Coming up in Philly music: Cards, guns, and love, opera-style

The Russian Opera Workshop is a prime example of the high-level quality and summertime casualness that characterize Philadelphia’s summer music season. Its free events feel pleasantly informal, but the workshop is a major learning experience for rising young vocalists from all over the world. Its director, Ghenady Mierson, is an opera coach with an international reputation who teaches at Curtis and the Academy of Vocal Arts. The participants tackle their concert-style workshop performances with the same seriousness they would bestow on a full-dress performance at the Met.

The first public event on this year’s schedule will be a Russian romances program — romances being the Russians’ term for their equivalent of German lieder. Russian is a beautifully sensual song language, and the Russian art-song repertoire covers a wider range of subjects than the German tradition. The song program will be followed by three performances of one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular works, The Queen of Spades. The opera’s plot exploits gambling, murder, obsessive love, and other operatically suitable subjects. Tchaikovsky’s music captures all the intense emotions evoked by the storyline, but it also includes lighter songs and a famous love aria, Ya Vas Lyublyu: “I love you beyond measure."

The Russian Opera Workshop will present An Evening of Russian Romances on June 26 at 7:30pm and The Queen of Spades on June 27, 28, and 29 at 7:30pm at the Helen Corning Warden Theater at the Academy of Vocal Arts, 1920 Spruce Street, Philadelphia. Admission is free but the theater is small and intimate, so it’s recommended you come early.