Tonight we have a meeting
with the Pinchgut Fundraising team
- with lots to get through, including wine....choices. We hold these regular
meetings over dinner - and we do work hard!
Anyway, THE dinner on Thursday 22 July will be a very special night indeed. At Pinchgut, we have long thought about putting on a second production each year, but due to a few constraints we haven’t been able to do this. Until now! It is expensive putting on opera! However, for the first time we are able to present a second performance this year - an entire, rare and beautiful (short) opera by Vivaldi, called La ninfa e il pastore at the Pinchgut Fundraiser Dinner.
The idea is for everyone to be intimate with the music and meet the performers
and the team behind Pinchgut. The event will be opened by Her Excellency Marie
Bashir, Governor of New South Wales, and held at WatersEdge at Pier One, with
performances by sopranos Anna Fraser, Jane Sheldon, tenor Andrei Laptev and
members of the Orchestra of the Antipodes, with Erin Helyard conducting from
the harpsichord.
Erin has worked on the score and prepared a new performing edition for the occasion. The plot revolves around two nymphs and a shepherd, and I had asked Anna Fraser, Genevieve Lang a bit more about what you would expect to see and hear:-
Erin describes La ninfa e
il pastore:-
“this superb jewel of a piece dates from around 1715, when the seasoned composer was in his early 30s and freshly appointed to the position of maestro di' concerti (music director) of the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, a charitable institution founded to care for orphaned and abandoned girls. The work is not an opera but rather a related dramatic genre – the serenata. The name derives from the practice of performing these little operas outdoors at night under artificial light – sereno means “clear night sky.” By the early eighteenth century, serenatas were composed to texts that were generally pastoral, amatory or eulogistic in tone and they were meant for private performance before a select audience. This year that select audience is you! La ninfa e il pastore has never before been performed in Australia on period instruments and if you enjoyed our production of Juditha Triumphans you will not want to miss this work, which is in a very different style. La ninfa e il pastore is more intimate in character and more subtle in tone. It could be compared to a small watercolour meant for the eyes of a few, rather than a large painting in oils destined for public exhibition.”
So if your eyes would like to
be those of a few…we still have a few places left. Call me on 02 9389 8117 or anna@pinchgutopera.com.au.
Tickets are $220 per person (ticket price includes a tax deductible donation of
$100). By the way, the event will help
raise funds for Haydn’s L’anima del filosofo at the end of this year – so you can also feel pretty
chuffed about that too!
Anna
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