The history of opera is, in a sense, a history of the western world. It’s all there, from the epic tragedies of kings and pharaohs, to the everyday trials of lovelorn peasants and stricken beauties.
The history of opera is also, in large part, a history of the golden years of Italy, home to a disproportionate number of the world’s great composers of stage-music. The Italian-opera trinity of Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini alone wrote six of the 10 operas performed most often in America between 1981-2001, according to research from Opera America.
So, in the same week that Italy celebrates the 150th anniversary of national unification, the Missoula Symphony and Chorale will take a musical trip back in time and across an ocean to explore the history of the world as a whole through a concert of great Italian operatic choruses. [Read More...]
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Fate holds a peculiar position in the classical concert hall. At every performance, the music of the program is there on the page in indelible ink, theoretically preordained and immutable, the most meticulously organized choreography of human expression in our culture. Yet any time that live musicians go about translating scratches on paper to waves of sound, the unpredictability of results would seem to belie the whole notion of predeterminism.
Even the same musicians, playing the same music twice, never sound quite the same.
It is much for this reason that one goes back, time and again, to hear familiar classics. In the best performances, one feels a simultaneous sense of inevitability and newness, of revelation and reassurance.
Sunday afternoon’s concert by the Missoula Symphony Orchestra was not quite such a performance. Yet as the ensemble performed a program of music explicitly themed around meditations on fate, the present trajectory of our local orchestra held tight to the script: They just keep getting better. [Read More...]
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This Saturday is, of course, Halloween; and there are about a billion things going on in town, most of them involving conspicuous costumery. Still, the best costumes won’t be found at the bars; instead, they’ll be on screen at the Roxy Theatre, where the Metropolitan Opera’s “Live in HD” series continues with Verdi’s “Aida,” the most spectacular of operatic spectaculars… [Read More...]
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I’m sitting in the Music Recital Hall at UM, listening as the Summer Opera Festival orchestra practices a section of tightly knit contrasts: fast outbursts set against subtly shimmering textures – a hallmark of the music of Giuseppe Verdi. The music starts and stops, as Darko Butorac barks out corrections.
“Oh mama mia, mama mia,” he sighs as the string players smudge a tricky bar. “I can’t subdivide this for you. You have to do it for yourselves.”
He counts out the tempo again, and this time it sounds just right.
Trouble is, back here in the percussion section, I have no idea where we are. On my sparsely notated sheet music, I see “Tacet 5-6-7,” an indication that I simply sit out three long sections of the music. When does the next section begin? It’s not really clearly noted. When it does eventually begin, my music tells me to count out seven bars of rest. Then fifty-two bars of rest. Then fifty-three. Then forty-one.
Then, I’m supposed to whack the bass drum very, very hard. [Read More...]
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There comes a moment toward the end of the longest section of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem when torrential thunderclouds of music suddenly dissipate to reveal a glisteningly tender, soft melody for strings. It is perhaps the most dramatic moment of extreme contrast in a 90-minute musical epic known for its profound extremes.
That moment summed up nearly all that was right about the Missoula Symphony Orchestra and Chorale’s performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the University Theatre on Sunday. [Read More...]
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Just got word that the soprano soloist scheduled to perform in this weekend’s Missoula Symphony Orchestra concerts, Jasmina Halimic, is not coming, due to a case of laryngitis (why is it that the only people I ever hear of catching laryngitis are singers?).
Soprano Kerri Marcinko will take her place. Click through to read a bit about her… [Read More...]
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