– The East Village Opera Company, which visits Fort Collins’ Lincoln Center on Nov. 4, is an 11-person band reinventing classic opera arias with stadium-sized rock tools. Sound like a recipe for cheesy bombast? Perhaps, but the New York-based group’s multi-instrumentalist/co-founder Peter Kiesewalter explains why his band has something to offer for both classical and rock fans, and why opera needs acts like his to stay relevant…

I know your band has toured quite a bit, but really, is this just a bigger-city phenomenon or do people all over seem to enjoy it?

Peter: I’ll be honest — initially the marketing geniuses at our label (Decca) thought this kind of thing might be a coastal, larger-city thing. But we’ve found that no matter where we go, whether people know opera or not, they’ve all heard this stuff before and it’s stood test of time, so they tend to enjoy it.

Isn’t opera a niche, though?

I think there’s been a recent development in the last couple years, with the Metropolitan Opera doing their hi-def broadcasts across the country, and theaters being sold out all over the place. People are realizing there’s an appetite for opera in places not thought of as typically opera-loving. And this is a rock band playing opera music.

What about people that say by combining opera with rock, you’re doing a disservice to both?

I don’t think we are. The critical stuff we have heard is that this is one of the first things that’s maintained the balance. It’s hard to maintain the integrity of an original opera piece, but we’re equal parts tradition and renewal. Any criticism is usually from the rock end, that it sounds like clichéd arena rock. And to be honest, I’ve heard form some classical people who don’t like their revered classical music tampered with at all.

What do you say to them?

I think it’s a dangerous attitude to take. Where would the history of jazz be if the American songs weren’t reinterpreted again and again? These arias were the pop music of their day. I’m actually surprised more people haven’t done this. I mean, I know why they haven’t — it’s a tricky thing to maintain that balance. But for an art form to survive, it needs to evolve.

How faithful are your versions? For example, Mozart’s “Le Nozze Di Figaro,” which opens your latest record, has a keyboard sample from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” at the beginning.

Yeah, we recreated that part but had to pay royalties for it. The effort on that last record was to at least maintain the emotional arc of the original thing. It’s really dramatic music, and in a world of irony and subtly it often seems corny when people bear their emotions. But we would have been doing a disservice to the music had we not presented it and worn the emotions on our sleeve.

There seems to be a lot of kinship between what you do and arena rock.

Arena rock, prog-rock, metal… we share a lot of similarities. Queen actually borrowed a lot from the world of classical music and opera. In modernizing and understanding these (opera) songs we’ve realized that.

What’s the stage set-up like?

We bring three to four string players, which is a little more ragged than on the record, but energy is quite palpable. You see a little more of the sense of humor and irreverence when you see us live than on the record. It’s definitely 10-15 percent cheekiness, and the people laughing the loudest are people most familiar with the source. We thought they’d be horrified but by and large they get a real kick out of it.