At a time when most high schoolers remain solely concerned with sports, parties and homework, Alkis Karmpaliotis (VI) has carved out a prominent role in the world of opera appreciation, turning a niche interest into a successful website. Karmpaliotis is the founder and editor-in-chief of AppreciateOpera.org, a widely circulated opera blog with interviews, articles and quizzes designed to introduce people to the world of opera and engage opera enthusiasts.
Karmpaliotis attributes his enthusiasm for opera to the influence of his parents, who started taking him to performances when the family moved to New York City. By the age of 8, he was hooked, quickly surpassing his parents in knowledge and passion. Living in New York helped cultivate his interest. The city exposed him to the most renowned opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera. “Many cities have theaters and operas and symphony halls, but it’s not like New York,” he said.
Karmpaliotis at Mozart’s “Cosi fan Tutte” as a preteen. The opera is one of his favorites. (Source: Alkis Karmpaliotis)
As opera is not the typical interest of school-aged children, Karmpaliotis began to feel isolated. He longed to share his appreciation. In 6th grade, he created the website Appreciate Opera, using it as a “fun little blog,” where he wrote about his opera-related thoughts.
Karmpaliotis loved sharing the blog with friends and family. “To this day, there’s Appreciate Opera magnets on the boards of the middle school, because I would talk about it obsessively to all my teachers and classmates,” he said.
Enterprising and driven, Karmpaliotis soon decided the website had the potential for more and decided to expand, seeking out interviews with professionals. He reached out to several well-known opera singers and conductors and landed interviews with artists like Antonello Manacorda, Anthony Roth Constanzo, and others, as well as Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, and four Grammy-winners. While Karmpaliotis secured his first two interviews via Instagram direct messages, others required more tenacity; Karmpaliotis liaised with mutual connections, managers and agencies for months.
These interviews, coupled with an increase in content production, set Appreciate Opera on a stratospheric rise. Now, Appreciate Opera has over 4,000 members — an exponentially increasing number. His top article, Ranking the Top 10 Orchestras in the World, has over 156,800 views, and website engagement is increasing at the rate of 1,000 views per month.
The articles are filled with insightful commentary, critiques and advice, such as this tip from Karmpoliotis’s popular “How To Appreciate Opera” guide: “The first piece you listen to is integral to your operatic journey. If you listen to a complex, obscure opera as your first listen, you may be scarred — it took me years before I was able to properly appreciate the difficult music of composers such as Béla Bartók.”
As his profile has grown, Karmpoliotis has seen new opportunities rise. His most recent interviews, with baritones Mark S. Doss and Etienne Dupuis, were solicited by the artists’ agency, which reached out to Karmpaliotis for interviews. Karmpaliotis plans to interview Mariko Silver, the CEO of Lincoln Center, next.
For Karmpaliotis, the blog is a way to “communicate my love for music without playing it. Having a platform like this to share thoughts like this, share pieces and passages I love, I think it’s a great way to get people interested.”
He has also noticed his influence extending to friends and classmates, who have started to dabble in opera appreciation after taking inspiration from his work. Once, while attending an opera solo, a regular free evening activity, he saw two classmates from school sitting in nearby seats. The encounter was no coincidence; they found the opera through one of his performance guides and had chosen the seats based on an article he had written. The moment is one of Karmpaliotis’s favorite stories and highlights his distinctive aptitude for engaging others in the arts.
Karmpaliotis is constantly pursuing arts outreach and education opportunities. Last year, he worked as teaching assistant for an Intro to Music class at California State University. He is currently working as a student consultant for the Metropolitan Opera, where he conducts interviews with artists and produces social media content geared towards other young people.
With college on the horizon, Karmpoliotis is not stopping. He plans to pursue a career in arts administration in the future, a future he received a taste of this summer, when he shadowed a member of the administration team at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. He said, smiling, “It’s something where I can make an impact, share my passion with people, try to make people love it as much as I do.”
