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’.
Saturday: Knoxville Opera’s Rossini Festival
Time flies, it seems. That’s the only reasonable explanation for the fact that Knoxville Opera’s Rossini Festival is now in its 17th year as Knoxville’s preeminent street fair event. This year’s version of the free annual event is Saturday, April…
KSO This Week: Pianist Fei-Fei Dong and Conductor Edwin Outwater in Mozart and Schumann
Knoxville Symphony Orchestra Masterworks Missy Mazzoli: Violent, Violent Sea Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466 (Fei-Fei Dong, pianist) Robert Schumann: Symphony No. 2 in C Major, Op. 61 Guest conductor: Edwin Outwater Tennessee Theatre, 604 S.…
UT Opera Offers ‘Middlemarch in Spring’ April 13-15 at the Bijou
The University of Tennessee Opera Theatre is taking a break this spring from the staples of the 18th and 19th Century repertoire and is instead exploring the joys and adventure of a contemporary chamber opera based on well known 19th Century literature. Their choice is an interesting one: ‘Middlemarch in Spring’, a recent work based on the George Eliot novel ‘Middlemarch’, with music by Allen Shearer and a libretto by Claudia Stevens.
