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Event
Menotti's The Medium and Amelia Goes to the Ball
These two operas by Gian-Carlo Menotti represent opposite ends of the dramatic spectrum. Puget Sound Opera's production will take you on an emotional journey of love, horror, tragedy, and slap stick humor.
"The Medium" is a simple story with enormous psychological overtones, equally full of emotionally touching and eerie music. Madame Flora, a fraudulent medium, begins to believe her own deceptions and has a nervous breakdown after she feels a cold spectral hand touch her during a seance. Her spiral into madness has grave consequences for her daughter Monica and the boy she loves.
"Amelia Goes to the Ball" is a one-act comic romp spoofing the classic love triangle. Amelia's plan to attend the first ball of the season is thwarted by her husband when he discovers a letter from her lover. Her husband's initial intention to kill her lover becomes a long-winded philosophical discussion between the two men on the legal and moral ramifications of the affair. Amelia, still desperate to go to the ball is pushed to her limit by the men's civility to one another, resulting in a hilarious solution to her problem.
REVIEWS OF THE MEDIUM:
"we have here the quality of opera. It is dramatic music, emphatic in action as well as feeling, and in essence song, which is what opera must be. No other American composer has shown the inborn talent that Mr. Menotti, an Italian by descent, unquestionable possesses for the lyric theater." -Olin Downes (New York Times)
"first-class musico-theatrical work . . . the most gripping operatic narrative I have witnessed in many a year . . .[It] wrings every heart string, and the music is thoroughly touching." -Virgil Thomson critic and composer
"Deaf (in the musical sense) as I am I responded to Mr. Menotti's score and felt its rightness for its book . . . they fused with arresting results." -John Mason Brown (Saturday Review)
REVIEWS OF AMELIA GOES TO THE BALL:
"Amelia Goes to The Ball displays a young composer not only of promise but on top of the world with all the exuberance of his freshly harnessed creativity. Already, Menotti shows himself an economical, effective one-man team as composer and librettist, and much of the music's charm springs from Menotti's theatrical instincts: he can instantly deflate a threatening Hunding-wannabe of a husband with a pompous bass drone and roll of timpani. And Menotti's signature melodic fertility emerges in full blush, even in parodic arias about fateful love." -Thomas May musicologist (Amazon.com)
"[here is] a young composer who has made an extremely brilliant and amusing start as a musician of the lyric theatre. There is something here, as it must tearfully be admitted, that has not materialized so far from an American-born composer. This is dramatic music, and it is vocal music. The flexibility and spontaneity of the score is inborn. The recitative, which is sometimes spoken and
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LocationEthnic Cultural Center Theater
3940 Brooklyn Ave. NE
Seattle, WA 98105
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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