Thursday, April 28, 2011

'Carmen and the Bull' Children's Opera at Union Avenue Opera

On Saturday, May 14th, join in the fun as a singing, dancing, traveling gypsy befriends a little bull, his mom and most unlikely of all—a bullfighter! Using the music from the opera Carmen, and loosely based on the beloved story Ferdinand the Bull, Union Avenue Opera’s education team delights young and old audiences alike with a new depiction of a timeless theme: Be True To Yourself. As it turns out, when Ferdinand is the best version of himself, good things happen to everyone involved!

Carmen and the Bull was created by Elise LaBarge (Ferdinand’s mom) with a lot of help from Anthony Heinemann (Ferdinand), Debra Hillabrand (Carmen), Robert Reed (Bullfighter) and Scott Schoonover (Piano).

Suitable for audiences of all ages.

When: Saturday, May 14th, 2:00pm (Doors open 1:30pm)
Where: Union Avenue Opera; 733 N. Union Blvd; St. Louis, 63108
Tickets: $5 general seating. All tickets sold at the door for this event.
http://www.unionavenueopera.org/

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Verdi's "Il Trovatore" Met Saturday Matinee Broadcast on April 30

Sondra Radvanovsky as Leonora. Photo by
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. You may also listen to a live stream of the broadcast. Approximate running time 2 hours, 45 minutes with an intermission at approximately 1:10 p.m.

The Met's web site says: "David McVicar’s popular production returns with Patricia Racette, Sondra Radvanovsky, Dolora Zajick, Marcelo Álvarez, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and Željko Lucic. Marco Armiliato conducts."

In the April 21, 2011, edition of the New York Times, Zachary Woolfe said:
With its cackling Gypsies, mistaken identities and secret brothers, the convoluted plot of Verdi’s Il Trovatore can seem like the setup for a joke. Already verging on chaos, it makes a natural backdrop for the anarchic final scene of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera.

Il Trovatore overcomes its absurdities, though, with its vitality, its irresistible melodies and tightly driven rhythms. Oh, and it helps if you have four amazing singers.

That is where things can get tough. Nothing arouses apocalyptic lamentation in opera fans like the loaded question “Where are today’s great Verdi singers?” For a revival of Il Trovatore that opened on Wednesday, the Metropolitan Opera reassembled the core cast from the premiere of David McVicar’s 2009 production, and it gave an accurate snapshot of the company’s current Verdi lineup: gamely energetic, effective if unglamorous, it gets the job done.
The High Definition transmission of Il Trovatore will be presented at AMC Esquire 7, 6706 Clayton Road; St. Louis Mills 18; 5555 Saint Louis Mills Boulevard; AMC Chesterfield 14, 3000 Chesterfield Mall; and AMC Showplace Edwardsville 13, 6333 Center Grove Road, Edwardsville, Illinois. Click here to buy tickets.

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

UAO Auditioning Child Singers for 'Turandot' and 'Dead Man Walking'

Union Avenue Opera seeks children to perform in its upcoming summer productions of Puccini's Turandot and Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking.

The company seeks unchanged boy voices and girls up to the age of 12. The audition takes place Monday, May 9th, 4:00pm-5:00pm.

To participate in this audition, please call Emily DePauw at Union Avenue Opera at 314.361.2881 or email emily@unionavenueopera.org by Thursday, May 5th.

Full details on the audition process can be found here.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Renee Fleming to Star in Met Saturday Matinee Broadcast of Strauss' "Capricco" on April 23

Renee Fleming

St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Richard Strauss’ Capriccio on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. You may also listen to a live stream of the broadcast. Approximate running time 2 hours, 16 minutes; performed without intermission.

The Met web site says:
On Opening Night of the 2008–09 season, Renée Fleming dazzled audiences when she sang the final scene of Strauss’ wise and worldly meditation on art and life. Now she performs the entire work, in which the composer explores the essence of opera itself. Joseph Kaiser and Sarah Connolly also star, and Andrew Davis conducts.
In a review titled "Words or Music: Why Choose?" in the March 29, 2011, edition of the New York Times, Anthony Tomissini said:
Strauss described Capriccio, with a libretto by the composer and the conductor Clemens Krauss, as a “conversation piece for music.” It is certainly a chatty opera. Countess Madeleine, a young widow who lives in a chateau outside Paris with her brother, the Count, is being courted by the composer Flamand and the poet Olivier. It is her birthday, and for the occasion Flamand has written her a string sextet, and Olivier a sonnet. The love triangle becomes an allegory for an aesthetic debate about whether music or words are more important, on their own terms or when the two arts are combined.

This realistic production by John Cox, introduced in 1998, moves the setting from the 1770s to the 1920s. For this revival, new costumes and décors were designed by Robert Perdziola. The idea of the updating was to make the aesthetic issues seem more pertinent to opera today, and it works, though you have to accept the talk among the characters about their reactions to the latest opera by Gluck.

For the Countess, being courted by two artistic men is both flattering and threatening. There is no reason to choose between words and music. But between her two suitors she must make a choice. Confronted by their ardor, she realizes how arbitrary such important choices are.

The opera is presented here without a break, as Strauss intended it, lasting about 2 hours 20 minutes. The Countess is onstage almost the entire time. Ms. Fleming, looking radiant, brought verbal crispness and coy charm to the Countess’s conversational singing but grabbed every chance to let her voice bloom in the fleeting melodic bits.
The High Definition transmission of Capricco will be presented at AMC Esquire 7, 6706 Clayton Road; St. Louis Mills 18; 5555 Saint Louis Mills Boulevard; AMC Chesterfield 14, 3000 Chesterfield Mall; and AMC Showplace Edwardsville 13, 6333 Center Grove Road, Edwardsville, Illinois. Click here to buy tickets.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" Met Saturday Matinee Broadcast on April 16

Alan Held and Waltraud Meier
(AP Photo/Metropolitan Opera, Cory Weaver)

St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. Approximate running time 1 hour, 40 minutes; performed without intermission.

The Met web site says: "James Levine interprets Berg’s masterpiece. Alan Held sings the title role and Waltraud Meier brings her interpretation of Marie to the Met for the first time."

Anthony Tommasini writes in the April 7 New York Times:
Mr. Levine’s continuing health problems, primarily chronic back pain, compelled him last month to cancel the rest of his performances this season with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and to give his notice of resignation as its music director. And he curtailed his spring schedule at the Met.

Mr. Levine made it a priority to conduct Wozzeck, a work he reveres and has performed stunningly over the years, the last time in the 2005-6 season. But I never heard him give a better account of this harrowing, deeply moving opera than this one. Mr. Levine must still be coping with back pain; he did not make it to the stage at the end for bows. Instead he simply waved to the audience from the pit.

On the podium, though, sitting in his conductor’s chair with his arms flailing, he seemed inspired. Could the extra urgency and sweep on this occasion, and tempos slightly faster than those I remember from his earlier performances, have been motivated by a determination to prove that he was still a dynamic maestro? Whatever the cause, the results were thrilling.

Mr. Levine still drew plenty of depth, spaciousness and glow from the orchestra during the despairing passages of Berg’s gravely beautiful atonal score, first performed in Berlin in 1925. But his work had greater overall shape and more prickly energy on this night than in years past. Played without breaks, Wozzeck lasts just 1 hour, 40 minutes. The time passed without notice; the score has seldom seemed so compact and inexorable.

Friday, April 8, 2011

Rossini's "Le Comte Ory" Met Saturday Matinee Broadcast and High Definition Transmission on Saturday, April 9

St. Louis Public Radio will carry the Met Opera broadcast of Gioacchino Rossini’s Le Comte Ory on their HD channel, KWMU-3 beginning at 12 noon. Approximate running time 2 hours, 45 minutes.

The Met web site says:
Rossini’s vocally dazzling comedy soars with bel canto sensation Juan Diego Flórez in the title role of this Met premiere production. He vies with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, in the trouser role of Isolier, for the love of the lonely Countess Adèle, sung by soprano Diana Damrau. Bartlett Sher, director of the Met’s popular productions of Il Barbiere di Siviglia and Les Contes d’Hoffmann, describes the world of Le Comte Ory as, “a place where love is dangerous. People get hurt. That can be very funny and very painful. Rossini captures both -— with the most beautiful love music he ever wrote.”
The High Definition transmission of Le Comte Ory will be presented at AMC Esquire 7, 6706 Clayton Road; St. Louis Mills 18; 5555 Saint Louis Mills Boulevard; AMC Chesterfield 14, 3000 Chesterfield Mall; and AMC Showplace Edwardsville 13, 6333 Center Grove Road, Edwardsville, Illinois. Click here to buy tickets.

In an article titled "Whose Version of Rossini? Scholar Disagrees With the Met" in the April 8, 2011, New York Times, Anthony Tommasini reports on a controversy surrounding the new production of Le Comte Ory:
The scholar and editor Philip Gossett is an expert on early-19th-century Italian opera, particularly the works of Verdi and Rossini. So naturally, the Metropolitan Opera asked him to write program notes for its premiere production of Rossini’s penultimate opera and last comedy, Le Comte Ory, which will be carried live on Saturday in an HD transmission to movie theaters and on the Met’s radio network.

Mr. Gossett refused. He did not want to be associated with the Met production, and he has not been reticent about explaining why.

He strongly objected to the Met’s decision to use the standard edition of the opera, prepared by Eugène-Théodore Troupenas and published in 1828, the year Ory received its premiere at the Paris Opera. Mr. Gossett considers this a butchered edition, seemingly intended for a “provincial opera house that couldn’t perform the music Rossini wrote,” as he explained in an essay for Das Bärenreiter-Magazin.