Handel's Alcina
Friday, November 1, 2024 at 7:30pm
Sunday, November 3, 2024 at 2:00pm
Morrison Theater, Brockman Hall for Opera
Louis Lohraseb, conductor
Crystal Manich, director
Joshua Winograde, Director of Opera Studies & Professor of Opera
Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra
Alcina is a beautiful and powerful sorceress with a penchant for luring men to her island, seducing them, and turning them into rocks and wild animals when she tires of the relationship—until the dashing knight Ruggiero comes along and sparks true love. When a magic ring breaks Alcina’s spell, and Ruggiero sees things as they are, will he return her affection? A spellbinding plot filled with twists, turns, disguises, and secret passions plays out through some of Handel’s most gloriously exquisite music in this Shepherd School Opera production.
Sung in Italian with English surtitles.
John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles
Friday, April 11, 2025 | 7:30pm
Sunday, April 13, 2025 | 2:00pm
Lucian and Nancy Morrison Theater
Brockman Hall for Opera
Benjamin Manis, conductor
Patricia Racette, director
Joshua Winograde, Director of Opera Studies
Shepherd School Opera and Chamber Orchestra
You’ve never seen an opera like this before. Step inside a world of fantasy, hilarity, and boundless imagination as Shepherd School Opera Department presents John Corigliano’s mesmerizing The Ghosts of Versailles. As the curtain rises, we encounter the ghosts of King Louis XVI’s court, including Marie Antoinette who is still haunted by the memory of her execution. Her favorite playwright tries to lift her spirits with an opera featuring the beloved characters from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. As the “opera within an opera” unfolds, realities blend, worlds collide, and events take an unexpected turn. An evening of spectacle, suspense, laugh-out-loud humor, and astonishing emotional poignancy awaits in this grand celebration of the power of opera.
Sung in English with English surtitles.