Here's something you might be interested in.
I went to Opera Neo's Faces of Love Scenes concert on Saturday night at SDSU. I was impressed by the amount of music these young singers presented. Including a brief intermission, the concert was three hours long.
The concert was completely memorized and staged. There were four different directors from the Opera Neo staff that provided the staging.
The most entertaining scenes from start to finish were from Mozart The Impresario, directed by Enrique Toral and the first act finale of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte directed by Peter Kozma.
I must give credit to these youngsters for buying into the staging. For the most part they performed the staging with conviction.
There were sexually suggestive--okay--sexually blatant situations which could have been awkward if the singers had given into self-consciousness. They did not.
As it was, the sexy scenes were still awkward. I'm not sure why the sexuality was so blatant. I kept wondering if the singers were old enough and whether or not the pedophile police were going to kick the door down and bust us.
I'm a fan of sexuality in classical music but I prefer it to be implied because that makes it sexier. If I recall correctly, Lise Lindstrom said this about her approach to Salome when I spoke with her back in January.
If while watching a scene the audience can discover that the characters want to "bump uglies" it makes the scene more exciting and tense.
When a scene has two characters in bed between each other's legs it doesn't play as well as two characters who want to be in between each other's legs but aren't.
On the whole, the concert was impressive as the entire thing was staged in one week. Vocally things got rough at times but that's going to happen with a compressed time table.
I went to Opera Neo's Faces of Love Scenes concert on Saturday night at SDSU. I was impressed by the amount of music these young singers presented. Including a brief intermission, the concert was three hours long.
The concert was completely memorized and staged. There were four different directors from the Opera Neo staff that provided the staging.
The most entertaining scenes from start to finish were from Mozart The Impresario, directed by Enrique Toral and the first act finale of Mozart's Cosi fan tutte directed by Peter Kozma.
I must give credit to these youngsters for buying into the staging. For the most part they performed the staging with conviction.
There were sexually suggestive--okay--sexually blatant situations which could have been awkward if the singers had given into self-consciousness. They did not.
As it was, the sexy scenes were still awkward. I'm not sure why the sexuality was so blatant. I kept wondering if the singers were old enough and whether or not the pedophile police were going to kick the door down and bust us.
I'm a fan of sexuality in classical music but I prefer it to be implied because that makes it sexier. If I recall correctly, Lise Lindstrom said this about her approach to Salome when I spoke with her back in January.
If while watching a scene the audience can discover that the characters want to "bump uglies" it makes the scene more exciting and tense.
When a scene has two characters in bed between each other's legs it doesn't play as well as two characters who want to be in between each other's legs but aren't.
On the whole, the concert was impressive as the entire thing was staged in one week. Vocally things got rough at times but that's going to happen with a compressed time table.