So you haven’t heard of Diana’s Garden by Vicente Martín y Soler? That’s OK; nobody else has either. Although it was immensely popular in its day, Diana’s Garden has all but vanished from the opera houses of the world since its premiere in 1787, the same year that Mozart’s Don Read more…
It’s an intoxicating time of year for operagoers! The 2016/2017 opera season is just beginning, and it looks like it’s going to be a fantastic year! Here are a few of the biggest productions to keep your eyes on this fall…
The Metropolitan Opera is opening its season with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde next week on Monday, September 26, 2016. This revolutionary work is often viewed as one of the earliest pieces to take definitive steps away from tonal music, as represented by the famous Tristan chord, an integral part of the Tristan leitmotiv. For those of you not in New York, you will still have a chance to see a live performance of this groundbreaking work at the cinema on October 8, 2016 at noon Eastern Time. Later in October I am particularly excited to watch the Met’s Don Giovanni, one of the Mozart – Da Ponte collaborations, at the cinema.
On September 14, 2016, a little after 7:00 p.m., Peter Mercer-Taylor made Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette come alive for me for the first time at the Minnesota Opera Behind the Curtain event at the Minnesota Opera Center in Minneapolis’s North Loop district. This rather obscure mid-19th century opera has never had a consistent place in the canon, but after Mercer-Taylor’s lecture, I wonder if it deserves one.
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