The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: University Opera updates and stages Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte” on this Friday night, Sunday afternoon and Tuesday night. Plus, here are the winners of the Madison Symphony Orchestra’s Final Forte
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NEWS UPDATE: If you missed it, here are the results of Wednesday’s night Final Forte teenage concerto competition with the Madison Symphony Orchestra, which was broadcast live from Overture Hall on Wisconsin Public Radio and PBS Wisconsin (formerly Wisconsin Public Television).
First and second place prizes of a $2,000 scholarship went to pianist Michael Wu and pianist Jessica Jiang, respectively. The two runners-up — violinists Emily Hauer and Jonah Kartman — each received a scholarship of $1,000.
Here is a link to more information, photos and background – including teachers — for each of the four contestants as well as the dates for rebroadcasting the finalists’ concert on radio and TV.
By Jacob Stockinger
The prize-winning University Opera and UW Symphony Orchestra will stage three performances of “Cosi fan tutte” (So Do They All, or Women Are Like That), the late comic and seriously satirical opera by Mozart about love, gender roles and cheating on partners.
The performances are in Old Music Hall on Bascom Hill on this Friday night, Feb. 28, at 7:30 p.m.; Sunday afternoon, March 1, at 2:30 p.m.; and Tuesday night, March 3, at 7:30 p.m.
Tickets are $25 for general admission with reserved seats, $20 for seniors (62 and up) and $10 for UW students.
As usual, UW students will alternate certain roles during the three performances. (Below is returning singer Anja Pustaver, one of the three Despina’s in the production.)
The stage director is David Ronis, the head of the opera program at the UW-Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music. He has won numerous national awards during his tenure at the UW-Madison for his inventive re-imaginings of well-known operas and musicals.
The student orchestra will be conducted by Oriol Sans, the acclaimed new professor of conducting and director of Orchestral Activities at the UW-Madison. (In the YouTube video at the bottom, you can hear the Overture to “Cosi” played by the Metropolitan Opera conducted by James Levine.)
Below is a studio photo by radio host Norman Gilliland of members of the production when they appeared on Wisconsin Public Radio. From left are: conductor Oriol Sans, director David Ronis, soprano Julia Urbank and soprano Cayla Rosche.
The opera has been updated to the Roaring Twenties, at a time when the women’s suffrage movement and other women’s rights issues were gaining traction. The re-staging also seems especially timely and contemporary, given the #MeToo and Time’sUp movements.
Here is a link to the full press release with the complete cast and production staff as well as a sketch of the abstract stage set (below) designed by Joseph Varga and other information, including a detailed synopsis and an explanation of the reason for setting the opera by in the Roaring 20s: https://www.music.wisc.edu/2020/02/10/cosi-fan-tutte/
Here is a link to a shortened version – with information about tickets and parking — on the Mead Witter School of Music’s home website under Concerts and Events: https://www.music.wisc.edu/event/university-opera-mozarts-cosi-fan-tutte/2020-02-28/
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Classical music: Meet Dame Ethel Smyth –- a Victorian feminist and forceful composer as well as an advocate of women’s rights and same-sex relations.
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By Jacob Stockinger
You probably don’t know the name Ethel Smyth (pronounced smaith, below).
The Ear certainly didn’t.
But then he came across this fascinating account of her life and work.
Smythe was friends with Peter Tchaikovsky and Johannes Brahms.
An early feminist leader for same-sex equality, she fell in love with the much younger writer Virginia Woolf.
And her muscular music and politically charged operas reminded people of Richard Wagner.
Now she has been resurrected thanks to Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College who also directs the American Symphony Orchestra and the Bard Music Festival. He staged her 1904 opera “The Wreckers.” (At bottom, you can hear a YouTube performance of the Overture to “The Wreckers.”)
Tom Huizenga, of the outstanding Deceptive Cadence blog, wrote this profile and appreciation for NPR, or National Public radio:
Tags: American Symphony Orchestra, Arts, Bard College, Bard Music Festival, blog, choral music, Classical music, Deceptive Cadence, England, Ethel Smyth, feminism, feminist, Jacob Stockinger, Johannes Brahms, Leon Botstein, lesbian, LGBT, Music, New York City, NPR, opera, Orchestra, Overture, Peter Tchaikovsky, Richard Wagner, same-sex, The Wreckers, Tom Huizenga, UK, United Kingdom, United States, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Victorian, Virginia Woolf, vocal music, women's rights, YouTube
Classical music: Why hasn’t anyone written an opera about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement?
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By Jacob Stockinger
Today is a federal holiday in the US: Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
And The Ear has just one question: Why hasn’t anyone yet composed an opera about MLK?
His larger-than-life existence has all the necessary operatic elements about it, from being a prisoner in jail and winning the Nobel Peace Prize to meeting with President Johnson in The White House and being assassinated while defending garbage workers in Memphis.
He took part in momentous events, some of them dramatic and violent, that involved huge masses of people.
Plus, he and his staff experienced major individual and personal conflicts.
And the cause he fought for forever altered the course of American history and the civil rights of other individuals and groups advocating women’s rights, Latino rights, gay rights and disabled rights among others.
Could it be that MLK has not been treated in an opera because the composers are white or non-American?
Who, then, could or should do it?
The contemporary American composer John Adams (below top) comes immediately to mind. He used President Richard Nixon (below bottom is a scene from “Nixon in China, as it was staged at the Metropolitan Opera); physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project in “Doctor Atomic: to create the atomic bomb; and in the still controversial opera “The Death of Klinghoffer” the question of terrorism examined through the story of Jewish tourist Leon Klinghoffer and his Palestinian murderers, to create his successful reality-based historical operas.
So, why not Martin Luther King Jr.?
Music certainly was vital to King and his campaign.
But what hasn’t he himself been treated as the central figure of an opera?
Maybe the difficulties posed by the King estate would have something to do with it, as they did with the current movie “Selma.”
But one can’t imagine that they are insurmountable.
Anyway, tell us what you think.
Should there be an opera about Martin Luther King Jr.?
Who would be a good composer to write one?
And why do you think one hasn’t already been written? Does racism play a role?
The Ear wants to hear.
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