Welcome students and teachers to Opera Online. I hope you all enjoyed Orphée et Eurydice last week.Remember to post your reviews online and let us know what you thought of the opera!
We're going to finish up with Orphée et Eurydice this week, taking a last look at the composer and the ballet section of the opera.
You Tube Clip of the Week
We'll see a performance of the famous Dance of the Blessed Spirits which opens the second act of the opera. In this brief ballet, the spirits dance serenely in the Elysian Fields in the Underworld.
This clip is from a production of Orpheus and Eurydice at the Palais Garnier in Paris in 2008. How is the choreography different or the same from the choreography you saw in the Opera Company of Philadelphia's production?
Website of the week
Lets look at the man behind the music; Christoph Willibald Ritter von Gluck (1714-1787). He was an opera composer of the early classical period. After many years at the Habsburg court at Vienna, Gluck brought about the practical reform of opera by getting rid of some of its extravagance that actually made it harder to tell a story through music. Many intellectuals of the time had been campaigning for this over the years. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that formal opera seria form had enjoyed for much of the century...
Opera on the AirOn Saturday, June 26 at 1pm WRTI Radio will broadcast the Lyric Opera of Chicago's production of Giacomo Puccini's TOSCA conducted by Sir Andrew Davis starring Deborah Voigt as Tosca, Vladimir Galouzine as Cavaradossi and James Morris as Scarpia.
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Until next week…
Until next week…
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