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.
Music
“If you don’t know what to do, there’s actually a chance of doing something new.”
― Philip Glass, Words Without Music: A Memoir
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…
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…
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: 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…
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…
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…
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.
