Matthew Worth (Tarquinius) and Tamara Mumford (Lucretia), Rape of Lucretia, Châteauville Foundation, 2007, photo by Giuseppe Di LibertoSo few classical music concerts happen in the summer months that the weekly Classical Music Agenda gets a vacation. Here is what you could hear in the month of July, although you may have to travel a bit to get there.
OPERA:
>> This is the time of the summer opera festivals, and the newest kid on the block is within a moderate drive from the city. Lorin Maazel, recently retired as music director of the New York Philharmonic, will host the first-ever Castleton Festival at the Châteauville Foundation, the estate owned by Maazel and his wife in Rappahannock County, Virginia. The festival has grown out of Maazel’s productions of chamber operas at Castleton Farms the last few years (for more information, see these reviews), but the venue’s small theater limits the number of people who can see each performance. The chamber operas on the schedule, all by Benjamin Britten, are The Turn of the Screw (July 3 to 5), The Beggar’s Opera (July 5, 12, 16, and 18), The Rape of Lucretia (July 10 to 12), and Albert Herring (July 17 to 19). Other performances of chamber music and the festival orchestra are listed on the foundation’s Web site.
>> The adventurous American Opera Theater presents an adaptation of 12 songs by John Dowland, woven together into a theatrical piece called A Pilgrime’s Solace, featuring mezzo-soprano Monica Reinagle and guitarist Andrew Dickenson at Baltimore Artscape (July 19, 7 p.m.).
>> At the Fringe Festival, Gregg Martin will present LIfe in Death, his one-act “opera electronica” on Poe’s The Oval Portrait (July 12, 17 to 19, and 24). Also, Opera Alterna will perform Michael Oberhauser’s Magnum Opus, a short opera on the Faust legend (July 9, 12, 16, 18, and 25).
