by Julia Nunez on 2017-04-06
REDLANDS>> On Saturday, April 8 at 8 p.m., music lovers are invited to a special presentation by the Redlands Symphony of the music of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. The presentation is set to be conducted by Maestro Ransom Wilson, with celebrated soprano Mary Mackenzie singing the score in German. The presentation is to be directed by noted stage director, A. Scott Parry.
Doors will open at 7 p.m. and a pre-concert talk by Wilson will start at 7:30 p.m. The concert will include 75 minutes of music, followed by an intermission and a conversation with the audience about the production, led by Maestro Wilson and including Mckenzie and Parry.
“Reinbert de Leeuw adapted and re-composed the Romantic lieder masterpieces of Schubert and Schumann into a modern, cabaret-style song cycle. This is taken one step further by presenting his cycle here as a staged monodrama,” Parry said. “We have conceived the piece as being the story of returning home from the funeral of her former lover and over the course of a single, emotionally wrenching night, coming to terms with her loss. She remembers the joy and sensuality of their newfound love, the doubts of its fidelity, the heartbreak of their parting, the frustration of awaiting his return, and then the trauma of confronting his death. She faces down her own conflicted feelings of what she was taught love should be, what she thought love could be, and in the end, what it actuality was.”
A. Scott Parry’s stage direction has been hailed by Opera News as “marvelous,” “lively,” “imaginative,” and “spot-on.” His productions have spanned an enormous range of repertoire, from West Side Story to Don Giovanni and La Bohème to La Cage aux Folles. He conceived, designed, and directed the world premiere production of I lavori d’amore persi, a compendium of music theater fragments by Claudio Monteverdi for the Bloomington Early Music Festival, as well as the newly-composed absurdist opera The Pig, the Farmer, and the Artist for La Mama’s Off-Broadway in New York City. He spent almost a decade on staff at New York City Opera at Lincoln Center, as well as serving on the faculty of Indiana University in Bloomington, where he previously received his master’s degree in Opera Stage Direction. Parry headed the Musical Theater program at Mesa Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, has been a visiting professor at the New England Conservatory, Amherst College, Peabody Conservatory, and is currently Director of Opera and Lyric Theater at Ohio State University.
As a composer-librettist, Parry premiered his quartet theater song-cycle On the Impracticality and Sure Impossibility of Perpetually Uncomplicated and Everlasting Love, based on poems of Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and Edna St. Vincent Millay and recently completed an English language adaptation of Beaumarchais’ third Figaro play, La mère coupable, which is currently being set to music.
“This will be a remarkable evening of music, the likes of which have never been experienced by our Redlands Symphony audience,” Wilson said. “By combining the beautifully moving songs of Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann with a fully staged performance capturing the flavor of a Paris café and featuring the Redlands Symphony, with the remarkable voice of soprano, Mary Mackenzie, we’re hoping the audience will appreciate that there are many ways to enjoy an evening of beautiful music.”
Tickets are available online at www.redlandssymhony.com or by calling the box office at 909-587-5565. Tickets can also be purchased on concert night at the door and parking is free.
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