FSU's Department of Music to Present Spring Opera Theatre Performance

2018 Apr 5

Frostburg State University's Department of Music will present famous operatic scenes from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Bastien and Bastienna," Samuel Barber's "A Hand of Bridge," Henry Purcell's "The Fairy Queen," Christoph Willibald Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" and Georges Bizet's "Pearl Fishers" for its spring opera theatre concert. Performances will take place Monday, April 23, and Tuesday, April 24, at 7:30 p.m. in the Pealer Recital Hall of FSU's Woodward D. Pealer Performing Arts Center. This event is free and open to the public.

Directed by Dr. Victoria Browers, the performance will feature sopranos Marse Romero and Rachel Cox, mezzo-soprano Pateley Bongiorni, tenors David Cook and Gabriel Harper, counter tenor/baritone Anthony Dyson and baritone Raymond Sorenson. Joesph Yungen will accompany the group on piano.

"Bastien und Bastienne" is a one-act singspiel, a comic opera, and was one of Mozart's earliest operas, written in 1768 when he was only 12 years old. It was allegedly commissioned by Viennese physician and "magnetist" Dr. Franz Mesmer as a satire of the pastoral genre then prevalent. In this opera, Bastienne, a shepherdess, fears that her dearest friend, Bastien, has forsaken her for another pretty face, and decides to go into the pasture to be comforted by her flock of lambs. Before she can leave, however, she runs into Colas, the village soothsayer, and requests the help of his magical powers to help win back her Bastien.

"A Hand of Bridge" is an opera in one act, possibly the shortest opera that is regularly performed: It lasts about nine minutes. It premiered as a part of Menotti's Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto in 1959 at the Teatro Caio Melisso. The opera consists of two unhappily married couples playing a hand of bridge, during which each character has an arietta in which he or she professes his or her inner desires.

"The Fairy Queen" is a masque or semi-opera. The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's wedding comedy "A Midsummer Night's Dream." First performed in 1692, "The Fairy Queen" was composed three years before Purcell's death at 35. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the 20th century.

"Orfeo ed Euridice" is an opera based on the myth of Orpheus. It belongs to the genre of the azione teatrale, an opera on a mythological subject with choruses and dancing. The piece was first performed at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 1762. "Orfeo ed Euridice" is the first of Gluck's "reform" operas, in which he attempted to replace the abstruse plots and overly complex music of opera seria with a "noble simplicity" in the music and the drama.

"The Pearl Fishers" ("Les pecheurs de perles") is an opera in three acts. It premiered in 1863 at the Theatre Lyrique in Paris. Set in ancient times on the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the opera tells the story of how two men's vow of eternal friendship is threatened by their love for the same woman, whose own dilemma is the conflict between secular love and her sacred oath as a priestess. The friendship duet "Au fond du temple saint," generally known as "The Pearl Fishers Duet," is one of the best-known in Western opera.

For more information, contact the Department of Music at 301-687-4109 or visit www.frostburg.edu/concerts.