Tweet if you like opera
(No, not that again.)
The San Diego Opera, boldly exploring cutting-edge trends in dramaturgy, is producing a Twitter version of the complete history of opera.
Members of the San Diego Opera pray, "Dear Lord, please make Twitter go away."
only in America!
Only in America? Hardly…http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/news/overtures-arias-and-tweets-the-worlds-first-twitter-opera-1769693.html
I like this “1580 to mid-1600’s – mostly Baroque operas”
Weren’t all operas written during that time Baroque operas?
Well, I think anything prior to 1600 would be called late Renaissance. I don’t really think of Monteverdi as being typically baroque, perhaps the early 17th century is sort of a bridge between late Renaissance
and Baroque. Maybe I’m off but I think of Baroque as being very ornate and heavily decorated and that type of music developed during the years of the 17th century. But the style was very much in place at the end of the century but not so much at the start.
Peri is listed on baroque-music.com, but he might be a bridge. However, Baroque music covers fairly long time period, and the highly decorated music we typically think of as Baroque was fairly late in the period.
You may bitch an nit-pick all you want. San Diego Opera totally rocks and if more companies were like them the art form would not be in the parlous state many claim it to be in. And no, I am in no way connected with them.
i don’t think this post takes any pot shots at SD opera does it? i mean, it’s just a funny/fun news item…
I anyone having issues with parterre.com? The Lucia Threat is not giving me any spaces to post comments.
Baroque art is not highly ornamented. It is the next phase after the fairly strict neo-classic revival of the early renaissance–a time when the shapes expand, ie the Roman round dome into the extended oval dome of St. Peter’s but ornament is still subservient to the line. The highly ornamented style was the Rococco, in which restless ornamentation spread out into three dimensions to the point if obliterating the line.
Monteverdi is definitely Baroque.
As traditionally defined, the “baroque” era in music is marked by, among other stylistic and aesthetic developments, the invention of the stilo recitativo by Jacopo Peri in the first so-called operas, Dafne (1598, lost) and Euridice (1600), produced in Florence. “Late renaissance opera” and “late 1580s-1600 opera” are both misnomers.
However, musicologists (and yes, I am one) these days generally prefer not to use terms like baroque and renaissance to define periods, but rather certain aspects of style. To characterize Monteverdi’s music as “not highly ornamented” overlooks an awful lot of his music (e.g., “Possente spirto” and the apotheosis from Orfeo, the concertato pieces in the Vespers, and most of the Seventh Madrigal Book, for a start). Seventeenth-century music and art are first and foremost about emotional affect (not the same thing as romantic “expression”) and dazzling artifice. That’s less true of Monteverdi than of, say, Alessandro Scarlatti, but the beginning of the style is certainly there.
SDO has far too few Commonwealth castings this season but they are offering Alan Opie as a deluxe Germont and the irreplacable Sarah Castle as Stephano — North America has not one lyric mezzo who could possibly do justice to the part.
Who here actually uses twitter? It doesn’t even make any sense.
You’re too young. It’s very popular with the 30-50 year old set.