WWFM Sunday Opera with Michael Kownacky
Sundays at 3 pm
Enjoy world-class productions from the world of opera featuring the great singers past and present performing in the world's great opera houses.
Paul Moravec & Mark Campbell's "Light Shall Lift Us"
Here is the link to the video presentation of "Light Shall Lift Us: Opera Singers Unite in Song"
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This delightful Christmas fantasy takes place through Christmas Eve to Christmas morning and finds the young smith named Vakula traveling to St. Petersburg on the back of the devil in order to get the Tsarina's slippers as a gift for his love.
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This week's opera is by Rhianna Giddens and Michael Abels and is based on the memoir of Omar Ibn Said, a slave who was abducted from Africa when he was 37 and taken to the slave market in Charleston, SC.
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This week's Sunday Opera is featuring Claude Debussy's only opera, 1902's "Pelleas et Melesande." Premiering to wildly mixed responses from audiences and critics alike, it's gone on to be considered by many to be a landmark musical work of the 20th century. This performance features Will Liverman and Sydney Mancasola in the title roles.
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Sondra Radvonovsky, Brian Jagde, and Etienne Dupuis head the cast in this look at how the fate of four people is determined because of an accidental shooting.
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We're heading back to the NCPA for a visiting production by the Bayreuth Opera and Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman." We'll continue our trip to the sea after the opera with a one-act opera by Ralph Vaughan Williams based on Synge's "Riders to the Sea" as well as a few other works including a brilliantly irreverent adaption of the "Dutchman" overture by Paul Hindemith entitled "Overture to the Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Spa Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 o'Clock in the Morning."
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This week's program begins with Armienta's opera based on the story of "Zorro" as he rights wrongs in southern California in the 19th century. We'll continue out trip with Spanish music after the opera with an excerpt from a Zarzuela entitled "Los Gavilanes" and two orchestral works by Joaquin Rodrigo and Enrique Granados.
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As a part of our Fall Membership Campaign, David Osenberg will be joining host Michael Kownacky this week for a live program sampling operas and performances in various languages.
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The Sunday Opera is off to Opera Southwest for Rossini's setting of the comic machinations of "Le Comte Ory" as he goes to great lengths, and fails, to seduce the wife of another.
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We're combining two operas from the Opera Festival of Chicago featuring Andrea Silvestrelli in widely varying roles. The first is as Thomas Becket in Ildebrando Pizzeretti's setting of Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral." The second is as Verdi's doomed leader, Attila the Hun, in Attila.
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Today's piece comes form the Music of the Baroque and features Handel's oratorio about the biblical general "Jephtha" who leads the Israelites to freedom from the Ammonites, but promises a sacrifice to God of the first living creature he sees if he's victorious, Unfortunately, that turns out to be his loving daughter Iphis who happily runs out to greet her father as soon as she sees him.