3rd Sunday of every month | 2:00 PM | $20

La Scala Opera House

Rosendale Theatre in association with Emerging Picture’s Opera in Cinema is proud to announce its 2011 – 2012 opera season: nine exciting High Definition (HD) opera experiences sung in their original languages with English subtitles from September until May on the third Sunday of every month. Every opera production originates from Europe’s major opera houses. Show time is always 2:00 pm but, for early arrivals, at 1:45 pm Ulster County’s Maureen Brooks will give a short pre-curtain talk on the featured opera. All tickets are $20 and they can be bought at the door. Participating opera houses include London’s Royal Opera House, Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, and Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceau. Some of the world’s best singers, orchestras, directors, designers and beloved composers are showcased in these opera cinema experiences where the viewer has the sensation of actually sitting in Europe’s most famous opera houses. But, once the curtain goes up, cameras take Rosendale audiences where the audiences sitting in the Old World opera house could never go. Edward Schoelwer, the coordinator for the HD opera series for Rosendale Theatre, says, “We’ve been delighted by the great audience support for the opera during our “trial and error stage” and look forward to seeing our regulars as well as making new friends.”

Maureen Brooks, a retired attorney, is a self-taught operaphile and “Ring Nut.” She teaches courses in opera for SUNY New Paltz’s Lifetime Learning Institute and she will be present at every Opera Sunday.

Entering its second year as a not-for-profit, volunteer run, center for film and all the performing arts and education, the historic Rosendale Theatre, run by the Rosendale Theatre Collective (RTC), is dedicated to enhancing the cultural life and economic vitality of Rosendale and Ulster County.

CLICK ON AN OPERA TITLE TO SEE MORE INFORMATION…

From Teatro Antico, Taormina | Sung in Italian with English subtitles | LIVE on August 9, 2011 at 3:30pm EDT. | Running time: approximately 169 minutes including three intermissions | I Act: 41 min | Intermission: 15 min | II Act: 31 min | Intermission: 15 min | III Act: 26 min | Intermission: 15 min | IV Act: 26 min

Juan Pons stars in Nabucco, live from the Teatro Antico, Taormina, Italy, in this four-act opera, Verdi’s third and the work that permanently established his reputation as a composer. Since its construction in the 7th century B.C., the Teatro Antico’s audiences have watched performances with Mt. Etna and the Ionia Sea as a stunning backdrop for the theatre’s arena stage. The theatre (also called the Greek Theatre) is home to the annual summer Taormina Arte festival.

An opera in four acts, Nabucco was Verdi’s third opera, and the one that permanently established his reputation as a composer. First performed at La Scala in 1842, the Biblically based story follows the plight of the Jews as they are assaulted, conquered and exiled from their homeland by the Babylonian king Nabucco (in English, Nebuchadnezzar).

2:00 PM | $20 | from the Gran Teatre del Liceu | Opera in Four Acts. | Running time: 170 minutes including intermissions | LIVE from Barcelona on Tuesday March 13, 2012, at 3pm EDT

Starring Ramon Vargas and Fiorenza Cedolins

The story is set in Paris in the period around 1830. It essentially focuses on the love between the seamstress called Mimì and the poet Rodolfo. They almost immediately fall in love with each other, but Rodolfo later wants to leave Mimì because of her flirtatious behavior. However, Mimì also happens to be mortally ill, and Rodolfo also feels guilt, since their life together likely had worsened her health even further. They reunite for a brief moment at the end before Mimì dies.

From the mid-19th century onwards — against the background of industrialization, the supremacy of bourgeois values, and an intellectual climate dominated by secular materialistic and scientific positivism — art became realistic, seeking to show things as they really were — almost photographically —, rather than making them more amiable or more beautiful. An opera such as La Bohème, which talks of the fragile nature of happiness in a world of poverty, cold and disease, is an obvious example of this trend.

In La Bohème, however, the aesthetic of Verism — the Italian equivalent of the French Naturalism of Émile Zola — becomes more sentimental and the brutality of social reality is depicted less crudely than elsewhere. Four young artists live out their everyday lives amid dreams and disappointments, waiting for the event that is to win them renown, but poverty and misfortune deprive the leading characters — Mimì and Rodolfo — of the joy of mutual love. The text and music relate all this with a pleasant melodramatic tenderness with which it is easy to identify.

2:00 PM | $20 | IL TABARRO / SUOR ANGELICA / GIANNI SCHICCHI | Three one-act operas | From the Royal Opera House | Sung in Italian with English subtitles | Estimated running time: 225 minutes, including two intermissions

This is The Royal Opera’s first complete presentation of Puccini’s Il trittico since 1965. Leading director Richard Jones staged his witty, darkly comic realization of Gianni Schicchi for The Royal Opera in 2007, and here he completes the trio. Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano will conduct. Il trittico (‘the triptych’), unveiled at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1918, represented an operatic departure. Instead of a single evening-length narrative, Puccini offered three contrasting one-act works. Il trittico reached Covent Garden in 1920, but has rarely been performed there complete.