On April 2, the “Viva Voce Series” returns to Casa Italiana Zerili-Marimò at 6 p.m. spotlighting the work of Anthony Roth Costanzo and Sarah Ruhl.

“Of Orpheus, Eurydice, Vivaldi, and more” came about when Eugenio Refini, professor of Italian Studies and Department Chair at New York University, was teaching a first-year seminar at NYU on Renaissance poetry and included Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” within the reading list. At around the same time, Sarah Ruhl was leading a play adaptation of the work in New York. So he took his students and then had Hurl visit them in class.

From there, Ruhl and Refini found common interests and ground and decided on exploring an opportunity to feature the playwright on the “Viva Voce” series. That’s when she mentioned an upcoming project with countertenor and Opera Philadelphia General Director & President Anthony Roth Costanzo.

From there they all came together and decided to do an event to highlight the upcoming project that Ruhl and Costanzo are doing together in Boston – “The Seasons,” a worked based on Vivaldi’s famed “The Four Seasons” that features an all-new libretto by Ruhl.

“It’s an opera which is going to be about emotions and the weather,” Refini added. “And so there are some very present and contingent themes approached fairly different, I believe, from whatever one would find in a typical Vivaldi opera.

The event will also explore a common interest that all three share – the Orpheus Myth. Ruhl wrote “Eurydice,” which explores the other side of the famed myth, while Costanzo appeared in the Met Opera’s revival of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice” during the 2023-24 season.

“I want to get them to talk about how they relate to this particular story, which has been so influential in the history of music more broadly,” Refini added. “And try to think together about how we can keep reinventing these myths, especially within the medium of drama and and opera.”

For Refini, the creator of the “Viva Voce” series, the spotlight has always been on the often-overlooked world of baroque opera.

It all started during the pandemic. Refini, a scholar whose focus is on Italian opera, with an emphasis on baroque opera, “wanted to develop something at NYU and at Casa Italiana which could bridge across my scholarly work and my interest in performance practice.

“And so I thought to begin a series, which was online, of course, where I would bring together scholars and performers with an interest in the interconnections of opera, voice studies, and performance practice, ” he told OperaWire in an interview, noting that those initial guests included acquaintances, colleagues, and immediate friends.

The initial conversations focused on baroque operas about Homer’s “The Odyssey,” with subsequent topics including the intersections of opera and dance. One of the events was titled “Domesticating the Tenth Muse: Myths of Female Voice and Enlightened Progress in 1790s Italy.”

Once the restrictions from the pandemic were lifted, the series was given a new look with in-person sessions. Academic scholarship, which had been at the forefront during the virtual sessions, gave way to a different balance that would reach a broader audience.

The first of these events focused on Pasolini’s “Medea,” starring Maria Callas and it featured a film screening introduced by a panel discussion. “Don Giovanni” got a spotlight in a subsequent event, with a look at the works that preceded Mozart’s famed masterpiece to recontextualize one of opera’s seminal works. More recently, the series even featured a conversation with Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera about “Primero Sueño,” which had a recent premiere at The Met Cloisters.

“I think the signature event which we did two years ago was a one week long workshop which ended with a conference and a concert with Italian soprano Roberta Mameli and the early music ensemble Theatro dei Cervelli, led by Andrés Locatelli, with whom I’m working on a recording project. They performed a set of Baroque cantatas which I have transcribed from seventeenth-century manuscripts as part of my current research project,” Refini narrated regarding the event “Ariadne’s Echo: An Exploration of Musical Hauntings.” “We managed to bring these musicians over to Casa Italiana, where they spent one week with us, working with our students and preparing for the concert. That was really, I think, the biggest event we have done so far in terms of involving performers, not only to speak, but also to perform.”

This has shifted the audiences interacting with “Viva Voce.”

Whereas the Zoom sessions featured approximately, by Refini’s estimates, 75 to 80 percent academic participants, the in-person events have evened the playing field.

“Even if they were meant to be conversational and a little informal, the focus of the earliest events was really about discussing either recent publications or scholarly matters,” he added. “When we returned to in-person events at Casa Italiana, which has this wonderful cohort of aficionados, who are very much into music more broadly and who are not necessarily from the academic world, things changed. I would say that, at this point, the audience percentage is reversed, in the sense that the vast majority are not from academia, but are really part of the broader public. This has led to fascinating interactions, as we always make time for Q&As. Indeed, bridging the gap between academic and non-academic audiences remains a key focus for me.”

“If you mention Verdi or Rossini, people tend to come in with a good amount of knowledge. But of course, when it comes to the seventeenth century and relatively unknown operatic composers, as you can imagine, the audience’s prior knowledge is pretty limited. Still, people get interested, and having the chance to attend live performances of this music definitely grabs their attention,” he added. “So I think curiosity is really the trick, it’s what makes these kinds of events work..

“I think there’s also an element of trust at this point. The people who come to these events trust the quality of what Casa does. So even if they don’t really know the topic of a given event, they’re willing to give it a try. And over time, evening after evening, that builds momentum, even for lesser-known subjects..”

This is part of a sponsored series in promotion of events taking place at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. Register for “Viva Voce: Of Orpheus, Eurydice, Vivaldi, and More” HERE.