L'elisir d'Amore

A normal Monday, once again....AA&A was interesting...I got my journal back with good comments, etc., and we breezed through the Renaissance. Nothing else of much interest happened at school.....

At around 4:30 I met Kate and we went down to the Staatsoper to see L'elisir d'Amore, by Donizetti. It was freakin' empty.....no one was there! We were literally the first people in line waiting to go into the Parterre section....consequently we got dead center first row, which was awesome! The opera itself was pretty good.....I definitely had mixed feelings about the tenor....his sound, although pretty, always sounded a bit forced.....anyway, the salesman/charletan guy was played by the same person who had played Bartolo in Barber of Seville, and he was, once again, fantastic. I liked the soprano....everyone else was OK. The orchestra was, I think, once again mostly subs, but the Donizetti bel canto stuff is so easy to play...they sounded fine. It was cute......like whipped cream, Jess remarked later.....not much substance, but a fun little romp of sorts. I was also nice and short.....no long soliloquies (OK, there were soliloquies, but short ones) and it was very funny. Not as funny as Barber of Seville, of course, but still funny. That's all I have to say about Monday, really......