by Timothy Robson
Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1950 cold-war era opera The Consul received a strong performance on July 21 by the Nightingale Opera Theatre at the intimate Barlow Community Center theater in Hudson. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1950 cold-war era opera The Consul received a strong performance on July 21 by the Nightingale Opera Theatre at the intimate Barlow Community Center theater in Hudson. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
At the same time last year that Nightingale Opera Theater executive director Melissa Davis was thinking about a title to produce in 2017, she was also feeling distraught by stories she read about the emerging refugee crisis.
“I listened to Menotti’s The Consul and was so moved by it that I thought there was no better time to perform the work than this summer.” That plan has now come to fruition: two performances are scheduled for Friday, July 21 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, July 23 at 2:30 pm in the Barlow Center in Hudson. (Read a plot synopsis here.) [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
November became Northeast Ohio’s unofficial Opera Month as a number of institutions unveiled productions during the first two weeks. Particularly dense was the weekend of November 4-6, when Opera Circle Cleveland, Kent State Opera, and Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater — in cooperation with Cleveland Opera Theater — all brought titles to the stage. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Opera fans in Northeast Ohio will enjoy a bumper crop of productions this harvest-time. Six shows, two of them double-bills, will open between November 2 and 11. We’ll be running separate previews for Oberlin Opera Theater’s Donizetti/Poulenc evenings (November 2,4, 5, and 6), for CIM Opera’s Puccini/Menotti performances (November 9-11) and for Opera Western Reserve’s single performance of Carmen (November 11).
But let’s take a look at the busiest opera weekend of the year. Baldwin Wallace’s Serse, Kent State Opera’s scenes from The Magic Flute, and the first pair of a dozen performances of Mascagni’s Zanetto by Opera Circle Cleveland, plus the remaining Oberlin Opera performances, all fall on the weekend of November 4-6. With some astute planning, you can catch a performance of each of them. Here’s a rundown of the BW/COT, Kent State, and Opera Circle productions. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
A strong cast of singer-actors and superb production values made Nightingale Opera Theatre’s recent production of Mark Adamo’s Little Women a beautiful experience. I saw the second of two performances in the intimate theater of the Barlow Community Center in Hudson on Sunday afternoon, July 16. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Mark Adamo’s Little Women, his first attempt at an opera, turned out to be a composer’s dream project. It is based on Adamo’s own adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s story of four New England sisters coming of age during the American Civil War. The piece was workshopped at Houston Grand Opera in 1998, then given a full production there in 2000. With more than 70 productions to date, including a version filmed for national television, Little Women has gone on to become one of the most-produced new operas of our time. Nine productions will have taken place in 2015-2016 alone.
Nightingale Opera Theatre will bring Little Women to the stage of Hudson’s Barlow Community Center on Friday, July 15 at 7:30 pm and on Sunday, July 17 at 2:30 pm. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Hudson’s Nightingale Opera Theatre will mark its move into a new venue at Western Reserve Academy on Saturday, June 13 at 7:30 pm with a production of Gaetano Donizetti’s “melodramma giocoso,” The Elixir of Love.
One of the top comic operas of all time, Elixir was the most-performed opera in Europe during the decade following its premiere in 1832, and unlike many titles, has never fallen off the charts.
In a telephone conversation, we asked Melissa Davis, Nightingale’s artistic director, why she chose the piece for the company’s summer production. “We wanted to do a show with a smaller principal cast this year,” she said. “Tim Culver, the tenor who will be singing the role of Nemorino, told me, ‘I just really love Elixir. Have you thought about doing that?’ I’ve performed the opera three times in my career and remember it so fondly. It has such great music and such a fun plot. We decided to go with it.” [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Warning to all witches: you’re courting danger if you try to turn children into gingerbread in Northeast Ohio. You’ve been punished for that many times recently — at the Cleveland Institute of Music (March 2012), at Youngstown State University (April 2013), at the Oberlin Conservatory (November 2013) and at Baldwin Wallace University (February 2014). The children rebelled once again last weekend at the Barlow Center in Hudson, as Nightingale Opera Theatre staged three performances of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. And once again, the witch didn’t survive the trip through her own oven. I saw the show, which was sung in English, on Sunday, June 29.
It was talented student casts who turned the tables on the sorceress in those previous performances. Nightingale, a company of professional singers, brought an especially high level of vocal prowess and acting experience to Humperdinck’s retelling of the famous fairy tale, while retaining the feel of a community production by casting young human beings as children and angels. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
Many performing organizations lay low in August. Others are just gearing up for late summer seasons. Nightingale Opera Theatre is in the final stages of rehearsals for its production of Massenet’s Werther at the Solon Center for the Arts on August 2 and 4, and the Hudson Chamber Players have three Sunday afternoon concerts in the works for August 4, 11 and 18 in Hudson and Cleveland. Both organizations are new on the scene in Northeast Ohio, and reflect the entrepreneurial spirit that seems to be bubbling up all over in today’s classical music world.
Melissa Davis (left) created Nightingale Opera Theatre just last summer with a production of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene at the Akron Art Museum. “There’re just not a whole lot of opportunities in this area for opera singers, especially sopranos. I wanted to start something and I guess I was just crazy enough to do it!”, Davis told us in a phone conversation. She chose Street Scene because its large cast allowed more than just a few singers and students to participate. “The Akron Art Museum was a bit too small for the show but we managed to make it work. It was a very intimate experience for the audience.”
Davis and her company followed up in March with two one-act shows, also staged at the Akron museum. [Read more…]