by Nicholas Stevens
The question has long troubled poets, playwrights, musicians, and visual artists: how best to activate collective memory through art, especially when the events in question constitute the darkest hour in recorded history? As part of their New Opera Works {NOW} Festival, Cleveland Opera Theater and its collaborating partners recently ventured an answer in the form of a new opera: Verlorene Heimat (“Lost Homeland”) by composer Dawn Sonntag.
by Mike Telin
Although composer Dawn Sonntag was well-versed in writing art song, vocal chamber music, and works for chorus, there was one thing missing from her catalogue of works for the voice — an opera. “I wanted to compose one but I had not found a libretto that I connected with,” the Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Music Department at Hiram College said during a telephone conversation.
Then one night during dinner with her mother-in-law, that changed. “I knew she had been born and spent part of her childhood in East Prussia, but I didn’t know why she had left. So I asked her and she told me the whole story. And when I was listening to it I thought, this is it!”
On Saturday, January 27 at 7:30 pm at the Maltz Center for the Performing Arts, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Cleveland premiere of Dawn Sonntag’s Verlorene Heimat (“Lost Homeland”) as part of the company’s {NOW} Festival. Presented in collaboration with the Cleveland Composers’ Guild, the opera is based on the true story of the East Prussian refugee family of Christa Neuber Kuske (1937 – 2012) and the Jewish-Ukrainian girl they sheltered.
by Mike Telin
With a mission to “give a voice to the composers of our time,” the latest addition to Northeast Ohio’s opera scene, ContempOpera/Cleveland, presented an impressive first installment of the company’s Incubator Series at Cleveland Public Theatre on Friday, June 9. The evening featured musical selections from five operas, some of them works in progress.
The evening began with two duets from Verlorene Heimat by Dawn L. Sonntag. The piece recounts the true story of East Prussian Nazi resistors and the Jewish-Ukrainian girl they sheltered during the final months of World War II. The haunting “Once I Had a Garden” was beautifully sung by sopranos Rebecca Freshwater and Andrea Anelli. Baritone Brian Keith Johnson joined Freshwater for the hopeful “I Promise I Will Find You.” Sonntag’s musical color palette is enticing, and the three singers gave heartfelt performances. [Read more…]
by Daniel Hathaway
With characters like Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, its setting in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the 1940s, and its subplots of sensuality, delusion, and madness, Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire makes it a shoo-in for operatic treatment. Composer André Previn and librettist Philip Littell took that task on in 1995, and Cleveland Opera Theater chose their adaptation of Streetcar for its second show at the Masonic Performing Arts Center, mounting a production that was admirable for its ambition and impressive in its results. [Read more…]
by Mike Telin
Steeped in desire, passion, and deceit, it’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire eventually found its place on the opera stage. On Friday, December 4 at 7:30 pm in Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Ohio premiere of composer André Previn’s and librettist Philip Littell’s 1995 opera based on Williams’ iconic play. The production will be repeated on Sunday, December 6 at 3:00 pm. (Left, Previn conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in 1986).
COT’s artistic director Scott Skiba recalled his first experience with the work, which was premiered at San Francisco Opera in 1998. “I remember sitting in the Oberlin Conservatory library watching it on a LaserDisc,” he told me over breakfast at a popular Ohio City café. “At first I wasn’t sure what to think of it, but nevertheless I found it interesting.”
The idea of producing Streetcar has been in discussion at COT for a few years, but when a reduction of the orchestra score was completed, taking the number of players down from 70 to 40, it suddenly became realistic to mount a production. [Read more…]
by Timothy Robson
Since the demise some years ago of Opera Cleveland and Lyric Opera Cleveland, opera performances in Cleveland have been few and far between. Several plucky companies, including Opera per Tutti, have popped up in the last few years, offering small-scale productions, often of more unusual repertoire. [Read more…]
by J.D. Goddard
Dedicated as “a symbol of Italian culture” in 1930, the Italian Cultural Garden hosted the San Carlo Opera sixty-eight years ago in its lower level amphitheater. In 2008, this cultural offering was revived presenting the art form of opera that originated In Italy at the end of the 16th century. —Program notes
On a very warm but comfortable Sunday evening, Opera Per Tutti continued its revival of Italian opera in Cleveland’s Italian Cultural Garden with an al fresco performance consisting of twenty-two operatic arias, Neapolitan songs, duets and a quartet sung by a troupe of five professional singers: soprano Andrea Anelli, soprano Rebecca Freshwater, tenors Leodigario Del Rosario and Dan Doty, and baritone Benjamin Czarnota, with Jeannette Davis at the piano. [Read more…]