The Yo! Opera Festival introduces children and young people to special forms of opera, especially designed to attract them. Special projects and a biennial international youth opera festival builds bridges between opera and a young and broad audience.

This 4th edition of the Yo! Opera Festival took place from 31 October to 4 November 2007. Part of the programme was The Opera Flat, a project in which the residents of a flat, pupils from a public primary school and students from the Dutch conservatoires met in a musical-theatrical cooperative process.
The Lectorate Lifelong Learning in Music evaluated this project, as requested by Yo! Opera. The research focused on the dialogue that took place within the conservatoires on the one hand, and the conservatoires and the conservatoire and Yo! Opera on the other. For recommendations the Lectorate was able to draw on related research that was done before.

Project description 
In The Opera Flat the residents of a flat in Utrecht received singers into their houses for one day. Pupils from the public primary school Overvecht wrote libretti that student composers of the Dutch conservatoires put into one minute opera music. Young singers from the conservatoires performed the mini opera’s in the doorways of the residents’ flats, as their guest. Each of the twenty-five opera’s shows a specific situation (‘meeting’) that could take place in a doorway, made up by the children. The visitors were invited to play a game of ringing doorbells, in order to take part in this music-theatrical event: the door opened and a singer sung an aria especially for the person in the doorway. The singers went out onto the gallery every hour, like a cuckoo clock, to perform a short ‘vocal signal’ together with the residents and the audience.