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
