… and another a complimentary one. Nice!

This afternoon’s performance, again conducted by our Assistant Conductor, was two minutes shorter than last night’s which means it was 3 minutes longer than usual. This is news you can use, I’m sure. 😉

We have three more performances of Un Ballo (this coming Thursday, Friday and Sunday). I do enjoy the music more and more. It’s not one of those operas that becomes a drag … at least not to me.

Next on the opera agenda is La Boheme. I do love that opera, and have such wonderful memories of doing the Baz Luhrmann production a few years back in San Francisco. We had the most wonderful conductor, Constantine Kitsopoulos, and Mr. Luhrmann was fabulous to work for as well. Oh how I loved that job! So going back to the music will be great fun, and working with a full orchestra will make it even more fun, don’tcha think? (For the Lurhmann production, which was in a much smaller pit, the orchestra was reduced, much like Opera San Jose used to reduce the work when we were in a smaller hall with a miniature sized pit.)

To have a Saturday evening off is pretty amazing! I’m hoping to actually attend a performance next week. Along with two other works Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (A Soldiers’ Tale) will be performed WITH narrator! This is a work I absolutely love (although for some reason there is no oboe and that is such a horror, yes?). The performance is at Cathedral Basilica of St. Joseph. I’d send you to the cathedral’s site, but I can’t get the darn thing to work! Instead, go here and scroll down to December 2 and 3. You can see what I’m talking about. And maybe you’ll even attend one of the two performances?! I would love to see some of my students at real live performances … if you love music, if you are taking oboe lessons, if you want to see what a professional musician does, if you want to hear Roscoe Lee Browne as narrator… or for oh so many more reasons … GO!
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