Random Acts
Nabucco beams out from the Met Live in HD; Rosie Flores tears it up at the Kitchen Sink Recording Studio; and Chris Jonas presents new compositions at Gig Performance Space
Giuseppe Verdi was twenty-eight years old when his third opera, Nabucco, was premiered before the demanding audience of La Scala in Milan. His first, Oberto, had been greeted warmly. His second, Un giorno di regno, was such a disastrous flop that he seriously contemplated leaving the musical profession entirely. Fortunately, he forged on, and Nabucco met with resounding success. The opera involves politics, romance, familial revelations, divine retribution, and a dramatic suicide played out at a time when the ancient Babylonians had conquered the Jews. Its most famous expanse is the chorus “Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate,” in which the enslaved Hebrews, on the banks of the Euphrates, pine for their homeland. Italians embraced it as a virtual national anthem, and to this day it remains one of the few choral numbers an opera audience may demand to be encored. That is not likely to happen at the Metropolitan Opera, which does not look kindly on encores, but anything is possible when Nabucco beams out as part of the Met’s Live in HD series. The screening begins at the Lensic Performing Arts Center (211 W. San Francisco St.) at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Jan. 7, with a recorded repeat at 6 p.m. that evening. The cast is headed by soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska, with Plácido Domingo singing the baritone title role as the King of Babylon. James Levine is scheduled to conduct. Tickets ($22-$28) are available through www .ticketssantafe.org or by calling 505-988-1234.