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BW Opera: Taking Up Serpents (Feb. 2 & 4)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater became only the fourth company — and the first collegiate one — to stage Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s provocative Taking Up Serpents when the show opened at the Kleist Center for Theater and Drama in Berea on February 2.

Masterfully directed by Scott Skiba with a talented student cast and a 13-piece professional chamber ensemble tightly conducted by Dean Buck, the one-act, 80-minute piece commissioned by Washington National Opera centers around 25-year-old Kayla, the daughter of a Holiness preacher in the Deep South.

A “lost soul and a wanderer,” Kayla’s on a quest to establish her own relationship with God outside the smothering confines of a patriarchal church that handles snakes, speaks in tongues, and indulges in other questionable practices invented by Christian charismatics. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Opera: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro

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by Mike Telin

A mainstay of the opera repertoire, The Marriage of Figaro is the first of Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. The plot is filled with mistaken identity, surprise paternity, and intrigue, as the servants Figaro and Susanna triumph in marriage while comically thwarting the attempts of the philandering Count Almaviva to seduce Susanna.

On Thursday, March 24 at 7:30 pm at Gamble Auditorium, Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater will launch Mozart’s comic opera in a production directed by Scott Skiba, with Dean Buck conducting the BW Orchestra. The opera will be sung in Italian with English supertitles. Performances run through Sunday, March 27. Tickets are available online. The performances will also be live streamed.

Based on a Pierre Beaumarchais play, Figaro is a social commentary about the lower versus the upper class — servants outsmarting the aristocracy. And it is the combination of comedy  and great music that makes the opera a masterpiece. “I think it’s one of the greatest pieces in all of theater, whether it’s opera or musicals,” Scott Skiba said during a recent telephone conversation. “The Beaumarchais plays are brilliant and the Mozart/DaPonte collaboration is equally brilliant.” [Read more…]

BW’s Dido and Aeneas at RED Space (Oct. 24)

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by David Kulma

We live in an age where opera, no longer restricted to theaters and concert halls, is happening in every place imaginable. This was the case when Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater presented two performances of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at RED Space in downtown Cleveland. I attended on Thursday, October 24. Lasting about an hour and with roles that you can divide up between seven women and two men, Dido is perfect for female-dominated college voice programs. But how do you make it work in a cement box? [Read more…]

Frady to guest direct BW’s
Dido and Aeneas at Red Space

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by Daniel Hathaway

Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater will stage Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at Red Space in downtown Cleveland on Wednesday and Thursday, October 23 and 24 at 7:00 pm, in a production directed by Kathryn Frady of Knoxville’s Marble City Opera.

Frady returns to BW at the invitation of opera studies director Scott Skiba, after having directed scenes and sung in a premiere during Cleveland Opera Theater’s {New Opera Works} Festival two years ago. “I love contemporary opera,” she said in a recent telephone conversation. “This season, Marble City Opera is producing the world premiere of Shadowlight by Larry Delinger and Emily Anderson. It’s about Beauford Delaney, a famous artist who grew up in Knoxville. We’re building a whole festival around the opera from January through May.

Dido and Aeneas, on the other hand, is a very old theater piece, perhaps having been first performed in London at a dancing school in the late 1680s. “Dido was Scott’s idea,” Frady said. “Originally, we were to have staged Menotti’s The Medium, but casting issues made a switch necessary. But Dido is a great piece.” [Read more…]

CIM/CWRU, Oberlin, and Baldwin Wallace produce impressive operas during March

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by Daniel Hathaway

CIM/CWRU: Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie

If you were able to shut down your peripheral vision in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music on March 1 and focus only on the stage, you could imagine yourself sitting in the stalls at the Paris Opéra in 1757, watching the revival of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace Opera presents Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress

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by Daniel Hathaway and Mike Telin

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress is based on a series of 18th-century engravings of the same name by William Hogarth and boasts a libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman. The opera chronicles the moral and physical demise of Tom Rakewell, who deserts Anne Trulove for London’s decadent delights. After many adventures initiated by Nick Shadow, a.k.a. the Devil, Tom ends up in a hospital for the insane. The moral of the story: the Devil will find work for idle hands. Click here to read a short synopsis.

On Thursday, March 21 at 7:30 pm at the Klais Drama Center, Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater takes on this entertaining tale of Tom and his pact with the Devil. The double cast includes Ethan Burck and Benjamin Krumreig as Tom Rakewell, faculty members Benjamin Czarnota and Marc Weagraff as Nick Shadow, DeLaine Crutchfield and Giuliana Bozza as Anne Trulove, and Nan Golz and Sarah Antell as Baba the Turk. Scott Skiba directs and Domenico Boyagian conducts the Baldwin Wallace Orchestra. Performances continue on March 22 and 23 at 7:30 pm and March 24 at 2:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

We spoke with Marc Weagraff by telephone and began by asking him how it feels to play the Devil?

[Read more…]

BW’s The Secret Marriage: questions for Covent Garden guest director Noa Naamat

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by Daniel Hathaway

Noa NaamatBaldwin Wallace Conservatory will present four performances of Domenico Cimarosa’s late-18th-century opera, Il matrimonio segreto (“The Secret Marriage”) this week at the John Patrick Theater on the school’s campus in Berea. The performances, from Thursday, March 22 through Saturday, March 24 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, March 25 at 2:00 pm, will be guest directed by Noa Naamat of London’s Royal Opera at Covent Garden. Tiffany Chang will conduct the BW Symphony Orchestra.

Although Cimarosa wrote over 80 operas, Il matrimonio is the only title to have won a permanent place in the canon, where it is favorably compared to the comic operas of Mozart. It became a hit at its first performance in Vienna in 1792, when Emperor Leopold II commanded the entire piece to be encored — after thoughtfully treating the performers to supper.

A native of Israel, Noa Naamat joined the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at Covent Garden in the fall of 2017 after studying in Florence and Scotland and directing theater and opera productions in Israel, Germany, Italy, Austria, the UK, and Ireland. [Read more…]

A weekend of short(ened) operas from Opera Circle, Kent, and Baldwin Wallace

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by Daniel Hathaway

zanetto-st-stanNovember 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…]

BW to stage Peter Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen Feb. 25-28

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by Daniel Hathaway

Carmen-BrookGeorge Bizet’s Carmen regularly appears in lists of the top ten operas performed across the globe, but like Handel’s Messiah, there’s no definitive version of the piece. The score of Carmen has been touched by many hands since its Paris premiere in 1875, as it has evolved from a comic opera with spoken dialogue to a grand opera with sung recitatives.

The most radical version of the work, Peter Brook’s La Tragédie de Carmen, which premiered at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York in 1981, reduces Bizet’s four acts lasting about 2-½ hours to one act lasting 85 minutes. Brook also stripped out the chorus, reduced the orchestra to 14 players, and cut many of the original elements from the score.

BW Opera Theater will present Brook’s The Tragedy of Carmen in the Robert Allman Theater on BW’s Berea campus from February 25 to 28, with evening performances running from Thursday through Sunday at 7:30 pm, and matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 2:00 pm. The production will be directed by Victoria Bussert, BW’s director of musical theater. We reached her by phone to get her take on the Peter Brooks version of the show. [Read more…]

Baldwin Wallace’s Spring Opera to open this Thursday evening

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by Daniel Hathaway

Smith-Benjamin-WayneThis weekend when Baldwin Wallace presents its Spring Opera, two casts of students will be singing in a work written by a composer younger than themselves. Wolfgang Amadè Mozart finished La finta giardiniera in Munich in 1775 at the age of 18 and saw it performed in January of that year.

“It’s a crazy story, a funny piece with something for everyone — mad scenes, lust, joy, sorrow,” stage director Benjamin Wayne Smith said when I spoke to him recently in his studio. [Read more…]

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