×

Opera House presents Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte

Live at the Met, the Metropolitan Opera’s award-winning series of live, high definition opera transmissions to theaters around the world, continues its 2013-14 season at the 1891 Fredonia Opera House on Saturday at 1 p.m., with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s popular Cosi fan tutte.

“We’re very excited to be participating in our third full season of Live at the Met broadcasts,” notes Opera House Executive Director Rick Davis. “The audiences, while small, have been extremely enthusiastic about this series. There’s just something exhilarating about seeing an opera production presented by one of the world’s foremost companies and seeing it right here in Fredonia at the same time audiences in NYC are seeing it live. We encourage people to come see what all the fuss is about!”

Met Music Director James Levine conducts the first Live at the Met performance of Mozart’s barbed romance Cosi fan tutte, a comic masterpiece about the romantic complications that ensue when a pair of friends decide to test their fiances’ fidelity. The production features a cast filled with rising Met stars, including Susanna Phillips and Isabel Leonard as the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and Matthew Polenzani and Rodion Pogossov as their fiances, Ferrando and Guglielmo. Danielle de Niese stars as the sisters’ feisty maid Despina, with Maurizio Muraro as the cynical Don Alfonso.

Mozart’s opera balances broad comedy with heart-rending tragedy, and features some of his best-loved arias, duets, and trios. The title, Cosi fan tutte, literally means “Thus do all (women)” and is popularly used to mean “Women are like that.” The words are sung by the three men in the operas second act, just before the finale. The opera is frequently performed and appears 14th on the Operabase list of the most-performed operas worldwide.

The New York Times calls Lesley Koenig’s production of the opera “simple, sunny, and charmingly traditional.” It praised the “winning cast [which] performed like a crack comedic theater troupe” and claimed never to have “heard a more vibrant, masterly and natural performance than this.” The opera runs approximately four hours, with one intermission.

Live at the Met telecasts are now shown in more than 2,000 theaters in 66 countries, making the Met the only arts institution with an ongoing global art series of this scale. The Met was the first arts company to experiment with this type of broadcast, beginning on a modest scale in 2006 and growing every season since then, with more than 10 million tickets sold to date.

Met opera stars serve as hosts for the series, conducting live interviews with cast members, crew and production teams, and introducing the popular behind-the-scenes features; altogether the worldwide audience is given an unprecedented look at what goes into the staging of an opera at one of the world’s great houses.

Individual tickets to each of the operas in the season are $20, ($18 Opera House members, $15 students). Tickets may be purchased in person at the Opera House Box Office or by phone at 679-1891, Tuesday-Friday, 1-5 p.m. Tickets may be purchased online anytime at www.fredopera.org. The 2013-14 Live at the Met season concludes with Gioachino Rossini’s La Cenerentola on May 10.

Live at the Met opera broadcasts are made possible by Dr. James M. and Marcia Merrins, who funded the purchase of the satellite transmission and projection equipment used in the series.

The 1891 Fredonia Opera House is a member-supported not-for-profit organization located in Village Hall in downtown Fredonia. For a complete schedule of events, visit www.fredopera.org.

Newsletter

Today's breaking news and more in your inbox

I'm interested in (please check all that apply)
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *
   

Starting at $4.62/week.

Subscribe Today