2016 Fall seriesRevenge
Tuesday afternoons 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. 18 October to 22 November 2016 FESTIVAL INN (in the Guthrie Room) 1144 Ontario St., Stratford, Ontario A series of films, live performances, and lectures  Opera Arts - artist Grant Jarrett
18 and 25 October
RIGOLETTO Giuseppe Verdi programs sponsored by Joanne McArthur 
1 November
THE LAST PRODIGY Erich Wolfgang Korngold program sponsored by Peter Fischer Dorothy Knight 
8 November
MUSIC IN TRANSITION 18th to 20th century AGGIE ELLIOT, soprano MARILYN DALLMAN, piano program sponsored by Audrey Durst  Canadian Opera Company
15 and 22 November
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Benjamin Britten programs sponsored by Karen Mychayluk Guy Chadsey |
Series Sponsor
Rigoletto is a Romantic Italian opera written in 1851. Its subjects are revenge for lost honour and the tragic remorse felt by an over-protective father, Rigoletto, whose daughter Gilda sacrifices her life to a notorious seducer, the Duke of Mantua. As well as seduction, it contains such dramatic elements as shame and surprise. Its score includes some of Verdi’s finest arias, including La Donna e Mobile. Our 1982 performance of the opera is directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and features Luciano Pavarotti as the Duke. Filmed in breathtaking north Italian locations, its directorial influences include Edgar Allan Poe and Frederico Fellini.
Join guest presenter Andrew MacDonald as we explore the life and music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, The Last Prodigy.
Hailed by Puccini, Strauss and Mahler as a Wunderkind of staggering talent, Korngold burst onto the musical scene in 1910 with a series of works demonstrating mastery of form, melody and orchestration. Somehow Korngold knew: knew how to compose, how to play piano, how to orchestrate, all brilliantly and all without any untoward expenditure of effort. Described as “the very last breath of the romantic spirit of Vienna”, he saw his musical language and style eclipsed in his own life time but he has received a posthumous rehabilitation that could not have been predicted even twenty years ago. We welcome back to Stratford Aggie Elliot, a former star of the Stratford Festival's operettas. She will be presenting a concert of Music in Transition, featuring works by Mozart, Gilbert and Sullivan, Bernstein, and Rogers and Hammerstein. The concert focusses on the ways vocal music has changed from opera to operetta to musical theatre, as Aggie explores a wide range of vocal music written over the past 225 years. Marilyn Dallman will accompany Aggie on the piano.
With A Midsummer Night's Dream, composed in 1960 by British composer Benjamin Britten, MOA pays tribute to the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare's death. The opera begins with the revenge of Oberon against Titania, and goes on to illuminate the contrasting worlds of the fairies, the lovers, the court, and "the rude mechanicals.”
Britten was one of the great composers of the last century. He loved the different worlds Shakespeare's play portrays, using each to comment musically on the others, and he revelled in its comic elements. The humour in the opera flows from the music and from the joyous pastiche of Italian opera conventions as much as from the words. Our DVD performance is directed by Peter Hall for the 1982 Glyndebourne Festival. It is a magical production with an eerie forest where the trees seem to have a Jungian archetypal life of their own, echoing other well-known fairy tales. |
