The University of Oregon School of Music and Dance will present “Once Upon an Opera” on Wednesday at the Tower Theatre in Bend. The program is part of UO Music Fest, an annual showcase of the school’s highly touted Opera Ensemble, offering auditioned students training in acting, dance, singing and more as a bridge to the professional opera world.

Opera Ensemble Director Karen Esquivel said she’s “really stoked about this program,” and you should be, too: The performance is free, family-friendly and, at 45 minutes, designed not to stretch attention spans too far (see “If you go” for details).

Esquivel said to bring the kids: “Lots of glitter,” she said, laughing.

As for the college students she works with, “I really pushed the kids into learning some difficult music, and they really rose to the occasion,” she said.

The theme for the ensemble this year is fantasy, Esquivelsaid. This month, on April 24 and April 26, the students will perform Engelbert Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera “Hansel und Gretel” at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, sung in German.

“There’s a lot of German, but it’s good for them to learn it in the original language, and so we went for it,” said Esquivel.

In Bend, rather than just perform single scenes from operas — although they will do a little of that, too — the singers will perform longer portions of two operas. First, they’ll see a 20-minute stretch of Antonin Dvorak’s “Rusalka,” sung in Czech.

“It’s the tale of ‘The Little Mermaid,’ a lot darker, as if it’s dark enough,” Esquivel said. “It’s not little Ariel, Disney-happy-ending thing. We don’t get to the horrible ending, but it’s very sad. The part we’re doing is the beginning.”

Singing in Czech “was a big stretch for us all,” Esquivel said. “If someone’s a fluent Czech speaker, they’d probably go, ‘bleh,’” she said, laughing. “But we did the best we could, and it’s a really good experience for them. It’s all very beautiful music, all very romantic music.”

Audiences will also get to see a portion of “Cendrillon,” the operatic telling of the Cinderella story, in French, by Jules Massenet, libretto by Henri Cain.

Singing in foreign languages is real-world experience that students need should they go on to sing professionally.

If that should be the case, “they’re going to be doing a lot of singing in different languages. So this year was a lot of French, Czech and a lot of German for the ‘Hansel und Gretel.’”

Bend audiences will hear beautiful singing, promises Esquivel.

“These are big romantic operas, and we’ve been blessed with some good voices to sing this stuff,” she said. “We have some real fine masters and doctoral students, and graduating seniors, that are singing the big solos in this repertoire.”

“They’re all graduating, so I’m going to be in rebuild mode” after this year, she added. “But we’re at a good point right this moment to do some serious singing.

— Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com