Berkshire Opera Announces First Major Collaborative Arts Concert
PITTSFIELD - Berkshire Opera continues its 2008 summer season at 8 p.m. on July 24 at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center with "Secrets of the Sky & Sea," its first major collaborative concert with partner organizations Barrington Stage Company, The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Amherst-based acapella ensemble The Dynamics.In this unique presentation, Berkshire Opera steps outside its normal boundaries of opera, leaping across musical genres in an extraordinary artistic exploration with song by composers ranging from Reynaldo Hahn, W.A. Mozart, and Giacomo Puccini to Stephen Sondheim, Kurt Weill and Irving Berlin. The program uses visual art, poetry, dance and musical excerpts to trace the universal appeal and immediacy of water and the heavens in an imaginative and entertaining survey of childlike dreams, romantic desires, and untold mysteries.
The two actors representing Barrington Stage, Tandy Cronyn and Mark H. Dold, will perform readings from poetry, literature, and plays including representative works by Keats, Shelley, Sue Monk Kidd, Lewis Carroll, Margaret Atwood, Shakespeare, and Byron. Cronyn and Dold are in the Berkshires preparing Private Lives, by Noël Coward, which will open to the public on August 7 at Barrington Stage. Visual art used in projection provided by The Clark will be culled from the Institute's permanent collection, allowing audiences an opportunity to study the pieces in detail, and in much larger scale than is frequently the case.
The cast is joined in this program by singer/songwriter Wes Yoakam on guitar, an award-winning young musician known for his versatility across many styles of music including classical, country, rock, pop, blues, and techno. Choreographer Kassandra Taylor, currently a member of Alonzo King's LINES contemporary ballet in San Francisco performs two original dances during the course of the evening. Amherst-based acapella ensemble The Dynamics joins the vocal soloists to open the concert with a new arrangement of "Beyond the Sea", the Charles Trenet standard made popular in the United States by Bobby Darin. At no time will any one art form be featured by itself so that the audience has the freedom to explore more than one artistic expression from a variety of angles.
In an effort to expand the geographic accessibility of all three organizations, the performance will be offered two times, first at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington and then at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield. The Colonial Theatre performance takes places Sunday night, August 3 at 8 p.m.
