SHORTWORKS & RECITALS:
THIS year’s ShortWorks programme features three of opera’s best known composers, Gaetano, Donizetti, Leonard Bernstein and Giacomo Puccini.
Donizetti’s comic masterpiece Don Pasquale will be performed along with Puccini’s rarely performed La fanciulla del West (The Girl from the West), which was originally commissioned by and performed at N.Y’s Metropolitan opera and starred the Great Caruso.
To celebrate the centenary of the American composer Leonard Bernstein, the Festival will present an original production, Bernstein à la carte, which features some of his best known work.
Intimately staged and approximately 90 minutes in length, the Shortworks are presented in Clayton Whites Hotel and offer audiences an opportunity to enjoy a one-act opera or a condensed version of a more familiar opera performed by cast members of the evening operas.
Don Pasquale
Donizetti was fond of bragging about the speed at which he composed his operas, and Don Pasquale was no exception. It was composed in a concentrated spurt of creativity and sparkles with all the energy that it implies. The story centres on an old bachelor, Don Pasquale, who wants to marry and have an heir in order to punish his rebellious nephew, Ernesto, and cut him off without a penny.
Bernstein à la carte
The American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist Leonard Bernstein was among the first conductors born and educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim.
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world’s leading orchestras, andhis music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, from his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.
Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story. Roberto Recchi, a Wexford regular will direct the production.
A group of singers organise a birthday party for Leonard Bernstein. They wait, everything is ready, but the guest of honour is late. While they wait, they play, they sing, they read excerpts from his letters.
The result is a colourful musical portrait of one of the best loved composers and conductors. The programme will include solos and ensembles from Bernstein’s most celebrated musicals, as well some of his lesser-known songs.
La fanciulla del West
La Fanciulla del West (The Girl from the West) by Giacomo Puccini, a condensed version of the original, is sometimes thought of as a connoisseurs’ opera, and rated by the composer himself as his greatest work. Puccini dubbed it his ‘second bohème’. More than any of his other operas, it needs singing-actors.
La Fanciulla premiered at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 1910. Set in America’s ‘Wild West’ at the height of the gold rush, it tells the story of Minnie, a lively, energetic girl who runs a local saloon frequented by miners and her fight to save the man she loves.