Wolf-Ferrari
L
e donne curiose
June 17, 19 & 25 at The Barns
Including a fabulous preshow chat by yours truly one hour before curtain
Written near the beginning of Wolf-Ferrari’s career, The Curious Women is a charming chamber opera. We discovered it a few years ago, and I’ve been carrying around a score for a while. During last fall’s auditions we realized that we’d have a dynamite cast for it this year. There are 9 principal roles – a great things for a resident company like Wolf Trap’s. The characters include 2 married couples, one engaged couple, one confirmed bachelor, and two servants who are (of course) smarter than the folks around them.
I find the music of Le donne curiose to be an entertaining and somewhat surprising mix of the lyricism and lushness of the late 19th-century, injected with adventurous harmonic shifts that give it a fresh yet familiar modern feel. The story is a domestic comedy in which the ladies scheme to figure out what’s going on behind closed doors in the men-only club that their husbands frequent.
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Sondheim
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
July 22 at the Filene Center
We rolled out our first Operascape production with Boheme in 2009. A perfect fit for the Filene Center Stage, Operascape features a complete production with images designed for Wolf Trap (projected on a 60-foot screen) and the National Symphony Orchestra onstage. The Filene Center has never been host to The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and this promises to be a memorable night of musical and dramatic thrills.
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Offenbach
Les contes d’Hoffmann
August 5, 7, 11 & 13 at The Barns
Including an amazingly awesome and informative preshow chat by yours truly one hour before curtain
Hoffmann emerged during last fall’s audition tour as a prime possibility for 2011, but we were concerned that its orchestration is too large for our pit at The Barns. Said orchestration, however, was not done by the composer, as Offenbach died four months before the premiere. With that knowledge, we felt emboldened to produce Hoffmann in our small theatre with a slightly reduced orchestration, featuring the original dialogues instead of the additional recitative music that was added to the opera after its premiere. It promises to be an intimate and engaging night of music and theatre! (Check the calendar later this spring for an exciting companion series, The Trails of Hoffmann, two evenings that explore the many other talents of Offenbach’s hero – Hoffmann’s own compositions, his stories and other writings, and other works of art based on his output.)
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Couples:
From Getting Hitched
to Getting Ditched
July 10
Steven Blier is back for one fabulous concert this summer! He’ll take the stage with five of our artists to explore the ups and downs of relationships, with songs from Fauré, Sondheim and Chausson to Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, and more.
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Not Enough for You?
Meet the people behind the productions in Backstage Buzz. Explore music and visual art in Vocal Colors. Buy tickets to two operas and receive an invitation to our exclusive Aria Jukebox performance on June 26.
Check back later for complete information on our family events for summer 2011, including Behind the Curtain (click here to read about last summer’s event) and Instant Opera! (dates and times TBD; click here to read more).
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But Before All This….
There’s some inspecting to be done.
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