This Week in Classical Music w/Randy Kinkel 3/24/19

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Goerke Returns as Wagnerian Soprano;

"The Magic Flute" to be a Video Game

 

It’s “This Week in Classical Music”; an update on what’s happening in the classical music world—I’m Randy Kinkel.

Christine Goerke is getting ready to join the long, storied line of Brünnhildes who have scaled Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle at the Metropolitan Opera. It’s one of the toughest assignments in opera: her first complete “Ring” cycle, a sprawling 17-hour, four-opera saga of gods, dwarfs, giants and humans that she’ll star in this spring.

It’s a triumphant return to the stage where Ms. Goerke trained as an insecure young artist in the 1990s. When she sang a small role in “Götterdämmerung,” the fourth “Ring” opera, at the Met in 2000, she would linger in the wings after her exit, watching the soprano singing Brünnhilde and thinking: “Some day.” Ms. Goerke overcame her self-doubt to achieve success singing Mozart and Handel. Then catastrophe struck, in the form of a vocal crisis.

The problem was that her voice had grown too large for the roles she had been singing. She slowed down, retrained, and re-emerged, against the odds, as one of the leading dramatic sopranos in the world. “People can’t get over the sheer power of the voice — and I don’t mean only the volume,” said Alexander Neef, the general director of the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, where she sang her first staged Brünnhildes. “It’s the communicative power.

It’s not only that she hits all the notes and she hits them powerfully. It’s that there’s always an element of storytelling that really allows her to connect with the audience.”

 

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The Magic Flute was one of Mozart's final works and it's now one of the best-loved operas of all time.

Written in two acts, the opera has been a huge hit with audiences ever since it was first performed. And now, it's been turned into a video game, taking Mozart's story to a new audience.

The fantastical opera starring the Queen of the Night and the bird-catcher Papageno – and now it's being turned into a video game

Created by gaming company Opus Ludus, The Flute challenges players to take on the role of Prince Tamino and move through a series of adventure scenes, combat and puzzles as he embarks on his quest to rescue Princess Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night.

The plot of the game is taken from Mozart’s original opera, which premiered on 30 September 1791 at Schikaneder’s Theatre in Vienna.

With an estimated two hours of playtime, The Flute is a described as a 2D “opera game” and is the first of its kind. It will be available to download on mobile in April.

 

For more on these and other items and events, go to the website, Kbach dot org, be listening each week at this time for another update, Find us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram; make sure you check out the Most wanted Hour with Linda Cassidy, playing your top 100 most Wanted classical works, every weekday at noon.  I’m Randy Kinkel for “This week in Classical Music” on 89-five KBACH Phoenix and HD, a service of the Maricopa Community Colleges and Arizona State University.