LA Opera: Scenes from The Broken Jug and The Dwarf

FanFaire celebrates LA OPERA

Recovered Voices:
Scenes from THE BROKEN JUG and THE DWARF

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FanFaire celebrates
LA OPERA

SCENES FROM
ACCLAIMED PERFORMANCES:

PORGY AND BESS

RECOVERED VOICES-
BROKEN JUG and THE DWARF

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As the 2007-08 season draws to a close, FanFaire begins its video album of "Scenes from Acclaimed LA Opera Productions," presented in cooperation with Los Angeles Opera. In the age of video—and broadband—it only makes sense to use the medium as a vehicle for bringing opera to an increasingly visually-oriented generation, in the hope of eventually seducing viewers to the art form that, like no other, unites all the arts - music, poetry, drama, painting/sculpture, dance.

FanFaire thanks Los Angeles Opera for making this possible. As the video series advances, the excitement of opera cannot but rub off on viewers—who will sooner than later realize that these are scenes from productions of only the highest artistic quality (in terms of both music and stagecraft) that can only be forthcoming from the top-tier opera company that LA Opera, one of the youngest in America, has become under the artistic leadership of PLACIDO DOMINGO.

This video clip rides the pendulum to the other extreme, featuring scenes from two (The Broken Jug by VIKTOR ULLMAN and The Dwarf by ALEXANDER ZEMLINKY) of perhaps the least known of the short operas, ones that have barely inched their way into the repertoire. But as LA Opera's Music Director, JAMES CONLON, points out in his commentary that is part of this clip, these obscure works, deserve to be known and heard, indeed etched into the consciousness of today's opera-going public - for moral, historical and artistic reasons.

They are the works of a "lost generation" of composers whose music was suppressed only because they were Jewish or were "opposed to or deemed offensive by an authoritarian regime," thereby causing the "greatest single rupture in what had been a continuous seamless transmittal of German classical music." Mo. CONLON has made it his mission to repair this rupture in music history and to mitigate a great injustice by working to revive their music which he feels can hold up on their own artistic merits. Thus the project "RECOVERED VOICES" was born. He pursues it with boundless zeal—spurning token performances, committed only to their inclusion in regular concert and operatic programming, and hopeful that through his efforts and in his lifetime, the heretofore unfamiliar names of BRAUNFELS, KORNGOLD, KRENEK, SHREKER, SCHULHOFF, ULLMAN, and ZEMLINSKY and their music will someday receive due recognition.

RECOVERED VOICES launched in the 2006-07 season with a unique semi-staged concert presentation of selections from some of these composers' works, including a complete performance of Alexander Zemlinsky's Eine florentinische Tragödie (A Florentine Tragedy), a one-act opera based on Oscar Wilde's play of the same name. CLICK HERE to read more about the launch of this project.

With the two operas featured in this clip, LA Opera marked a milestone, becoming the first major company in America to present fully staged productions of classical music suppressed by the Holocaust. THE BROKEN JUG is about corruption in power, a serious subject that ULLMAN somehow deftly masked as near-comedy. THE DWARF, based on OSCAR WILDE's story, "The Birthday of the Infanta," in which a golden-voiced dwarf, pathetically unaware of his ugliness, naively falls in love with a spoiled princess to whom he has been given as a gift, and who inevitably breaks his heart, has echoes of WILDE's more famous spoiled princess, SALOME. ZEMLINSKY's richly orchestrated music is powerful and moving. The staging of both operas is impeccable, and the music truly deserving to be known and heard. The orchestra is led by JAMES CONLON and stage direction is by DARKO TRESNJAK.

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