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New opera sells out in New York

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norman lebrecht

January 14, 2015

Now here’s a turn-up for the books.

Our inveterate operamanes tell us the whole run of this premiere show is sold, but there’s a waitlist. You might get lucky. Read here.

Comments

CDH says:

January 14, 2015 at 5:15 pm

I got a nice sense of the theatricality of this little production, which indeed sounds interesting, but do these two actually know anything about music? I came away with no sense of what the piece actually sounded like.

Have they been engaged by SD to show that you don’t have to know anything about music to enjoy opera? Possibly a valuable contribution in this day and age!

William Safford says:

January 15, 2015 at 3:36 am

Isn’t Shawn’s father Sherrill Milnes? If so, they probably know something about opera….

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John Borstlap says:

January 15, 2015 at 10:07 am

The composer, Stefan Weisman, is a very gifted one, and thus draws upon traditional means, as another opera of his demonstrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqzXBi6ifCg

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May says:

January 14, 2015 at 10:05 pm

This is really stretching things quite far to call this an opera. After watching one of the clips on vimeo, it seems like an interesting theater piece, but it takes more than singing a libretto to an (btw out-of-tune) piano accompaniment to make a play into an opera. Were the same chord not repeated for minutes at a time, the work would be much shorter than 100 minutes.

Christy says:

January 15, 2015 at 4:27 am

I believe all of most of the productions at the HERE Prototype opera and theater festival have sold out. This isn’t new for NY. There is a lot of this type of activity and it’s well-supported even if it doesn’t show on statistics. Loft Opera, which did the DiDonato recital is another. But you have to go downtown and outside Manhattan normally.

Benjamin Gordon says:

January 15, 2015 at 8:45 am

I think the headline overstates the whole business a bit… If you read the article, you see that the theater barely seats 100 people. This isn’t comparable with selling out a normal house. This has more the whiff of a experimental black box performance and doesn’t quite warrant being called an opera.