How busy Hongkongers can find time for some fast-paced opera
Organisers hope that More Than Musical’s 90-minute version of La Traviata and the Bel Canto Singers’ 22 Mozart songs in an original Cantonese story will whet the appetite for opera newcomers to see original full-scale versions
Do you love the arias and choruses but can’t imagine sitting through a 3½-hour opera? New, dramatic, interpretations of Verdi and Mozart opera classics with hectic Hongkongers in mind may be just the ticket.
A 90-minute condensed version of La Traviata by More Than Musical and the Bel Canto Singers’ When Mozart Meets Da Ponte – 22 of Mozart’s much-loved songs bound together in an original, Cantonese story – both choose to stay true to the genre’s theatrical aspect while trying to shed its stuffy and plodding image.
On June 17 and 18, MTM and backer Swire Properties will present a pared-down, contemporary version of Giuseppe Verdi’s great work about the doomed romance between a 19th-century Parisian courtesan and a young man from a provincial, bourgeois family. The new non-profit organisation, set up to promote Western operas, will stage its debut production at Swire’s just-reopened ArtisTree.
Opera director Nic Muni says classic operas originally were written for a very different audience. People would chatter, go in and out of the concert hall and generally pay far less attention to what’s happening on stage, which necessitated a slow-moving plot with large chunks of recitative so the audience wouldn’t get lost.