Elina Garanca – O Don Fatale
OPERA SINGERS
The Barber of Seville – ‘Ecco, Ridente in Cielo’
Jonas Kaufmann ~ La damnation de Faust (Berlioz)
Anna Netrebko – Io Son L´umile Ancella De Adriana Lecouvreur
Plácido Domingo As Macbeth
On September 22, 2016, Los Angeles Opera presented Darko Tresnjak’s production of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Macbeth. Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave based their opera on Shakespeare’s play of the same name.
They premiered it in 1847, a few years before the play appeared in Italian. A lifelong lover of the English Bard’s plays, in 1865, Verdi revised and expanded the opera with the help of Andrea Maffei for presentation in Paris. All of this was before Verdi wrote Otello, which he staged in 1887 or Falstaff, his last opera, which premiered in 1893.
In his program article on Macbeth, Music Director James Conlon notes, “It has been observed that Verdi’s opera is a tragedy for the royal couple but a comedy for the witches.”
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Piotr Beczala – “Werther: Pourquoi me réveiller”
Così Fan Tutte: What Can The Online Dating Generation Can Learn From Mozart’s ‘School for Lovers’?
‘The School for Lovers’. That was Mozart and Da Ponte’s alternative title for Così fan tutte – an opera as much celebrated for its nuanced depiction of love as for its glorious music. But in a world where apps like Tinder and Grindr amass millions of users each day, it’s hard to imagine how a classical idea of a lovers’ academy could bear any similarities to the seemingly shallow world of modern dating.
It’s within this world – and, you’d be forgiven for having missed this story back in 2008 – you’d find Amy Taylor of Newquay, and her husband Dave Pollard. They had married after initially meeting online in the virtual-reality forum Second Life, but then divorced three years later after Amy discovered that Dave’s avatar had been cyber-cheating with someone else’s avatar back on the web. (Do keep up at the back). The story was accompanied by profiles of the real Dave, who bore little resemblance to his chosen online avatar, a 13 stone, six-foot-four hunk with long streaked hair and improbably huge pectoral muscles, living in a ‘sprawling three-bedroom detached villa.’
Anyone who has ever told a white lie to impress someone, or bigged themselves up in front of a potential date, or posted an ‘enhanced’ picture on a dating website, should pause before they cast any stones at poor Dave and his optimistic online double.
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