TribLIVE: Opera began in Italy around 1600 as an attempt to re-create ancient Greek drama. It found its own greatness just a few years later when Claudio Monteverdi wrote “L'Orfeo.”
Pittsburgh Opera is in a class by itself locally because opera is such an extravagant art form, requiring an expensive cast of singers, a full symphony orchestra, costumes and sets.
2 comments:
What a great opera to open your season with! La Traviata is such a classic opera that everyone knows and love. Because of how recognizable it is makes it such a great choice. The production itself will be incredible which is great. However, it will also be a box office hit because it is so traditional. The Pittsburgh Opera should make a pretty fair amount of money off of this production that will allow them to try some newer or more cutting-edge things. Another advance to having your season opener be a traditional piece is that it will bring in a more diverse audience. This will be an audience of the older generations seeing a show that they know and love. They will bring a new younger generation that the older one wants to share this story that they know and love with. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to go and see it.
I'm working on La Traviata at Pittsburgh Opera! Yay! Super excited. The singers are awesome and they will melt your heart the minute they start singing.
The rehearsal just started this week and it's been really fun doing internship at the opera house because I can see closely how things work. Opera singers are in a different union from the play actors, so there are a certain amount of different rules, one of them being, they take breaks differently! The contract, if I'm not mistaken, has just been renewed/updated lately, and the stage manager actually went to go through the contracts after she called a 20-minute break to double check if she was right and found out it should've been a 25-minute break instead (am I saying too much here.....)
I'm gonna second what Jason said above about the benefit of opening a season with a traditional and popular opera piece - the uber driver who took me to the Pittsburgh Opera was a super crazy fan of La Traviata (and his brother sang bass 40 years ago) and he was really looking forward to watching the performance with his family.
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