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…]
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).
Conjuring the spirit of Halloween for just one more night, the November 1 program by the Canton Symphony Orchestra under the enchanted baton (or magic wand?) of Gerhardt Zimmermann, was frightfully delicious. Not that I favor socializing in the netherworld, but from beginning to end, the evening was a magnificent dance with the devil.
First-time listeners to Music Einem Ritterballet (Music for a Knight’s Ballet) might understandably hear more of Mozart or Haydn than Beethoven in the work. Still, the choice of this early composition (1791) to open the third concert of the Canton Symphony Orchestra Beethoven Festival on April 25, jaunty and charming as it is, ultimately served to illuminate Beethoven’s separation from his classical predecessors in a steady and bold ascent to the pinnacle of his ninth symphony. 
Last Friday evening Opera Western Reserve mounted its eleventh annual production, a solid version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. As always, by limiting the event to one performance, the organization ensured a full house. Don Giovanni combines the comic, tragic, and supernatural in a magnificent musical pastiche. The opera is not as theatrically balanced as The Marriage of Figaro and The Magic Flute, and Act II often has significant cuts.