New York’s Metropolitan Opera announced in September that it would be canceling all its shows for the 2020-21 season, but plans to reopen in September 2021 with American composer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, the first opera by a Black composer the Met has presented in its 140-year history. The area’s opera companies face the same … [Read more...]
PB Opera’s ‘Hansel’ makes deft use of small Crest surroundings
By Dennis D. Rooney Those of us who as children read the Grimm Fairy Tales, or better yet, had them read to us, know all about creepy castles, evil forests, wicked stepmothers, wily foxes and sanguinary wolves, ungrateful kings, scheming dwarfs, and other bad actors we came to know from the folk tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century. There … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2019-20: Opera companies playing it mostly safe for coming season
The three major opera companies in the South Florida region are sticking to the mostly tried-and-true this season, but there are enough surprises to make it a good few months for the opera veteran, too. Palm Beach Opera: Over the summer, General Director Daniel Biaggi stepped down from his post in search of new challenges, but will stick around for a little while to allow … [Read more...]
At PB Opera, a fun ‘Fledermaus’ with an aria surprise
A little Italian magic came as the most unexpected surprise Saturday night during the Palm Beach Opera’s presentation of Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus. Playing Prince Orlofsky en travesti was the celebrated mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, resplendent in Russian battle dress and a white beard. Pressed in Act II to sing something (itself an interpolation into the … [Read more...]
PB Opera scores with stylish, fast-moving ‘Giovanni’
Mozart called his opera Don Giovanni an opera buffa, and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte called it a “dramma giocoso” (playful drama), but the work’s ending, with its protagonist being swallowed by the earth after the statue of a man he killed comes to dinner and implores him to repent, has seemed to many stage directors of the past two centuries to define the opera as a piece … [Read more...]
Echols a gently winning Violetta in PB Opera’s ‘Traviata’
It’s a commonplace of Verdi scholarship that the composer’s “big three” operas of the early 1850s – Il Trovatore, Rigoletto and La Traviata – were game-changers for him in that they announced a consistent mature style in addition to introducing tunes so catchy they hold their popularity today. All of which is true, but it takes an especially sensitive and musical performance … [Read more...]
For PB Opera, it was a grand night of youthful singing
Time was when the Palm Beach Opera held a singing contest in April, inviting young opera performers from around the world to be heard in front of an elite panel of judges and a full orchestra. The contest is gone (though it may someday return), and with it the chance to hear a wide variety of new voices and not incidentally a broad sampling of repertoire that one will surely … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2018-19: Opera
The folks at OperaBase tell us there are more than 25,000 live opera performances across the globe each year, which says something about the durability and resilience of this art form that first saw daylight in 16th-century Florence. Closer to home, the three major opera companies in this region – the Palm Beach and Florida Grand opera companies on the I-95 corridor, and the … [Read more...]
PB Opera offers nights of song and fun for the summer
By Dale King Summers are usually fairly quiet for the Palm Beach Opera, much less hectic than the regular season that will launch in December with a rising-stars concert followed after with three mainstage opera productions of works by Verdi, Mozart and Johann Strauss II. But this summer, the company is making its presence felt with a new series called Summer Opera … [Read more...]
Beautiful new ‘Figaro’ charms at Palm Beach Opera
A good production of Le Nozze di Figaro that doesn’t get in the way of its music can demonstrate to its audience this work’s surprising modernity, even rooted as it is in the late 18th century. It’s Mozart who speaks to us most clearly from his 1786 vantage point, writing a kind of operatic music that lives and breathes with its characters, a music that mirrors their manic … [Read more...]