Sunday, April 26, 1 p.m., Orcas Center
— from Artha Kass —
End this year’s Opera season with The Met: Live in HD production of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. This pair of shows at the Metropolitan Opera which mix jealousy with inebriated men for murderous results, will stream live to Orcas Center on Sunday, April 26 at 1:00 pm.
Opera’s most enduring tragic double bill returns in an evocative new production from Sir David McVicar, who sets the action across two time periods in the same Sicilian village. Marcelo Álvarez rises to the challenge of playing the dual tenor roles of Turiddu in Cavalleria Rusticana and Canio in Pagliacci. Rae Smith (War Horse) has designed the moodily atmospheric 1900 village square setting of Cavalleria, which transforms to a 1948 truck stop for the doomed vaudeville troupe of Pagliacci. Eva-Maria Westbroek (Cavalleria) and Patricia Racette (Pagliacci) sing the unlucky heroines, and Met Principal Conductor Fabio Luisi is on the podium.
According to The Wall Street Journal, “David McVicar’s new Met production provides a splendid, subtly contemporary view of the two verismo chestnuts, demonstrating that these fast-paced tales of jealousy and murder, with their explicit, hair-trigger emotionalism, still have the power to shock. We go from Greek tragedy to pie-in-the-face vaudeville.”
Tickets for The Met: Live in HD Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci are $18, $13 for students, $2 off for Orcas Center members, and may be purchased at www.orcascenter.org or by calling 376-2281 ext. 1 or visiting the Orcas Center Box Office open Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from noon – 2 pm. For more information about Orcas Center’s 2015 season visit www.orcascenter.org.
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