Classically Speaking

This weekend is the WV Symphony Snowshoe Festival, and I’m tagging along. 

The WV Symphony is playing two concerts, with cello soloist Julie Alvers. The concert themes are “Tyranny and Tenderness,” and the music includes Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, cello concertos by Elgar and Shostakovich, Glinka’s Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, and Vaughan Williams’ ridiculously beautiful Fantasia on Greensleeves. 

You can listen to the music before the concerts on their Instant Encore pages here and here.

This is my first trip to the Snowshoe Resort, and I’m really looking forward to it.  I have received excellent advice about bringing warm clothes and finding certain little chocolate shops, and I’m excited about hearing the music, talking with people, and seeing the monarch butterfly release. 

In addition to the Symphony Festival, it’s also the Monarch Butterfly Festival this weekend – and my colleague Jan will be recording video of the butterflies for Outlook.

If you’re at Snowshoe, say hi to me (and speak clearly into the microphone!).  I’m putting together a story about the festival will be on the radio during Monday’s West Virginia Morning. I should also have some more sound and images here on Classically Speaking, so stay tuned.

Now, I just need to go pack!

My first opera was Prokoviev's The Love for Three Oranges. 

This opera is rarely performed now (for no good reason) but it has remained in my memory as the perfect first opera: a dejected prince and Fata Morgana, a wicked enchantress, who inadvertently cures him by making him laugh when she trips over and reveals her red bloomers!  She is so annoyed that she causes him to fall in love with three oranges. 

After much excitement, the prince manages to steal the oranges which become larger and larger as he rolls them around a desert.  Overcome by thirst he slices open the first one which contains a beautiful princess who is begging for water and dies. 

It is not until he gets to the third and most beautiful of the princesses that somebody in the audience obligingly provides a bucket of water.  Of course the adventure isn't over yet, and the angry Fata Morgana turns the princess into a monstrous rat before she is finally overcome and the opera ends happily.

My family was living in Munich at the time, so this was my delightful first step on a path that has led to many opera productions over the years. 

By the time I was eleven, I could sit through Wagner's Mastersingers without fidgeting (except perhaps towards the end of the first act) and had performed as a monkey in Mozart's The Magic Flute with Fritz Wunderlich as my Tamino.  

The Magic Flute has remained my favourite opera ever since, but I should love to see those oranges again.  

Previously:

* First Opera: Tosca 

* First Opera: Carmen