The pundits tells us life will be different after the pandemic. By switching to outdoor performances Palm Beach Opera may have stumbled on a panoply of new ideas for its future. Using the iThink Financial Amphitheatre at the South Florida Fairgrounds, with singers’s voices slightly enhanced, made for a reproductive quality not usually heard in smaller houses. Also, having … [Read more...]
Superb singers make PB Opera’s ‘Flute’ magical amid pandemic
It was different because of COVID: Palm Beach Opera held its season outdoors at the 6,000-seat iThink Financial Anphitheatre at the Fairgrounds (just one mile from the Florida Turnpike at the Southern Boulevard exit). The first of the major American opera companies to bravely adapt to an untested venue, the troupe’s general director, David Walker, thanked the people who made … [Read more...]
PB Opera ready for outdoor festival, with Met-style casts
By Robert Croan “And then the pandemic punched us in the face.” That’s how it felt to David Walker, in his first season as Palm Beach Opera’s general director – a post he took over after Daniel Biaggi resigned in 2019. “It was going so well,” says Walker, 54. “Puccini’s 'Turandot' [the opening production in January 2020] was our highest-grossing show in 12 years. … [Read more...]
Season Preview 2020-21: Area’s opera companies move to outdoor festivals, concerts
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...]