{"id":970,"date":"2006-01-16T19:50:05","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T19:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:09:32","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:09:32","slug":"opera_again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=970","title":{"rendered":"Opera Again"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the Little Opera That Could did this weekend…the Long Beach Opera<\/a> had its first presentation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle<\/a>; in the “chamber” version first performed by the Birmingham Opera.<\/p>\n

Disclosure: I’m a board member at LBO, and so obviously not totally objective. But damn, it was good<\/b>. It exceeded my best hopes for what it could be, and it managed to deliver a series of moments of breath-taking musicality and theatricality.<\/p>\n

Patterico, who joins me in both annoying Michael Hiltzik and enjoying classical music – and who knows far more than I do about both – came along (we brought him to The Sorrow of Young Werther last year, and managed to pique his interest), and came away a musical purist impressed.<\/p>\n

There were four operas presented over two days, and for me the excitement of seeing this come off – on a budget that would barely buy bottled water and snacks for a major L.A. Opera production – was blown away as Wotan prepared to cast his spell on his daughter Brunhilde – leaving her to sleep on a rock surrounded by fire awaiting her hero’s kiss – and Wotan (Rod Nelman) and Brunhilde (Diedre Palmour Gorton) managed a scene of such emotional impact that I realized that I wasn’t breathing as I watched them; I caught myself, looked around the theater, and realized that no one else was either.<\/p>\n

For the LBO Executive director (and musical director, and conductor, and bottle washer) Andreas Mitisek, and all people who did the work, on and off stage, a triumph. For myself, the feeling of pride that the guy who puts the air in Valentino Rossi’s tires must have…to have been a small part of something wonderful.<\/p>\n

There’s an interesting series of posts that may come out of this – on “putting on a show” and what that involves and means, about the satisfaction of seeing art made, and about the role of Wagner in “bad Philosophy” – but right now, I’m just happy.<\/p>\n

There is one more performance next weekend, and if you like music, you ought to make it a point to go. Tickets can be had at the LBO website – www.longbeachopera.org<\/a>. You’ll regret it if you don’t go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long beach opera puts on Wagner – and it works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/970\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}