Opera

by Peter Burwasser

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Published: Sep 14, 2006

Yes, it's "that opera" again. A whole bunch of people will happily attend to this seemingly indefatigable boy meets girl, girl dies, boy cries tale of Parisian bohos, because it makes a pretty good noise. The on again, off again couple of Mimi and Rodolfo will be sung by the beautiful sounding (and looking) Ermonela Jaho and Roger Honeywell.

Bugs Bunny would enjoy this show, as so much of the music was in his programs, but he's a cartoon figure and can't attend. All else can revel in this ever fresh comedy, with joyousness pouring over the edges. Great comedy is timeless. This will be a fully staged production, with Richard Raub on the podium.

More Rossini! Here's an interesting factoid: Rossini ended his fabulous career at the age of 35, having completed several dozen operas. His initial reason for stopping work was poor health, but he spent much of the rest of his relatively long life partying. It's true. This worked out for a basic reason; the guy was a genius, and he made an excellent living as a composer. Every note he wrote is full of meaning, beauty and expression. This take on the Cinderella fable is a wonderful example of his art. OCP's music director, Corrado Rovaris, conducts this stuff with as much verve and panache as anyone, and he leads a superb cast, including OCP favorite Kevin Glavin, the brilliant buffo baritone.

Temple Opera has a splendid track record for producing sprawling, fun-filled comedies, including the delightful staging of Verdi's Falstaff last season. A major reason for these successes is the way in which the directors draw upon so many of the resources of this large school, with energy and professionalism applied to not just the singing and orchestra playing, but the staging, the sets and the choreography, lending these productions a quality of completeness that can elude other student productions. Expect no less in this beloved French masterpiece, performed, by the way, in the new edition for the first time in the U.S.

Romantic farce is perhaps the most common operatic vehicle, and it had to start somewhere. Perhaps this was it, first heard in Venice in 1644. Francesco Cavalli was not so trailblazing as his older compatriot, Monteverdi, but his work helped to establish a number of operatic traditions, including the central dramatic place of the florid aria, and the two-sides-of-a-coin contrast of comedic and tragic plot development.

Loosely based on Mozart's opera Impresario, this is another clever concoction of innovative Curtis opera director Mikael Eliasen. This will be a pastiche of different opera scenes, sung in their original languages, and performed as if they were auditions with an agent.

The American opera establishment was largely created by Italians, and so the Italian repertoire has utterly dominated the scene here. The average native opera goer should be forgiven, therefore, to be unaware of such masterpieces as Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, which is, musically and dramatically, one of the towering works of the 19th-century musical stage. AVA's Ghenady Meirson (he also teaches at Curtis) is a one-man crusader for Russian vocalism, and will direct this voluptuous work, which is based on the novel by Pushkin. This will be a concert version, sans staging, but we'll take what we can get.

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