Mainly Opera and Ballet
Rossini’s Cenerentola is Cinderella with the wicked step-mother as a bumptious, arrogant step-father (Don Magnifico), and the fairy godmother as the prince’s tutor and master of philosophy (Alidoro). The libretto is based on Perrault’s fairy tale, but with all mythical and supernatural elements from the story eliminated, turning it into something of a household comedy. …
The one non-singing role in this Mozart Singspiel— the Ottoman Pasha Selim — at the very end turns out to be the noblest character in the story. In the meantime his unrequited passion for Konstanze has led him to threaten terrible punishment if she fails to reciprocate his ardour. She has been purchased as a …
Purcell for the twenty first century — or perhaps the seventeenth, or the nineteenth — and it’s enormous fun. This semi-opera, based on Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, is a series of masques written by Purcell a century later in the early 1690s, and this production is based on the incarceration in a mental hospital of nineteenth …
