San Diego Opera Podcast

Let's take a few minutes to listen to excerpts from our 2010 Season which feature the secondary principal singers, roles like Marcello, Ismaele, Mercutio and Germont.  You can have the greatest Rodolfo and Mimi in the world, but you'd better have a Marcello who can match them!

Love duets are a part of just about every opera in the standard repertory, so much so that we don’t think about them much.  We just luxuriate in their beautiful melodies.  But there’s always a reason for those ebbs and flows of passion.  Let’s explore some of the love duets in the early periods of opera history and see what makes them tick!

The most fascinating aspect of Verdi’s La traviata is that the story is based on true events in the life of a real, 19th century French socialite, who had many aristocratic, well-connected and famous lovers, went through numerous fortunes and died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 23.  Who was this remarkable woman?  Listen to this week’s podcast to find out!

One of the more unusual aspects of Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet is the fact that the tenor and soprano who sing the two title roles have four (count ‘em, FOUR) love duets!  Let’s take a look at these duets and see what the challenges are in them for the singers as well as for the audience.

Nabucco was Verdi’s third opera and his first true success.  But what was the measure of success in opera in 1840s Italy?  What were other composers doing at the time?  Who inspired Verdi?  Let’s explore this opera by placing it in the context of music and drama of that time.

Let’s explore further a topic that we discussed a few months back, inspired by a recent article in the New York Times by the eminent music critic Anthony Tommasini on the nature of bel canto.  Does this elusive Italian term describe a style of musical composition, especially in terms of melodic direction, or a composer’s sensitivity to words?  Or both?  You be the judge!