love approach,” Bisanti said. “They wanted you to understand the intensity of what I was doing.”

It was something Bisanti encountered with her own high school teacher, who also studied in Italy.

“She said, ‘I won’t give you a compliment unless you go above and beyond my expectations and nobody ever does,” Bisanti said.

Bisanti said it meant a lot to her when that same teacher expressed how impressed she was with Bisanti’s senior recital.

From that point, Bisanti went on to study vocal performance and music therapy at the University of Kansas under the direction of Joyce Castle, who has performed in such vaunted places as the Metropolitan Opera.

In the following years, Bisanti got married and moved to Nebraska with her husband where she taught vocal lessons and got involved with a friend in what would be the start of efforts to bring opera to local singers.

They started the Nebraska Opera Project which brought in local professionals to join with them and sing and put on productions. That was followed later by a company in Des Moines, Iowa, but there professionals were hired with locals singing the minor parts. Bisanti wanted to stay with the plan where locals were able to showcase their talents.

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“Our company was different. We wanted all local people to showcase their talent in Omaha,” she said. “Then we had students, we had professional orchestras that played with us.”

With her husband getting a job with Mayo in Austin, the family made another move and Bisanti began having conversations with the MacPhail School of Music. However, those plans were derailed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

With a child still at home, the time just wasn’t right to start a similar project. What did happen was that she took the job as the K-12 music teacher at Pacelli and through that she met Lyle choir director Stefanie Tranchida, who also trained in Italy and had the similar ideas of creating something akin to what Bisanti had been doing prior to coming to Minnesota.

They began working with Kate Rogers in Rochester and began setting the foundation for the Hometown Opera Company along with Michelle Howard.

Since beginning, the company has performed several concerts and educational outreach, which has met the goals of what founders had originally set out.

“It’s been wonderful,” she Bisanti said. “There has been so much talent coming out of southeast Minnesota. It’s just beautiful. It’s the same thing that happened in Omaha. People just started coming out of the woodwork.”

A large part of this enjoyment has been bringing students into this project. The Hometown Opera Company has done a lot of work in ensuring that the genre has been approachable for students.

Defining what opera is has been integral in informing students that opera isn’t as foreign as they may think it is. That side of education includes the history of why people learned to train themselves to sing as they do and the stories behind the individual operas.

“I explain to them the way it started was that the singers needed to project their voices over the symphony and they didn’t have a microphone,” Bisanti said. “Learning how to produce this much sound to project over a symphony.”

“The story lines are stuff you would honestly watch on prime time TV,” she continued. “It’s not much different as to what’s happening now.”

On a deeper level, however, it’s the music itself that can work as a catalyst for students.

“Even our students who aren’t necessarily used to hearing this type of music are very drawn in by the richness and depth of the musicality and the stories,” she said. “It’s been really cool to bring students and the community into opera.”

For the future, the company will continue offering performances and shows to the public and students, including a full opera in the summer of 2025, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, which will run July 25- Aug. 3 on the weekends at the Charles E. Gagnon Museum and Sculpture Garden in Rochester.

Bisanti said she’s excited to bring more of what she loves to the people of southeast Minnesota.

“I think it’s really just the richness of these genres,” she said. “It allows an expression of human emotion that for me, and in no other genre, no other art form, in my opinion, I can express those things I can when I’m singing operatically.”

For more information on the Hometown Opera Company, visit: https://www.hometownoperacompany.com/

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