Welcome to the 2008 Season
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by Joshua Major
 To meet the challenge this 2008 season, we have made some tough staffing decisions and have re-focused on the basics — those events that sparked the festival 18 years ago. We offer smaller concerts of new and old favorites. The Bergonzi String Quartet continues its relationship with the communities in the Western UP; Ana Vidovic, the international guitar sensation, returns; Louis Nagel performs an almost-all-Bach concert; Sarah Hughes offers stirring organ recitals and a workshop for area organists; our Resident Opera Artists offer a Richard Rodgers revue and they perform La Tragédie de Carmen, a highly theatrical and streamlined version of Bizet's Carmen with orchestra. The opera will be sung in French with English surtitles. La Tragédie de Carmen is an adaptation of the opera by Peter Brook and Marius Constant. The music is almost all written by Bizet, but has been re-orchestrated and restructured to tell a more direct, theatrical story. By reducing the piece to 4 singers and 2 actors, they remove it from its grand opera category and make it into an intimate, soulful and powerful story, which is perhaps more in keeping with the spirit and realism of Prosper Mérimées novel on which Bizet's opera is based. By producing the work with a clear stage, the theater becomes the setting, leaving the focus entirely on the singer, the music, and the story. Themes of destiny, power and obsession are keenly developed and more directly experienced in this moving production. |