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...]
Arts buzz: Norton director Davis resigns; Morikiami to reopen grounds
WEST PALM BEACH — Elliot Bostwick Davis, CEO and director of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach since March 2019, has resigned. “The events of the past months have impressed upon me the importance of being closer to my family and I’m looking forward to returning to Boston and beginning the next chapter of my life,” she said in a prepared statement. She declined to … [Read more...]
Soprano Lopez scores triumph in FGO’s ‘Butterfly’
By Robert Croan The title role in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is one of the pinnacles for every opera soprano. Sandra Lopez has performed this arduous role more than 50 times in nine productions, and in her Broward Center performance Jan. 30 (the fifth of six in Florida Grand Opera’s current run; the last one is tonight) she came through the hurdles unscathed and victorious. … [Read more...]
Soprano returns to familiar turmoil for FGO’s ‘Butterfly’
By Robert Croan Puccini’s Madama Butterfly is one of the most popular operas in today’s repertory. It wasn’t always. The world premiere at Milan’s La Scala Opera, on Feb. 7, 1904, was met with hissing and boos, and had to be withdrawn after a single performance. In May of that year, for a production in Brescia, Puccini made some alterations, dividing the 90-minute Act 2 … [Read more...]
Singer searches for man inside the myth of Don Giovanni
By Robert Croan Mozart’s Don Giovanni was special from the time of its premiere in Prague in 1787: a great drama told in great music, with the combination amounting to something more than either would be on its own. Balancing comic and tragic elements in equal proportions, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte called the opera a dramma giocoso (playful drama), … [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...]
FGO ends season with beautifully sung, handsome ‘Werther’
Florida Grand Opera closed its 78th season on May 11 with a beautifully sung, attractively presented mounting of Jules Massenet’s Werther, which many scholars of French opera consider to be the composer’s masterpiece. The opera, based on Goethe’s breakthrough novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, tells the story of a young poet who falls desperately in love with a woman he … [Read more...]
FGO’s ‘Frida’ a brilliant, energetic read on iconic Mexican artist
By Robert Croan Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s 1991 opera, Frida – based on the life of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo – requires only 15 singers (some in double roles) and an orchestra of six to 11 players, but the brilliant, kinetic Florida Grand Opera production that opened last weekend in the Miramar Cultural Center, seemed huge. The energy level soared from first note to … [Read more...]
Opera on life of artist Kahlo ‘bright and beautiful,’ soprano Jones says
By Robert Croan The turbulent life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-54) reads like a secular passion play about a troubled human being who suffered poverty, childhood polio and a horrific tram accident that left her in lifelong pain. In her paintings, Kahlo depicted herself as an anguished Madonna. No less important in her life, however, were her political views (a … [Read more...]
FGO’s fresh, youthful ‘Figaro’ an object lesson in fun
By Robert Croan Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, seen in Broward Center’s Au-Rene Theater on Friday night, was a tribute to Florida Grand Opera’s excellent Young Artists Studio. Recent alumni took on three of the four leading roles, with all supporting characters assigned to current members of the program. Conducted with vigor by Andrew Bisantz and buoyantly staged by … [Read more...]