The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: The “Met Live in HD” starts its 10th season this coming Saturday with Verdi’s “Il Trovatore.” Plus, today is your last time to hear the acclaimed opening concert by the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Read the reviews here.

ALERT: Today at 2:30 p.m in Overture Hall is your last chance to hear the season-opening program of music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Aaron Copland and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky by the Madison Symphony Orchestra. The performance won acclaim from local critics.

Here is a review by John W. Barker for Isthmus:

http://www.isthmus.com/arts/stage/madison-symphony-orchestra-opens-2015-season/

And here is a review by Jessica Courtier for The Capital Times:

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/individual-sections-shine-in-madison-symphony-orchestra-s-season-opener/article_3fd85244-6456-11e5-b949-ef2658626736.html

And here is Greg Hettmansberger’s review for Madison Magazine:

http://www.channel3000.com/madison-magazine/arts-culture/madison-symphony-celebrates-itself-rightly-so/35500642

By Jacob Stockinger

Next weekend sure is a train wreck for local music. Not that this past weekend wasn’t or that future weekends won’t be.

So much is happening that The Ear sometimes gets discouraged rather than excited. You begin to think not about what you will see or hear, but about what you will miss!

And then there are the major non-local events.

One such big one is the opening this coming Saturday, Oct. 3, of the 10th season of the series of “Live From the Met in HD,” the broadcast of live opera performances that are broadcast via satellite to thousands of cinemas around the globe.

The series has been one of the Metropolitan Opera’s outstanding success stories and money-makers over the past decade and of the controversial tenor of the Met’s general director Peter Gelb.

Here in Madison, you have a choice of two locations: Eastgate cinemas on the far east side and Point Cinemas on the far west side.

Here is a link to the Marcus Theatres web site where you can find out about other locations in the area, state and region:

https://www.marcustheatres.com/movies/met-ii-trovatore-live

The opening production is Giuseppe Verdi’s “Il Trovatore” (The Troubadour, 1853) with the famous Anvil Chorus (heard from a previous production at the bottom in a YouTube video). The staging and production of the opera with a Spanish theme is the dramatic and disturbing art of Francisco Goya.

The cast features soprano Anna Netrebko and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky.

The show will start on Saturday at 11:55 a.m. Running time, with one half-hour intermission, is about 2 hours and 45 minutes. Admission is $24 for adults and $22 for seniors 60 and over; and $18 for children 3 to 11. Tickets to the encore productions are $18.

Here is a link with the title of the 10 other productions – including works by Richard Wagner, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Gaetano Donizetti, Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, Alban Berg and Georges Bizet for this season.

And you can follow links to plot synopses, cast notes and other information.

https://www.metopera.org/Season/In-Cinemas/