Saturday, June 24, 2017

Verdi's Falstaff onscreen at the Strand - Sunday, June 25 at 2 PM

Westside Theatre Foundation and Risiing Alternative present Falstaff - Opera Onscreen

For his last masterpiece, Verdi found the material for the comedy of his life-long dreams in the story of this old, penniless and pot-bellied knight: a huge roar of laughter, which still reverberates in us a century later.FALSTAFF, Verdi Opéra Bastille


A lyric comedy opera in three acts by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901)
Libretto by Arrigo Boito after Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV Creation : Teatro alla Scala, Milan, February 9, 1893

Sung in Italian

Conductor Daniel Oren
Director Dominique Pitoiset
Sets Alexandre Beliaev
Costumes Elena Rivkina
Lighting Philippe Albaric
Paris Opera Orchestra and Chorus
Sir John Falstaff - Ambrogio Maestri
Ford - Artur Rucinski
Fenton - Paolo Fanale
Dottore Cajus -Raúl Giménez
Bardolfo -Bruno Lazzaretti
Pistola - Mario Luperi
Mrs Alice Ford - Svetla Vassileva
Nannetta - Elena Tsallagova
Mrs Quickly - Marie-Nicole Lemieux
Meg Page -Gaëlle Arquez


Presentation
“For forty years I have wanted to write a comic opera”. When Verdi wrote these words in 1890, he had already bid farewell to the stage not once but twice, with Aida and with Otello. Fifty years earlier, he had tried his hand at opera buffa with Un giorno de regno.

The piece was a flop and, since his wife died during its
composition, the failure left him highly embittered. Was it the desire to ward off the ill fortune that appeared in so many of his operas that made him take up his pen again one last time? Or was it the shadow of Shakespeare? Or perhaps the libretto written by the talented Boito, inspired by Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor, overcame his reluctance? “I am having fun…”

Verdi repeated continually when composing Falstaff. The composer views the escapades of the old penniless and pot-bellied knight, who wants to deceive the wives and ends up routed, in a dirty washing basket and tossed into the river Thames, with the clear-sighted, distant and mischievous gaze we recognise from his later photographs. At the age of eighty, his composing was leisurely and liberated from the rules. Arias, duets and ensembles merge together in the same musical movement, continuous and boisterous, making Falstaff an unsurpassed operatic comedy that, a century later, continues to give us the gift of joyous laughter.

$15 tickets at Highway 61 Coffeehouse
$18 at the door

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