Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Rinaldo ed il mago di Ascalona - Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain.

In this week’s Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly give their humorous overview of Rossini’s 1817 opera, Armida.

One of the many operas inspired by the tale of Armida and Rinaldo told in Torquato Tasso’s 16th-century Italian epic, La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered), it’s a story of love, duty and sorcery.

Rinaldo, a paladin knight fighting to take back Jerusalem from the Saracens during the First Crusade, has fallen in love with Armida, a Saracen and a sorceress, who returns his love. When she uses her magical powers to take Rinaldo away from the siege and derail the Crusaders’ attacks, she learns a difficult lesson about love, honor and duty.

You can hear the Rossini Opera Festival’s production of Armida with Carlo Rizzi conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna and Carmen Romeu (Armida) and Antonino Siragusa (Rinaldo), Saturday at noon on Houston Public Media Classical 91.7.

[The musical excerpts heard in this OCS come from a 1994 release of a live performance of Armida on the Sony Classical label (S3K 58 968) featuring Daniele Gatti conducting the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, with Renée Fleming singing Armida and Gregory Kunde as Rinaldo.]

Théodore Chassériau (1891-56), Macbeth and Banquo meeting the witches on the heath, Musée d’Orsay. Public domain. In this Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly discuss Giuseppe Verdi’s Macbeth.  First staged in Florence in 1847, it was Verdi’s tenth opera and his first stab at adapting Shakespeare for the musical theatre stage.  A tragedy set in medieval Scotland, Macbeth is a cautionary tale about what can happen to a marriage when... Read More

Portrait of Lucrezia Borgia by Bartolomeo Veneziano (c. 1510). Public domain. Houston Public Media’s Arts & Culture Director, St.John Flynn, and opera expert, Eric Skelly, discuss Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucrezia Borgia, about the femme fatale, renowned for her ruthless pursuit of power, whose vulnerability is unveiled when she comes face to face with her long-lost son. You can hear the 2014 Caramoor Festival production of Lucrezia Borgia, starring Angela Meade in the title role, Saturday... Read More

In this week’s Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly discuss Show Boat, the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (book and lyrics). Based on Edna Ferber’s 1926 best-selling novel of the same name, Show Boat tells the story, over a forty-year time span, of the performers and crew of the Cotton Blossom, a Mississippi River show boat.  Set between 1887 and 1927, and dealing with the... Read More

Eduard Grützner’s Falstaff (Wikimedia Commons) In this Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly present a light-hearted overview of Verdi’s last opera. Only the second comedy Verdi ever wrote, Falstaff is based on the larger than life character from Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV who tries to seduce two women (who know each other!) at the same time. You can listen to San Francisco Opera’s performance of... Read More

Metropolitan Opera House, New York City. Photo by Niall Kennedy (Creative Commons license). This Saturday’s San Francisco Opera broadcast, Saturday at noon, is the world première performance of Tobias Picker’s Dolores Claiborne, featuring Patricia Racette in the title role, and conducted by George Manahan, recorded Fall 2013 in War Memorial Opera House.  As neither of our opera experts, St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly, have seen this new opera, they feel they cannot make it the... Read More

Houston Public Media’s arts & culture director St.John Flynn and opera expert Eric Skelly discuss Giuseppe Verdi's magnificent La Traviata, the story of the ill-fated love between the dying courtesan Violetta and the young and besotted Alfredo. [The musical excerpts used in this OCS are from the Deutsche Grammophon recording of La Traviata featuring James Levine conducting the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Cheryl Studer, Violetta; Luciano Pavarotti, Alfredo; Juan Pons, Germont (DG435 797-2)] You... Read More

A quick, lighthearted overview of Richard Strauss’ celebration of the beauty of humanity Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow). In this Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s arts & culture director, St.John Flynn, and opera expert, Eric Skelly, discuss Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten, a magical story of a half-mortal Empress who must find a shadow to avoid having to leave her husband and her life on earth to return to the... Read More

A fun intro to Rossini’s comic masterpiece, this Saturday’s noon opera broadcast. This week’s San Francisco Opera broadcast, Saturday at noon on Classical 91.7, is The Barber of Seville featuring American baritone Lucas Meachem as Figaro and mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard as Rosina. In this week’s Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s arts & culture director, St.John Flynn, and opera expert, Eric Skelly, introduce Rossini’s musical version of the story of the wily barber’s efforts to secure... Read More

In this week’s Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly discuss Benjamin Britten’s epic tragedy Peter Grimes. Inspired by the story in George Crabbe’s The Borough, acollection of poems about life in a village on the east coast of England at the start of the 19th century, Britten’s opera tells of the demise of the outcast fisherman Peter Grimes, and the townsfolk who threaten him. Tune in for San Francisco Opera’s... Read More