This week on Rhode Island Public television,
WSBE: (Comcast 294, Cox 808, Full Channel 109,
and Verizon 478)
La Traviata
Great Performances at the Met
|
Saturday, August 17 -- 8:00pm; Sunday, August 18--3:00am; Monday, August 19--12:00am
La Traviata
Soprano Natalie Dessay stars in Willy Decker's stylized production of Verdi's "La Traviata," about a frail courtesan who sacrifices her happiness in order to spare her beloved (Matthew Polenzani) and his family any strife her reputation could cause them.
DURATION: 150 MIN
DETAILS: [CC] [STEREO]
GENRE: PARENTS PICKS
SYNOPSIS: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/about/education/educatorguides/content.aspx?customid=20876
Educational Guide: http://www.metoperafamily.org/metopera/about/education/educatorguides/content.aspx?customid=20872
Hear Natalie Dessay: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oxfHz77Pts
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FRANCESCA
DA RIMINI
Great Performances at the Met
|
WGBH 2 Sunday, August 18 -- 1:30pm;
FRANCESCA
DA RIMINI
A production of
Riccardo Zandonai's "Francesca da Rimini," about a doomed romance
between a warlord's wife (Eva-Maria Westbroek) and brother (Marcello Giordani).
DURATION: 150 min.
DETAILS: [CC] [STEREO]
GENRE: PARENTS PICKS
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Great Performances
Tanglewood 75th Anniversary Celebration
James Taylor, Yo-Yo Ma, pianists Emanuel Ax and Peter
Serkin, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston
Pops Orchestra perform at the 75th anniversary celebration of the Tanglewood
Music Festival in western Massachusetts.
Friday 9 pm WGBH 2
Saturday 2 am WGBH44
Monday 3 am WGBH44
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Auditions
LOCATION: Rhode Island College, Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts
Wed. 28-Aug 7:00 PM NC 198
Wed. 4-Sep 7:00
PM NC 198
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Auditions
Final auditions for the 2013-14 season
The Providence Singers invite experienced choral
singers to audition for the 42nd season. Auditions for new and returning
members will be conducted by appointment.
• Remaining
audition days: Tuesday, August 20 | Tuesday, August 27
•
Appointments available: 7 to 9 p.m.
More about auditions | Audition brochure (pdf)
It keeps getting better: Auditions for the 2013 Junior
Providence Singers
Back for its eleventh concert season, the Junior
Providence Singers will hold auditions from 4 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday,
September 4-5, at the Carter Center in East Providence. Meet new music director
Paulette LaParle, sing your audition, and get set for an incredible season that
includes an encore performance of Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs,
performed last year by the Providence Singers.
More information
| Download brochure (pdf)
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OPERA ON THE INTERNET
WITH
DAVE D' AGUANNO
Opera fans get a rare opportunity to kick off their
"opera weekend" by tuning in to the LIVE video-stream of Verdi's
"Don Carlo" to be shown on Friday morning at 11:30 a.m. as part of
this summer's Salzburg Festival. The opera features tenor Jonas Kaufmann in the
title role, along with a strong supporting cast. To my knowledge, this is the
first time an opera from Salzburg has been available for LIVE video-streaming
on the internet, & let's hope that this will be the first of many more to
come.
(http://www.medici.tv/#!/don-carlo-verdi-salzburg-festival)
Also from Salzburg, on this coming Saturday afternoon,
you'll be able to hear the August 6 performance of Verdi's "Giovanna
d'Arco" with soprano Anna Netrebko in the title role and with Placido
Domingo singing the baritone role of Giacomo (Giovanna's father) -- a
performance not to be missed, IMO.
(http://oe1.orf/at/)
Along with composer Riccardo Zandonai, Sergei Rachmaninov
also composed his own "Francesca da Rimini," although most people are
mainly familiar with his piano concertos and symphonies. "Francesca"
can be heard on German Radio in a performance that took place in Stuttgart
earlier this summer (July 19).
(www.dradio.de/dkultur/)
In a lighter vein, Rossini's "Cenerentola"
("Cinderella") can be heard on NPR in its ongoing series of
performances from Los Angeles Opera's past season, in this case from March
2013.
(www.wrti.org/)
Enjoy!
DAVE
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David Lang’s anti-opera: Where secrets become art
August 12, 2013 by David Patrick
By his very nature, David Lang rethinks everything we think
we know about any given avenue of music. And with the whisper opera, which was
performed over the weekend of Aug. 10 at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart
Festival, he did so by going to the polar opposites of what theater audiences
are used to: Quietude, revelations of the most intimate sort and a level of
fragmentation that was barely imaginable in a stage work so cogently conceived.
The libretto was culled from social media, taking sentences
(or fragments of them) from anonymous persons from around the world with the
belief that such utterances are public, but manage to be unnoticed secrets
because they’re part of such a vast chorus of communication.
“Cry!” was the first word I heard from the cellist near me.
“I couldn’t … I was.”
When whispered in fragmentary form, such utterances sounded like somebody was
having a unexplainable revelation. Not
until the end was there anything like conventional singing from soprano Tony
Arnold or the International Contemporary Ensemble.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Lang can seem compulsively
quixotic at times, leading us down musical alleys we might’ve known existed but
never thought were worth investigating (and consistently proving the contrary,
showing there was meaning there all along). So when I was led to my seat – one
of eight places in a series of small musical trenches set within the stage of a
small studio theater at Lincoln Center, putting you at eye level with the feet
the five-member ensemble – I thought, “Well … here we go.”
From my fox hole, I saw various instruments (bass drum,
glockenspiel) anchored in specific places, though the musicians moved from
place to place during different sections of the piece, not so much playing
their instruments as scratching and caressing them. Extended techniques, in
other words, of the quietest sort. Pervasive white curtains were the main
atmospheric feature, suggesting either the gauzy netherworld of cyberspace or a
hospital ward.
“They said I was crazy …”
Plenty of eye contact was possible with the performers
peering down at listeners, but that didn’t come until later – until the piece’s
loose-limbed, abstract narrative thickened and the utterances from the stage
became more cogent and less fragmented.
The first section of the opera brought your ears down to a
tiny sound envelope, to the point that, when the medium-dim lighting levels
came up a bit, the buzzing of the lights, normally unnoticeable, was annoyingly
intrusive. And no doubt part of the piece.
“I don’t know where my sister is.”
Was there music behind these disembodied sounds? Not until
halfway through the hour-long piece did music clearly emerge, though when it
did, it formed some significant centerpieces. One was an extended glockenspiel
solo that initially laid out a fragmented series of motifs and then took on a
continuity that made you rediscover what exactly that means – and it was balm
to the ears.
At another point, flute and clarinet had an antiphonal
pointillistic duet from opposite ends of the stage. That normally might not
seem overwhelmingly dramatic, but in this sensory-deprived context it did,
particularly with underlying percussion effects that suggested a seashore.
Structurally, the whisper opera is not unlike George Crumb’s
extended works, often following an arch form, though with a coda that, after
meeting the audience less than halfway with a world of discursive sound, throws
out unassumingly simple and completely apprehendable melodies.
“I feel like somebody is watching.”
Oddly, the piece paralleled a book of poems I had lately
stumbled upon: Marvelous Things Overheard by Brooklyn-based, Greek-influenced
Ange Mlinko (out next month from Farrar Straus Giroux). There, the striving,
squalor and all-around messiness of real life is contrasted with the clean,
seamless world of received myth, the gods of antiquity who never had to wash
dishes and change diapers. The poet
tells us that rainbows cant be statistically analyzed and thus must be an
illusion. The god Apollo seems to be her
refuge, “In whose presence it is impossible to grieve.”
“I knew he was right. I knew it.”
Just as Mlinko uses idealized myth as a sounding board,
Lang’s music similarly acts like a kind of organizational membrane, the central
meeting ground for his far-flung Internet chatter.
But what makes the whisper opera quite possibly unique is its conscious lack
of any sort of commentary on what’s whispered. The music neither celebrates nor
judges our everyday utterances. It reflects them back at us. What does Lang’s
act of quiet boldness mean beyond finding some value in the temporal
world? Rarely does a piece so resolutely
refused to tell you what to think or what it says. Maybe I’ll know next week.
Or next year.
“Your mother eats kitty litter in Disney World.”
That’s one quote not heard in Lang or Mlinko; it’s an
accusation I heard muttered on a street corner by a mentally-ill homeless
person – my favorite overheard marvel. Something so enigmatic would have to be
a secret. Or art. What’s the connection between the two? Discuss.
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The Met radio broadcast season is
over for now...
check this space the first week
of December.
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OPERA ON WGBH TV
THIS WEEK!
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