Season 2001-2002

Baroque Potpourri

Friedberg Hall, October 30

The Peabody Opera Workshop and Early Music Ensemble present Purcell’s masque from Timon of Athens and the final acts of Jacquet de la Guerre’s Céphale et Procris and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea.

Peabody Opera Theatre

Richard Strauss’s

Ariadne auf Naxos

Friedberg Hall, November 15-18

The ridiculous meets the sublime in this twofold tale of life, love, death, and the theater. Hajime Teri Murai conducts the Peabody Symphony Orchestra; John Lehmeyer directs.

La tragédie de Carmen

Baltimore Theatre Project, January 31-February 3

Peter Brook’s celebrated reinterpretation strips away the exoticism of Bizet’s classic to reveal the themes of passion, obsession, and jealousy underneath. John Lehmeyer directs the Peabody Chamber Opera; Benjamin Loeb conducts.

Peabody Opera Theatre

Mozart’s

Così fan tutte

Friedberg Hall, March 13-16

Two cocky young soldiers accept a bet from their cynical older friend: to test the fidelity of their fiancées, they both will pretend to go away to war, only to return in disguise to woo each other’s betrothed! Mozart and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte inject this farcical plot with a full measure of pathos and human emotion. Guest artist Martin Isepp conducts the Peabody Concert Orchestra; Roger Brunyate directs.

Riders to the Sea
L’enfant et les sortilèges

Friedberg Hall, April 29

This double bill presented by the Peabody Opera Workshop juxtaposes two contrasting one-acts from the early twentieth century. Riders to the Sea, adapted from Synge’s stage play by Ralph Vaughan Williams, takes place on the unforgiving Irish coast, where the women must live with the knowledge that their sons and brothers face death every day. A very different sort of opera is Maurice Ravel’s fairy tale L’enfant et les sortilèges, in which an wild little boy’s ill-used toys come alive to teach him a lesson in kindness.