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Meditations on Zaide: Punishment & Perspective

“That is the terrible hour where my poor mind awakes from the short anesthesia induced by manual labor.” (Gomatz, in Zaide) As I’ve learned in these few weeks of studying and preparing Zaide, punishment was once primarily corporal – of the body. Then it became temporal – separating offenders from the rest of the world

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Mature Content Advisory

June 2, 2010 Mature Content Advisory Zaide is the story of a man and woman captured and held against their will in a foreign land.  In this production, their love story unfolds against a frank and realistic depiction of their lives in captivity, and some scenes may be considered violent in nature. The content of

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Interrogation

As we barrel into a summer filled with young artists making their way into a demanding and complicated profession, I was pleased to see today’s entry on Seth Godin’s blog.  Link to the original version here. Read on for customization. Here, my revised list of questions you should ask yourself if you’re considering or embarking

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From the Trap to Walhalla

The LA Opera Ring opened last weekend, and it boasts a nice selection of Trappers turned Wagnerians.  Below, the list of seven WTOC alums who appeared in Saturday night’s Rheingold.   Several of them return throughout the Ring, and they are joined by Alan Held as Gunther in Götterdämmerung. Richard Paul Fink, Alberich Michelle DeYoung, Fricka

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Crawling the Web for Zaide

Google alerts are part of my professional lifeblood.  This month,there’s one set to notify me daily of any news with the word “Zaide” in it.  This is what I have learned in the last few days: “zaide” or “zayde” is Yiddish for Grandfather. Over at “180 Days with Mozart and Me“, Bill is working his

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Lunch Music is Back

Today, the kick-off of our free lunchtime mini-concerts for staff members of the Wolf Trap Foundation.  Wow, it feels good to have music back in the building!

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Bastianello & Lucrezia – Monday 5/24, 7:30 pm EDT!

Two highly enjoyable performances from WTOC alumni at The Barns – streaming on the internet to a computer near you!  Go to www.wolftrap.org/discovery or http://www.livestream.com/discoverygoesdigital. A couple of months ago, Rahree and I managed to produce two semi-staged one-act operas without the benefit of our usual summertime complement of amazing colleagues.  We survived to tell

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Girl Power, Dancing Bears and Mondrian

Today we enjoyed a lovely lunchtime picnic at the warehouse with the staff of the scenic and costume shops.  We noted tons of girl power at play this summer across the intern and seasonal staff positions.  Technical Director Tim McCormick says “I just hired the best people, that’s all.”  ‘Nuff said. This afternoon, the Zaide

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