The Kentucky Opera has announced its upcoming season, which includes two classic operas as well as a regional premiere.
“The first opera of our 18/19 season is 'The Magic Flute' by Mozart,” said Ian Derrer, the opera’s general director. “We are going to be performing that in German with English subtitles, but also the dialogue will be in English as well. It will be very accessible to our audiences.”
Derrer said “The Magic Flute” is one of the greatest operas of all-time; it’s family-friendly, comedic and the music is instantly recognizable.
“People leave humming and all of the sudden they realize they’ve known these tunes all their life and didn’t realize they were part of an opera,” he said.
“The Magic Flute” will kick off the season in September, followed in November by Ben Moore’s new opera, “Enemies, A Love Story" – which was part of Kentucky Opera’s Composer Workshop in the fall of 2009 and the fall of 2011 and returns for a full-scale production.
“Herman Broder, the lead role in this opera, is — if he had a relationship status on Facebook it would be ‘it’s complicated,’” Derrer said. “He is a Holocaust survivor, finds himself in New York, he is married — although he has another wife and a mistress, so two wives and a mistress. It leads to a complicated scenario.”
The final opera of the season, which will run in February 2019, is Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
“Rigoletto — one of the crowning jewels of opera, one of Verdi’s best operas without question,” Derrer said. “It is a dark tale, filled with Shakespearean grandeur, but it also has some of the most beloved melodies created by any composer, including ‘La Donna È Mobile,’ the great tenor aria.”
All productions of The Brown-Forman 2018/19 Season will be performed in the historic W. L. Lyons Brown Theatre; all music will be performed by the Louisville Orchestra.