NEW YORK—Dell'Arte Opera Ensemble was founded in 2000 by Artistic Director Christopher Fecteau and Managing Director Karen Rich. Its mission is to provide master classes, seminars, private coaching, and performance opportunities for young opera singers. Audiences are provided an opportunity to see operas in intimate performance spaces and at modest ticket prices.
This month, dell‘Arte Opera Ensemble is presenting four programs under the title of “Violetta & Her Sisters.” It is comprised of separate performances of “La Traviata,” “Manon,” “Scenes from the demi-monde” (semi-staged excerpts from “La Boheme” and “La Rondine”), and “Chansons de Baudelaire” (song settings of Charles Baudelaire’s poems by Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Henri Duparc, Louis Vierne, Vincent d’Indy, Charles Martin Loeffler, and others).
The first performance of Verdi’s “La Traviata” bodes well for the season.
The source of the libretto is “La Dame aux Camélias” (“The Lady of the Camellias”), an 1852 play by Alexandre Dumas fils, which was made into the Greta Garbo film “Camille.”
Violetta (the central figure in “La Traviata”) is one of opera’s most demanding roles, both vocally and dramatically. It is said to require three voices: a coloratura soprano for the heroine’s Act 1 aria “Sempre libera,” a fuller voice when she has her fateful meeting with her lover’s father, Giorgio Germont, and a darker voice for the death scene in Act 3.
