by Mike Telin

Beginning on Wednesday, February 26 in Kulas Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music director David Bamberger and the CIM Opera Theater will present two one-act masterpieces of English opera, Dido & Aeneas and Riders to the Sea. Harry Davidson will conduct the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra. The performances will be sung in English with projected text. Performances begin at 7:30 pm and run through Saturday, March 1.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea is set in the Aran Islands, off Ireland’s west coast. Before the opera opens, Maurya has lost her husband, father-in-law, and four of her six sons at sea. Mezzo soprano Lyndsay Moy (left), who performs the role of Maurya, says all one needs to do to perceive the difficulties of daily life the opera’s characters are forced to endure is to look at the geographic location where the opera is set.

“It’s easy to understand just how dangerous the ocean can be. And Maurya is someone who has experienced a lot of pain caused by the ocean. She has lost her husband, her father-in-law and four sons and at the beginning of the opera she presumes that her fifth son, Michael, is also dead. [Read more…]