6 Select Committee has aired during recent TV hearings.Ĭavanagh, projection designer Erhard Rom, costume designer Constance Hoffman and lighting wizard Jane Cox set the last shared vision 150 years after the action in “Cosi.” The opera, written in 1787, opens with projected images of flames lapping the scrim, into a tenuous future, with shredded parts of the American flag hanging down, the house and civilized society crumbling.
In colors gray and white, the house, of course, represents the nation, the so-called “shining city on a hill,” which has suffered some temporary moral and ethical power outages recently, which the Jan. Which brings me to San Francisco Opera’s new and rousing staging of Mozart’s enduring “Don Giovanni” (through July 2, directed by Michael Cavanagh, in a third and last chapter of the company’s several-year cycle of the composer’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte.Īs in the other two operas in the cycle, “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Cosi fan tutte,” “Don Giovanni” is set in what Cavanagh called “The Great American House.” Over the three operas, the narrative arc begins during the post-colonial period, moves to the 1930s, and, for this last one, into a war-ravaged home in the late 2080s.
Such art has its greatest punch when it reflects our own times yet reinforces timeless themes, shedding light on what we can do to navigate our way through our current stretch of tension-filled days. I can see what she was driving at, but I’ve always believed the arts prepare us to be better people by softening our rougher edges.Īncient Greek philosopher Aristotle described the process as “catharsis,” a kind of purification, a purging of base emotions through “pity and fear,” affirming the mystic power of art when we experience it, particularly theater.īut the notion, it seems to me, also applies to any art that appeals to the intellect as well as our emotions, such as Renoir’s 1880 Impressionist painting of youthful friends, “Luncheon of the Boating Party” or Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel about a girl’s half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, “Atonement” or a symphony, with its musical rhythms, harmonies, tone colors and structures or the Gershwins’ 1935 “Porgy and Bess” opera, which is theater and a showcase for the human voice, as all operas are. My wife, Hale, a former high school art teacher, has long said they don’t but always adds that doing for others, our communities and nation, getting beyond the narrow lanes of self-centered ways, makes us better people.
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