The finale of Don Pasquale, at Florida Grand Opera. (Photo by Lorne Grandison) Two of this area’s opera companies bookended the season with Gaetano Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, with the Palm Beach Opera doing a 17th-century take on the early 19th-century setting in which this 1842 opera was initially set. The production of Don Pasquale now showing at Florida Grand Opera in … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Consul’ revives worthy 20th-century work expertly
Gian-Carlo Menotti’s The Consul was a Broadway sensation in 1950, but in the decades since it’s dropped below the operatic radar. The current production by Florida Grand Opera of this Cold War work is as good an argument as can be made that the opera deserves to be restored to the mainstream, if not so much for the greatness of its score as its sheer effectiveness as theater. … [Read more...]
FGO takes on Menotti’s ‘Consul’ to close season
Victoria Livengood first discovered the power of Gian-Carlo Menotti’s opera The Consul as an 18-year-old student at the University of North Carolina. Having received a full vocal scholarship after auditioning for the choir to fill an hour elective in what was supposed to be a pre-law curriculum, she came home to Thomasville one weekend to show her parents the first song she’d … [Read more...]
FGO’s Così: Strong singing, smart direction sell tricky story
For as many problems of interpretation that Mozart’s Così fan Tutte presents to its observers, there are at least as many options that this singular opera gives to its presenters. Given that its specific locale of Naples isn’t underlined in Lorenzo Da Ponte’s libretto, directors have felt free to reorient it everywhere else and every other time, and it rarely detracts from the … [Read more...]
FGO’s beautifully sung ‘Thaïs’ could use a little more heat
The operas of Jules Massenet are not as admired today as they once were in the last 20 years of the 19th century, when works such as Manon, Werther, Sapho and many others made the industrious French composer a wealthy and famous man. He has been much abused by history for his willingness to cater to the mass taste of his day and making no absolutely bones about it. “I don’t … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Nabucco’ an old-fashioned pleasure
There is something about Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Nabucco that brings out what I imagine to be the atmosphere of its first groundbreaking performances in 1842. It may have to do with the way the set and the costumes combine with the conviction of the performers, the prominence with which the chorus is used, or the ferocity of fresh discovery that its … [Read more...]
FGO names Sarasota Opera’s Danis as its new CEO
MIAMI ― A new general director and chief executive officer will lead the Florida Grand Opera in the 2012-13 season. Susan T. Danis joins the Florida Grand Opera on Oct. 9. Danis is the fourth general director and CEO in the opera’s 72-year-history. Robert Heuer, the company’s CEO for 32 years, retired in May. A self-proclaimed “opera geek,” Danis spent almost 14 years … [Read more...]
FGO production makes a strong case for ‘La Rondine’
The soprano who created the role of Magda in Giacomo Puccini’s La Rondine said late in life that the composer died “with the wound of ‘Rondine’ in his heart,” having never gotten over the opera’s mixed record of success and failure. In its first-ever mounting of the bittersweet opera Puccini wrote for a Viennese commission, Florida Grand Opera has taken an important step … [Read more...]
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes silly, FGO’s ‘Carmen’ still bold, colorful
The Florida Grand Opera closed its 69th season Saturday night in Fort Lauderdale with a production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen that was sometimes brilliant, sometimes risible, but that also offered reliably good singing and enough dramatic punch to give it real entertainment value. In their bid to reinterpret this greatest of French operas, the Franco-Canadian team of André … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Lucia’ has good lead, iffy concept
Florida Grand Opera’s current production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has reimagined this opera in a way that falls short of success, but fortunately it does have a soprano in the lead role whose singing is strong enough to carry the heavy lifting of the Mad Scene and much else besides. Eglise Gutiérrez, a Cuban-born soprano now resident in Philadelphia, has … [Read more...]