Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/105989
arts the ing your calls and so on.) "Te $20 price is the frst point at which the $7 fee hits on our sliding fee scale," he explained. Not so, according to my friend and Culture Vulture newsletter founder Jim Wilhelm, who attempted to buy tickets online for a Savage Rose Teatre production at the MeX Teater. Tickets were $17 each, plus both fees. "For whose convenience?" the inquiring mind wants to know. Wilhelm declined to pay and got advice to bypass the box ofce and go straight to the MeX and buy at the door, avoiding both mark-ups. My chamber pot runneth over Smillie's PICKS By Thomson Smillie Illustration by Bart Galloway T .S. Eliot said, "April is the cruelest month," and I say February is the grumpiest. If ever there was a time to be curmudgeonly, it is now, with Christmas living only in the memory of your credit-card company and spring a ways of. Tis month, Kentucky Opera does the best job in Louisville of lifting the mood. Te paramount event is a new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Brown Teatre, with shows at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 15, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 17. Sandwiched between them is Verdi's Rigoletto at Tinseltown and Stonybrook theaters, live from the Metropolitan Opera. What links the two, apart from synchronicity, is that they are both updated in period, sets and costumes. Why update? Te pro argument is that moving the action from 18th century Seville (Don Giovanni) or Renaissance Mantua (Rigoletto) to the present makes the work somehow more immediate and more relevant, especially to a new, younger audience. Te contra is that the mores and manners of the original period — when losing one's virginity could be, for a woman, a fate worse than death — seem totally out of joint with jeans and sneakers. Updating Rigoletto from the decadent court of a rakish duke of Mantua to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas has a certain apt appeal. But back to Don Giovanni, which the Opera will perform in a 1940s flm noir style. What matters, of course, is the music. Te story of the legendary sexual superstar, Don Juan, is told through a masterly book by Lorenzo Da Ponte and a score by 78 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 2.13 Mozart at the height of his powers. Faithful to the unities of Greek drama, the action all takes place in the course of one day — the last of Don Giovanni's life — as he reaps the wild oats sown over a lifetime of debauchery. Tere are fantastic tunes, one of the greatest of Mozart's huge architectonic act 1 fnales, and loads of comedy, most of it brutal. Te frst in Kentucky Opera's current survey of Mozart operas, Te Marriage of Figaro a couple of years back, was performed with piano during the Louisville Orchestra's ill-conceived outage. Tank heavens a full pit orchestra will be on hand to scare us out of our seats with the thundering chords in D minor that open the overture and later herald the entrance of a stone statue that will drag Don Giovanni down to hell. Legend says that Mozart wrote this stunning overture on the morning of the premiere, the parts handed still wet from the copyists to the musicians. Full mark-up I bought two tickets online for one of the admirable Kentucky Author Forums at the Kentucky Center's Bomhard Teater — $20 each, and the bill was $58.55. Tis seemed a bit steep, even given our culture of sales tax and added gratuities. Te always genial Stephen Klein, president of the Kentucky Center, ofered a breakdown: $40 for two tickets, plus a $14 convenience fee ($7 per ticket), plus a $4.55 handling fee. (Klein clarifed: Te convenience fee funds the online and telephone ticketing systems, pays the employees answer- Two of Louisville's chamber groups have lovely programs this month. At 5 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 3, the Kentucky Center Chamber players will perform Chopin's "Sonata for Cello and Piano," followed by Stravinsky's Te Soldier's Tale, a fne work of small-scale theater. Written during the cash-strapped years after WWI, it calls for a narrator, two actors, a dancer and a small instrumental ensemble. It runs less than an hour and is action-packed. One week later, on Feb. 10 at 3 p.m., the Chamber Music Society of Louisville, celebrating its 75th season, will present the Kalichstein/Laredo/Robinson Trio at the University of Louisville's Comstock Hall for a performance of pieces by André Previn, Richard Danielpour and Beethoven. Google Previn's name for a sense of his amazing versatility: leading world-famous orchestras, composing in genres from pop to marvelous flm scores to opera, being married fve times. Te man has stamina. Final thought Tere is something profoundly nerdy, almost schoolboyish, about needing a secret code to get into the most commonplace websites. Who the heck wants access to my AT&T; account (though contributions are always welcome)? I have about six passwords for phone, U-verse and Internet; none of them is remotely memorable. And if anyone would like to steal my LinkedIn or Facebook pages, please feel very free. With my grateful compliments. A 10-year-old friend (they always know best about these things) has a good system. Her password for Amazon.com is "Amazon" and her iTunes password is "iTunes." Te height of nonsense was reached when I recently joined the YMCA. (No, really! I joined the thundering herd in fulfllment of New Year's resolutions). I attempted to rent a locker and was given an eight-digit number, plus a combination of another six numbers. I was asked for my membership number, though I have no idea what it is. To access the training computer, I need another fve-digit code. I may decide to remain fat.