Sunday, Mar 31, 2013
Fully staged production sung in French with English supertitles and piano accompaniment
AS OF THURSDAY, APRIL 11, BOTH PERFORMANCES ARE SOLD OUT.
Westminster Opera Theater will present Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), an operatic fantasy is five acts, on Friday, April 12 and Saturday, April 13 at 8 p.m. in The Playhouse on the campus of Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J, The fully staged production will be sung in French with English supertitles and piano accompaniment.
Offenbach's score is set to a libretto by Jules Barbier, based on tales written by E.T.A. Hoffmann. The story follows the main character, Hoffmann, as he relates his past experiences with three forlorn lovers.
The cast is composed of Westminster Choir College undergraduate and graduate students. David Paul is the director and William Hobbs is the production’s musical director. Westminster Opera Theater has been praised for its innovative productions of a wide range of operas. Participants in the program have gone on to perform in opera houses around the world. Recent productions have included Savitri by Gustav Holst, Gianni Schicchi by Giacomo Puccini, Oreste by George Frederic Handel, L’enfant Prodigue by Claude Debussy, L’enfant et les Sortilèges by Maurice Ravel, Così fan tutte, La Clemenza di Tito and Il Re Pastore by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Dialogues des Carmélites by Francis Poulenc, Albert Herring and A Midsummer's Night Dream by Benjamin Britten.
David Paul has directed operas and plays at leading professional companies and educational institutions throughout the United States and abroad. In addition to his directing work, Mr. Paul is active as a teacher of acting for singers. He has coached, taught, and directed at the Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and serves on the full-time faculty of both institutions. He has also taught and directed productions for the Barnard/Columbia Department of Theater, the International Vocal Arts Institute in Israel, and the Intermezzo Festival in Belgium.
A member of the Westminster Choir College Piano and Voice faculty, William Hobbs also works at many of the world’s major opera houses as conductor and coach. These include the Opéra National de Paris, the Salzburg Festival, San Francisco Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Seattle Opera, Washington Opera and the Opéra de Monte-Carlo. He has assisted conductors Claudio Abbado, Sir Charles Mackerras, Jiří Bělohlávek, Sir Andrew Davis, James Conlon, Robert Spano, Richard Bonynge, Donald Runnicles, Jiři Kout, Marco Armiliato and many others. He is the founder and artistic director of Opera Slavica, which is devoted to presenting full productions of masterworks from Russian, Czech and Polish composers, providing singers with no background in these languages with the knowledge and training to sing, read and translate them, and offering professional guidance for reaching industry standards.
Admission to this performance is $25 for adults and $20 for students and seniors. To purchase a ticket, please call the box office at (609) 921-2663 or order online at www.rider.edu/arts.