Ruth Leon recommends… Partenope from San Francisco Opera
Ruth Leon recommendsPartenope from San Francisco Opera
Tickets for the stream are $27.50. Click here
More from San Francisco Opera which is livestreaming one performance of each of its operas during its Summer Season. The second livestream is Partenope. Love is a battlefield in Christopher Alden’s Olivier award-winning production of Partenope, a laugh-out-loud comedy of romance and rejection, set to some of George Frideric Handel’s most masterful music. In this SF production, Partenope is the most eligible debutante in 1920s Paris. And she’s besieged by suitors.
Christopher Moulds conducts Handel’s virtuosic score, a brisk confection full of high-flying virtuosity and emotionally stirring arias.
Partenope will be livestreamed on Sunday, June 23rd at 2pm Pacific Time which is a bit easier for those of us who are a long way from San Francisco.
I never get the point of a setting of an opera in another period than the one in which it was written. The musical style is an essential part of the work’s identity, it is very odd to listen to baroque coloratura in a twenties setting. This is different from works where an imagined earlier period is conjured-up like in most operas, including baroque, and in Wagner or Debussy or Strauss.
I thank God for your comment [and I’m an atheist!] If a ‘director’ can ignore and change the libretto, then a conductor has the right to alter the score: Would the public enjoy and accept adding bass guitar to La Travis’s or Carmen? Opera must truly be dying if people are so sick and tired of these same standard fifteen or so operas, that they need to continue this now-decades-old unoriginal habit of re-ambientation. Perhaps a boring Handel opera with hours of da capo arias can benefit from superficial, meaningless visual distraction, but enough is enough. And to think we had deep, brilliant, informed talents such as Strehler, Zeffirelli, Everding, Schank, even Dexter at the Met was better than these current hacks. Just to name a few. I suggest a new Ring at the Met or Bayreuth, staged by Brad Pitt, set in the Great Depression, with The Rolling Stones in the pit… or a Fledermaus set in the Ice Age with Putin as Orlovsky…