(upbeat music) - Intermezzo Chamber Music series provides an intimate classical music experience during the summer and fall in the heart of Salt Lake City.

And here to tell us about the upcoming season and the opera look both ways is composer Steve Roens.

Steve, welcome, thank you for being here.

So this concert's very interesting.

You partnered with Katharine Coles.

- That's right.

- So talk about the partnership and how you came up with the opera.

- All right, well for years, I have been setting poems of Katharine's from her various different collections that have been published.

And when she published a biography of her grandparents, an oil geologist and his wife, it seemed like a natural next step to make an opera.

And so we worked together with that.

She created a libretto and the opera just covers actually the first part of their lives from when they meet to when they get married.

And that's what the libretto covers in that.

So that's the focus of the opera.

- Great, and I know it's not a full opera, it's like 50 minutes.

- It's like 50 minutes, it's what we call a chamber opera, which means generally shorter time, smaller group of instruments, not an orchestra, but a chamber group and generally fewer characters, yeah.

- And it's the second half of the program?

So what's on the first half?

- The first half is a wonderful piece for clarinet and strings by the Argentine composer, Osvaldo Golijov.

- All right, well, it looks like a fabulous production coming up, and I'm sure you had a lot of fun collaborating with her on that.

- I certainly did, yes.

- Well, anyway, wonderful to have you, thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- And if you'd like to know more about that upcoming opera, small opera with the Intermezzo Chamber Music series, the opera's called "Look Both Ways."

It's June 30th at 7:30 at Westminster University.

Go to intermezzomusic.org, that's intermezzomusicmusic.org.

I'm Mary Dickson, thanks for watching "Contact."

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