Category: featured

We’ve expanded the HSOW 2012 One Act Opera show to include another American one acts opera.

Steven Serpa’s Thyrsis and Amaranth (2010)
A charming piece for countertenor and soprano, based on a fable by Jean de la Fontaine,.  This 20 minute pastoral opera will be directed by Nina Scott-Stoddart and Andrew Pelrine.

The third of our three programmes for the 2012 HSOW will be an evening of One Act Operas in English,and we’re especially proud to present a real operatic rarity: The Harpies, composed in 1930 by American composer Marc Blitzstein.  

This operatic spoof of Greek mythology – and of musical neo-classicism – is also intended as a Depression-era allegory. Drawing on Greek mythological characters while satirizing the classical operatic form, with traces of pop music of the period and barbershop harmony thrown in for good measure, the opera expresses, in allegorical format, the composer’s attitude toward economic and political conditions as they existed at the time of the the Great Depression.

Set in ancient Thrace, the work has eight characters, balanced between tenor and soprano principals, a group of three female Harpies, and three male Argonauts. At the center is Phineus, a sightless oracle, who attempts to enjoy his dinner but is constantly attacked by the Harpies. Not only do they steal his food, they emit a foul odour as well. Jason appears on the scene with the Argonauts, and he promises to fight off the Harpies if Phineus will guarantee that the gods will continue to favor them. As soon as the Harpies are defeated Iris appears as a messenger of the gods. She promises Phineus that he will always be safe from the Harpies, and she dispatches them to experience various tortures. The prophet can now eat his meal in peace.

Music Director:  Jennifer Szeto
Stage Director:  Steven Bourque
Vocal Coach:  Lucy Hayes Davis

The third of our three programmes for the 2012 HSOW will be an evening of One Act Operas in English,and we’re thrilled to present the Halifax premiere of Gisela in Her Bathtub, a comic opera by Canadian composer Neil Weisensel and librettist Michael Cavanagh.

Gisela lounges in the tub to soak her modern cares away while she tries to finish reading an epic historical romance, in spite of interruptions. The setting of the novel is wind-swept ninth century Iceland. Great loves are won and lost, blood is shed, and the bathwater of the gods is splashed on the tile floor of antiquity.

Music Director:  Jennifer Szeto
Stage Director:  Bonnie Archibald-Awalt
Vocal Coach:  Lucy Hayes Davis

The third of our three programmes for the 2012 HSOW will be an evening of One Act Operas in English,and the centerpiece of that evening will be Ralph Vaughan Williams’s opera Riders to the Sea, based on the play by J.M. Synge.

Within only about forty-minutes of music, Riders to the Sea lays bare the most frightening of human experience—the bleakness of waiting, the despair of loss, and the inevitability of still more loss. As is often the case, the inexorable sea looms as the background, but it well could be any overwhelming and magnetic force of nature or man. This is an extraordinary picture of people facing their own immovability, and of the futility of resistance and the necessity of acceptance or, at least, resignation.

The music is seductive, gripping, inescapable, and likely Vaughan Williams’s greatest theatrical work.

Music Director:  Jennifer Szeto
Stage Director:  Anne Morison
Vocal Coach:  Lucy Hayes Davis

 

The second of our three programmes for the 2012 Workshop will be Bizet’s Carmen.

Bizet once wrote in a letter: ‘I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil and the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note’. His opera Carmen wholeheartedly embraces this credo. This hot-blooded tale of erotic obsession shocked its first-night audiences with its low-life theme and violent conclusion. Carmen’s blatant sexuality, her readiness to discard men like picked flowers, and the rowdy women of the chorus who both fight and smoke onstage, were strong fare for the Opera-Comique’s traditionally family atmosphere.

Music Director:  Tara Scott
Stage Director: Anthony Radford
Vocal Coach:  Paula Rockwell

For more information and cast lists, please see 2012 Workshop