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| February 19, 2003 For Immediate Release | |
|---|---|
| Photos 8 p.m. Central Ticket
Service Located in the lobby of Hall Auditorium, 67 N. Main St. between the Oberlin Inn and the Allen Art Museum. Open 12 to 5 pm, Media contact: Oberlin College
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IN HALL AUDITORIUM MARCH 12, 14-16 Conducted by Jeannette Sorrell ’90, Founder and Music Director of Apollo's Fire For Tickets call: 440-775-8169
OBERLIN, OH–The acclaimed Oberlin Opera Theater presents George Frederick Handel's three-act opera Alcina, opening Wednesday, March 12, at 8 p.m. in Oberlin College’s Hall Auditorium. Since Alcina's 1735 premiere at Covent Garden, the richly expansive music, emotional range and power, and fantastical mysticism of this opera have brought it attention as one of Handel's greatest works. Now the Oberlin Opera Theater—praised by the Plain Dealer for its remarkable sense of adventure—brings a spectacularly fresh, contemporary style to this classic favorite. Epic romance and exquisitely passionate music are framed by striking spectacle, darkly stylized sets, and the modern-day magic of 21st-century innovation. The guest conductor is Jeannette Sorrell, '90, former faculty member
of the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute and founder of Apollo's
Fire, the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra. Stage direction is by Jonathon
Field, opera director and assistant professor of Opera Theater. Alcina—which will be sung in Italian with English supertitles—will
be performed at Synopsis Production Notes Performers and Production Team The Oberlin production team of professional staff and students includes
Coaches Montgomery, assistant music director of opera theater, and Daniel
Michalak, vocal coach/rehearsal pianist; Assistant Director and Stage
Manager Victoria Vaughan, assistant director of opera theater; Managing
Director and Technical Director Michael Louis Grube, associate professor
of theater; Set Designer Mroczek, lecturer in theater; Costume Designer
Flaharty, associate professor of theater; Sound Engineer and Lighting
Designer Jen Groseth, lecturer in theater; and Assistant Stage Manager
Barbara Paterson ’05. Jeannette Sorrell (Guest Conductor) brings to the stage an unusual
background as both orchestral conductor and early music performer. As
a harpsichordist, she studied with Lisa Crawford and Gustav Leonhardt.
Upon receiving an Artist Diploma from Oberlin Conservatory in 1990,
she was immediately invited to join the faculty of the Oberlin Baroque
Performance Institute, where she taught until 1994. As a conductor,
she studied at the Tanglewood Music Festival with Roger Norrington and
Leonard Bernstein, at Oberlin with Robert Spano, and at the Aspen Music
Festival. Her 1990 performance of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony with
the Oberlin Conservatory Orchestra was broadcast by NPR as one of the
"outstanding performances of the year." Sorrell founded Apollo's
Fire in 1992 and together they have received numerous awards, including
the 1995 Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society,
given for an outstanding project involving the collaboration of scholars
and performers, and the 1998 Northern Ohio Live Achievement Award
for Classical Music. Jonathon Field (Director) has directed over 90 productions throughout the United States and is becoming one of America’s most sought-after stage directors. He has directed touring productions for the Lyric Opera of Chicago of Trouble in Tahiti, Gianni Schicchi, The Old Maid and the Thief, and The Spanish Hour. For San Francisco Opera’s Western Opera Theatre he directed La Cenerentola and Die Fledermaus and for Seattle Opera, an updated version of La Bohème. In San Francisco he has also directed Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov in the original Russian. Over the past 10 years, he has directed 10 productions for the Arizona Opera, being deemed by the press “their most perceptive stage director.” Since coming to the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in 1997, he has directed Carmen, Slow Dusk, The Old Maid and the Thief, Roméo et Juliette, Così fan Tutte, Manon, Don Giovanni, Coyote Tales, La Cenerentola, Die Fledermaus, The Rake’s Progress, and The Bartered Bride. As artistic director of Lyric Opera Cleveland, Field directed the 2002 productions of I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky, and Don Giovanni, which was nominated for the 2002 Northern Ohio Live Award of Achievement in classical music/opera. This season Mr. Field will direct Die Fledermaus (opening June 18th) and The Elixir of Love (opening July 30th)
ACTS OF PASSION: New Dance Works by Oberlin
Faculty and Guest Artists |
