by admin | May 18, 2023
As part of this seminar for local educators and operas lovers, I will speak about the historical context for Verdi’s final dramatic opera, Otello (1887), which the composer completed after a 16-year self-imposed withdrawal from opera composition. We will... 
by admin | Mar 5, 2023
The Los Angeles Opera is staging Debussy’s only complete opera, Pélleas et Mélisande. A masterful response to the stylistic gauntlet thrown down by Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Debussy’s Pélleas sets to music the Symbolist play of Maurice... 
by Kristi | Oct 1, 2021
In this Behind the Curtain conversation, musicologist Dr. Kristi Brown Montesano and Dr. Arianne Helou, a dramaturg and French studies scholar, discuss “Oedipus Rex,” composed by Igor Stravinsky to a libretto by Jean Cocteau based on the ancient Greek... 
by Kristi | Oct 1, 2021
Dr. Kristi Brown-Montesano will guide LA Opera Board members through an exploration of music from the interwar period (1919—1939), an era that witnessed an astonishing variety of aesthetic and stylistic developments in western Classical music. Lectures will delve into... 
by Kristi | Oct 1, 2021
This Week’s Topic – How to Build an Opera: from Overture to Scene For this final session, we will look at the how Rossini and Wagner put their operas together—their distinct approaches to making Cenerentola and Tannhäuser musically coherent—from the...