Au Fond Du Temple Saint FTW
Well, summer is rapidly approaching (today's freezing rain notwithstanding), and you know what that means: opera season! For those of us in a state with an open-air opera house, anyway.
This weekend my grandma got me tickets to the Opera Southwest, which is a much smaller scale production than Santa Fe but still very professional, especially now that they've moved out of the Kimo Theater to the Hispanic Cultural Center (The Kimo is a gorgeous vintage theater, but it is not set up for opera at all, and it showed). And it was a fun show - they did two of the one-acts from Puccini's triptych, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, and they were both entirely enjoyable. Suor Angelica was a little...simple, perhaps, music-wise. It was all very pretty and well-executed, but there was nothing about it that really grabbed me by the throat the way some of his more developed operas do. It is, however, a very moving story, and by the time they got to the end and Angelica's miraculous vision, I was kind of actually crying.
Gianni Schicchi, on the other hand, is a fairly thin story - wealthy old guy dies and writes all his greedy relatives out of his will, they get a local rogue to pretend to be him to dictate a new will, he takes advantage to will himself a fortune - but it's so clever it's hard not to be charmed. There's a lot of crude, slap-stick-esque humor (this was probably the first time I've heard the audience laugh out loud multiple times at an opera), and the way Puccini used the music to add an extra twist to the humor on stage was really interesting.
Oh Puccini. You are so good at pushing all my buttons, sir.
I also bought my tickets to the Santa Fe opera today! I wanted to wait a little longer, since this is going to be an expensive month with the moving and all, but I didn't really have a choice. I realized this weekend that the show I wanted to go to in August was the same weekend as Bubonicon, and while I probably could manage two days of geeking it up at a sci-fi convention along with a night at the opera, I don't think I'd be good for much the rest of the week. And they only had one other weekend performance of the opera I want to see, and when I checked online today there were two tickets left in the cheap seats. And while spending the money now is a little bit of a twinge, it's not nearly as bad as having to spend $200 dollars next month because there's nothing left in the balcony. So, I'm going to see The Pearl Fishers at Santa Fe at the end of June. Which, seriously, only has one of my all-time favorite duets ever, I could not be more excited.
This entry was originally posted at http://masterofmidgets.dreamwidth.org/268224.html. You can also comment there using OpenID.
This weekend my grandma got me tickets to the Opera Southwest, which is a much smaller scale production than Santa Fe but still very professional, especially now that they've moved out of the Kimo Theater to the Hispanic Cultural Center (The Kimo is a gorgeous vintage theater, but it is not set up for opera at all, and it showed). And it was a fun show - they did two of the one-acts from Puccini's triptych, Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi, and they were both entirely enjoyable. Suor Angelica was a little...simple, perhaps, music-wise. It was all very pretty and well-executed, but there was nothing about it that really grabbed me by the throat the way some of his more developed operas do. It is, however, a very moving story, and by the time they got to the end and Angelica's miraculous vision, I was kind of actually crying.
Gianni Schicchi, on the other hand, is a fairly thin story - wealthy old guy dies and writes all his greedy relatives out of his will, they get a local rogue to pretend to be him to dictate a new will, he takes advantage to will himself a fortune - but it's so clever it's hard not to be charmed. There's a lot of crude, slap-stick-esque humor (this was probably the first time I've heard the audience laugh out loud multiple times at an opera), and the way Puccini used the music to add an extra twist to the humor on stage was really interesting.
Oh Puccini. You are so good at pushing all my buttons, sir.
I also bought my tickets to the Santa Fe opera today! I wanted to wait a little longer, since this is going to be an expensive month with the moving and all, but I didn't really have a choice. I realized this weekend that the show I wanted to go to in August was the same weekend as Bubonicon, and while I probably could manage two days of geeking it up at a sci-fi convention along with a night at the opera, I don't think I'd be good for much the rest of the week. And they only had one other weekend performance of the opera I want to see, and when I checked online today there were two tickets left in the cheap seats. And while spending the money now is a little bit of a twinge, it's not nearly as bad as having to spend $200 dollars next month because there's nothing left in the balcony. So, I'm going to see The Pearl Fishers at Santa Fe at the end of June. Which, seriously, only has one of my all-time favorite duets ever, I could not be more excited.
This entry was originally posted at http://masterofmidgets.dreamwidth.org/268224.html. You can also comment there using OpenID.