Atlanta Opera enters uncharted territory with ‘Winter Journey’

“Some of the greatest works in classical music are and should be things we can relate to as modern audiences,” said renowned baritone David Adam Moore, who will perform the lead role in “Winter Journey.”

Moore, along with set and costume designer Vita Tzykun, has created an elaborate and constantly shifting array of projected visuals to accompany his performance of Franz Schubert’s classic song cycle “Winterreise.” The show opens at Kennesaw State University’s Bailey Performance Center Saturday before moving to the Conant Performing Arts Center at Oglethorpe University Sept. 17-20.

“So often, these standard rep pieces are treated as special museum pieces that need to be preserved in some way,” Moore said. “I don’t think they need to be preserved; they need to be enlivened and realized and manifested in the present day and presented in a way that audiences can immediately relate to.”

Schubert’s poetic song cycle for voice and piano tells an open-ended story, in which a poet-narrator reeling from a recent breakup takes a lonely journey through the winter snow in the dead of night. The hourlong work is most often performed in recital, but Moore said the work’s open-endedness makes it the perfect vehicle for adaptation with modern technology and added visuals.

“It’s very much a rabbit-hole,” he said of the piece, which provocatively leaves many of its narrative ends untied. “It makes it very open to interpretation, and it makes it very updateable.”

The production utilizes 3-D projection mapping, which conforms a projection’s output to the exact dimensions of a surface onstage, adding such images as snow during a blizzard, Times Square in winter and the bleakly expansive Salt Flats of Utah — images that Moore and his partner Tzykun captured themselves.

It’s fitting that the unusual show’s singer has followed an unusual career path. Though he’s found success as a baritone performing on the world’s great opera stages, Moore, who grew up in a small town in west Texas, came to singing relatively late. Still, he was raised in a family of musicians with a tradition of playing country and western music. His father, Bubba Moore, played bass in country artist Tracy Byrd’s band for years.

“I grew up going to these beer joints hearing all of my family members play,” Moore said.

As a teenager in high school, Moore was most drawn to visual art, but a later interest in music and composition led him to begin vocal training. “I got side-tracked by opera,” he said. “It’s something I felt driven to do. … There’s some innate need I have to stand onstage and holler in the most cultivated way possible.”

Moore and Tzykun, who work together professionally and are also a couple, first met at the Israeli Opera, where Tzykun was a stage manager and Moore was performing.

Moore will return to Atlanta for the Atlanta Opera’s November production of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” a contemporary opera based on the oral histories of five U.S. war veterans, but this time he’ll work totally behind the scenes. Although Moore performed the lead role in the opera’s world premiere, he’ll work solely on the visual side for the show, creating the sets and projected videos along with Tzykun. “Taking this highly evolved old art form and bringing it to contemporary culture in a way that contemporary culture understands, integrating it, that’s what we want to do more than anything,” he said.

Although the shows represent a new direction for the Atlanta Opera, traditionalists needn’t fret. The main stage season includes productions of some of the most reliable classics in the repertoire: Puccini’s “La bohème” in early October, Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance” in March and Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” in May.