Stony Brook Opera inaugurates its 2013-2014 season with “A Romantic Evening of Opera’s Greatest Scenes” on Friday, November 15, at 8 pm in Staller Center’s Recital Hall. This stirring program presents love scenes from popular Italian, French, German and Russian operas. David Lawton, professor of music and artistic director of the Stony Brook Opera, will conduct the show. Isabel Milenski, artistic director of Hofstra Opera Theater, makes her Stony Brook Opera debut as stage director. She is an active New York City freelance director and has led productions at the Juilliard Opera Center and the Manhattan School of Music. The scenes will be semi-staged, with piano accompaniment performed by Annie Brooks and Matthieu Cognet, and will be sung in the original languages, with projected titles in English.
Scenes include:
Act II duet for Rigoletto and Gilda from Verdi’s Rigoletto
The final trio of the Antonia act from Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann
The “Presentation of the Rose” from Richard Strauss’ Rosenkavalier
Lensky’s Aria and the duel scene from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
Act I, scene 2 from Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi
Short vignettes from Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito
Excerpts from Handel’s Serse
“We have some exciting new singers in our opera program,” said Lawton. “We have chosen scenes that are perfect for our young singers. Even though the scenes are drawn from seven different operas, they are unified by a common theme: all of them involve high points in passionate love relationships, from the magic of love at first sight, to enforced separation, reconciliation after a conflict, and the pain of loss. This program promises to create a particularly satisfying musical and dramatic experience for our audience.”
Featured singers are sopranos Corinne Byrne, Bo-Kyung Kim, Kathleen O’Rourke and Jennifer Sung; mezzo-sopranos Monica Scaiky and Kristin Starkey; tenor Christopher Reames; and bass-baritone Yohan Yi.
Stony Brook Opera will also present this program at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Wednesday, November 13, at 12 pm.
General admission is $10, and student/senior tickets are $5 for the Stony Brook performance on Friday, November 15. For tickets call (631) 632-ARTS or visit www.stallercenter.com. For more information call the Department of Music at (631) 632-7330.
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