Change in the art and music world can come swiftly or cautiously, but finding meaning in either one is not necessarily easy to manage. Generally, new start-up organizations are a good sign, as is major news from those groups already…
A Glimpse Ahead: 2025-26 Knoxville Music and Theatre Season
Waiting anxiously in the wings for its entrance cue, the 2025-26 season of theatre and music is yet another one packed with classics and new works—gems of both history and the latest efforts of playwrights, composers, and authors. Subscriptions to…
Marble City Opera Announces Ryan Colbert as Associate Executive Artistic Director
Marble City Opera has announced that Ryan Colbert will be joining the company as its Associate Executive Artistic Director. She will begin her new role with MCO effective August 1, 2025. Founding Executive Artistic Director of MCO, Kathryn Frady offered:…
Review: Marble City Opera Vies With Mother Nature for a Rewarding ‘Pagliacci’
BY ALAN SHERROD Since its founding in 2013, Marble City Opera has followed an intriguing evolutionary track, one that has embraced the concept of site-suggestive staging to offer both a fresh take on operatic classics as well as a…
Preview: Marble City Opera To Present ‘Pagliacci’ in Oak Ridge’s A.K. Bissell Park
Marble City Opera journeys to Oak Ridge for their 2025 springtime offering, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, on Thursday and Saturday, June 5 and 7, at 7:00 PM. The opera company, well known for its outdoor, site-suggestive staging of productions of Carlisle Floyd’s…
Review: Marble City Opera Returns To Westwood for Poulenc’s ‘The Human Voice’
BY ALAN SHERROD When Marble City Opera last offered Francis Poulenc’s one-act opera The Human Voice (La voix humaine) in 2017, it did so on a double bill with Menotti’s The Telephone. Just such a pairing, performed with only the…
Review: Marble City Opera’s Haunting ‘dwb (Driving While Black)’
Marble City Opera’s latest production is ‘dwb (driving while black)’, a one-act opera that dives headlong into the inherently intensifying anxiety faced by Black families as children approach driving age and face the intersection of modern mobility and the horrors of profiling and racist policing. With music by Susan Kander and a libretto by Roberta Gumbel, the 45 minute work features three performer/musicians: Mother (soprano Allison Sanders), Cellist (Cremaine Booker), and Percussion (David Verin). ‘dwb’ is directed by Ivan Griffin, who previously directed MCO’s The Christmas Spider.
Marble City Opera Announces Upcoming 2024-25 Season
While not quite a teenager, Marble City Opera has done a lot of living as Knoxville’s chamber opera company. This next season, 2024-25 will be the company’s twelfth since it first trod the boards in 2013. Designed with a mixture…
Review: Marble City Opera Breaks New Ground with ‘The Doctor and the Devils’
The occasion of a new opera making its world premiere carries not only an elevated interest for opera-goers, but also an elevated excitement. That was certainly the case last weekend as Marble City Opera premiered The Doctor and the Devils, a work it had commissioned from Knoxville composer Jason Overall.
Marble City Opera Announces Change in Venue and Date for ‘IL TABARRO’
Sometimes it just happens. Due to a last minute conflict at the original venue, the first of two performances of Puccini’s Il Tabarro, originally scheduled for Saturday, June 22, will now be performed on Friday, June 21, 2024 at the…