OperaDelaware’s Spring Festival has become a valuable tradition

This post is provided courtesy of the original article from WHYY Newsworks...
OperaDelaware’s Spring Festival has become a valuable tradition, a highly anticipated event that draws opera buffs from well beyond the borders of the First State.

Last year’s inaugural event paired the East Coast premiere of Franco Faccio’s long-forgotten opera Amleto with a performance of Verdi’s Falstaff.

This year’s festival is dedicated to one composer only — Giaochino Rossini in celebration of the 225th anniversary of his birth. But this is no run-of-the-mill tribute as OperaDelaware has paired works that not only illustrate the serious and comic sides of this most influential composer but one — Semiramide— that rarely gets an outing.

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'Brilliant' debut of two Shakespearean operas in Delaware

Content of this post comes courtesy of an original review from WHYY Newsworks...

Photo courtesy of OperaDelaware.

Audiences who attended OperaDelaware's inaugural spring festival over the weekend became part of history as they took in the East Coast premiere of Franco Faccio's Hamlet and the Delaware professional premiere of Verdi's Falstaff.

The event marked the company's triumphant return to full-stage productions at Wilmington's Grand Opera House following a three-year absence.

Programming two Shakespearean operas is not only a tribute to the 400th anniversary of the Bard's legacy. It also explores the complex — and sometimes contentious — relationship between two composers, a librettist and their desire to raise Italian opera to a higher art form.

Verdi's last two operas "Otello" (1887) and "Falstaff" (1893) with librettos penned by Arrigo Boito were the closest he came to writing the kind of through-composed opera Wagner pioneered.

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