“How do you perform an opera in Boston, New York, and back in Boston again in under 48 hours—and do it well?,” writes Lucas Phillips in Sunday’s (3/30) Boston Globe. “It helps that Henry Purcell’s 17th-century classic, ‘Dido and Aeneas,’ is as short as it is.… Handel and Haydn Society took its semi-staged production on a 400-mile journey in an intense three-performance weekend.… Twelve hours since wrapping up a Friday night performance at Jordan Hall—after loading up two tour buses with 13 baroque instruments, a trunk of music, four cases of water, two cases of beer, one case of wine, and suitcases—the 18-member choir, three guest soloists, 15 orchestra musicians, two directors, and three staffers waited for the bus’s air conditioning to be fixed.… It was nine hours until show time Saturday night at Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian Temple of Dendur in New York City, where the show would also be live-streamed…. Ira Pedlikin, who has served as the group’s artistic planner for almost a decade, said the organization’s standard concert model is Friday night and Sunday afternoon, leaving one day open. In all, it takes about 150 hours to plan for the trip, Pedlikin said.”
Posted April 4, 2019
In photo: Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society performs in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum’s Temple of Dendur, led by Conductor and Artistic Director Harry Christophers. Photo by Stephanie Berger
