I have to admit that prior to February 2017 my knowledge of Florence Price and her music was that of her name on a list of American women composers. In my shaky defense to never having heard a live performance of her music until then, or even a recording, I can say that I wasn’t totally alone even among those who write about the subject.
Review: Marble City Opera Examines Our Personal Baggage in ‘Postcard From Morocco’
This weekend found Marble City Opera’s final staged production of the year, Dominick Argento’s one-act work from 1971, ‘Postcard From Morocco’, in the event end of Jackson Terminal. The placement of a piece like Argento’s opera (libretto by John Donahue) in a space like the Terminal felt strangely natural—seven people find themselves waiting in a train station, all the while examining their existences in terms of their personal “baggage” in a surrealist dramatic environment. Dare I say it? It’s a bit like “Waiting For Godot in a Train Station.” And I mean that in the nicest—and most enticing—possible way.
Friday: Inner Voices String Quartet at Modern Studio
Inner Voices String Quartet returns this Friday evening with a new and different program: III.
Review: Knoxville Opera Wraps Its 40th Season With A Superb ‘Aida’
By Alan Sherrod It was probably inevitable that Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida would be Knoxville Opera’s choice to conclude the 2017-18 season—its 40th anniversary season. After all, it was to be a season designed to make a major statement for…
Preview: ‘Postcard From Morocco’ On Its Way From Marble City Opera
Guessing in which intriguing, non-theatrical location Marble City Opera will stage their next chamber opera production has become something of a game in the Knoxville music scene. Following last season’s finale of La Traviata staged at Historic Westwood, this season…
Review: A Different Sort of Holmes and Watson in ‘Sherlock’s Last Case’ at Theatre Knoxville Downtown
Theatre Knoxville Downtown presents ‘Sherlock’s Last Case’ by Charles Marowitz
Previewing Knoxville Opera’s ‘Aida’: Soprano Michelle Johnson
In almost every decade, it seems, music writers love to dig up an age-old question: “where are the great Verdi sopranos?”
Review: Clarence Brown Theatre’s ‘Urinetown, the Musical’
One good rule of theatre: seize comic irony when it falls in your lap. As the audience arrived for the opening night of the Clarence Brown Theatre’s production of Urinetown, the Musical, they had to pass by the theatre’s new…
Review: UT Opera Theatre Makes Gender Equality a Compelling Subject in ‘Middlemarch in Spring’
It was probably just coincidence that the University of Tennessee Opera Theatre chose the 2015 chamber opera Middlemarch in Spring for its April opera production precisely at a time when the issues surrounding gender equality in society have finally come…
Review: Pianist Fei-Fei Dong and Conductor Edwin Outwater Join KSO for a Splendid Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20
With Maestro Aram Demirjian away for the week in Boston conducting the New England Conservatory Symphony, the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra found itself once again with the Mozart concerto on the bill—and a guest conductor on the podium. This week’s Masterworks conducting duties fell to guest maestro Edwin Outwater in a program that also included Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 and contemporary composer Missy Mazzoli’s ‘Violent, Violent Sea’.
