In the Wings

BLO’s 40th Anniversary Season has been an incredible year here in the Community Engagement department. Here are a few highlights!

The creative process of making an opera in a classroom has many benefits to the community.

BLO’s 40th Anniversary Season has been an incredible journey of music, drama, and joy across our great city. Take a look back at some of the high notes with us.

Images (top to bottom): Vincent Turregano, baritone, performs at BLO’s Concert in the Courtyard (Paul Marotta, Perfect Bokeh Photography). High school students pose with Carmen artists Kathryn Skemp Moran, Jennifer Johnson Cano, and Roger Honeywell (L-R) (Paul Marotta, Perfect Bokeh Photography). Felicia Gavilanes, mezzo-soprano, and Vincent Turregano, baritone, perform at the MFA European Galleries. Heather Gallagher and Maya Kherani perform as Hansel and Gretel, with teaching artist Brendan Buckley, center, for students at St. Brendan School in Dorchester.

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BLO invites high school and college students to attend the final dress rehearsals of its productions. Read what these students thought about The Marriage of Figaro.

During the performance did your ears happen to perk up at the sound of something familiar? Brett Hodgdon has found spaces within the opera to weave in some well placed Easter eggs.

Rosetta Cucchi Directs The Marriage of Figaro and Much More. She enjoys a strong advantage over most directors active in opera today – she reads music and understands it.

These digital influencers brought our opera hashtags to TRENDING status each of the three times they've convened. They're hilarious, fun, and twitter-powerful. #FigaroBLO

This upcoming production sets the action in an imaginary Italian villa in the 1950s, a world of luxury and cinematic style. Partly inspired by the visual world of the 1954 Billy Wilder film, Sabrina, the production stresses the work’s theatricality, wit, and playfulness.

The Marriage of Figaro is a masterful blend of comedic and tragic elements, playing with operatic conventions and introducing innovative musical elements. In the words of Johannes Brahms, “…each number in Figaro is a miracle; it is totally beyond me how anyone could create anything so perfect; nothing like it was ever done again….”

Of the Beaumarchais Figaro trilogy of plays, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro live on both in their own right and through the operas that mark cornerstones of the repertory, while the third play, The Guilty Mother, has provided the foundation for a fascinating, challenging 20th-century work. The enduring character of the wily Figaro, and the other personalities drawn into his orbit by Beaumarchais, have appealed to numerous composers beyond the untouchable Rossini and Mozart.