Westminster Opera Theater Presents La Clemenza di Tito
Westminster Opera Theater will present Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito on Friday and Saturday, April 25 and 26, at 8 p.m. in the Princeton Regional Schools Performing Arts Center in Princeton. The production will be fully staged with orchestra and sung in Italian with English supertitles. The music director is Daniel Beckwith, and the stage director is Marc Verzatt.
Mozart's penultimate opera, La Clemenza di Tito is written in the opera seria form that was enjoyed by the 18th-century aristocracy. Full of noble music and virtuoso singing, it is the story of love, revenge and forgiveness set in ancient Rome.
Music director Daniel Beckwith is also director of opera studies at Westminster. He has conducted in many of the major opera houses throughout North America and Europe. With a repertoire that spans the 17th through the 20th centuries, he has been hailed as one of the most exciting conductors of his generation. Beckwith served as an assistant to James Levine for six seasons at the Metropolitan Opera and was given his conducting debut with Don Giovanni in 1995.
The operas of Mozart have figured prominently in Beckwith’s career. His return engagement to the Metropolitan, as well as San Francisco Opera and Portland opera debuts was with Don Giovanni. Vancouver, Baltimore, Edmonton and Arizona opera companies have all heard his performances of Le Nozze di Figaro, and he made his Australian opera debut in 1998 with La Clemenza di Tito.
Beckwith’s love of, and affinity for, the Baroque, early classical, and the Bel canto repertory has given him the opportunity to perform many of the cornerstone operas of these varying periods. The vehicle of his April 2000 New York City Opera debut was a new production of Rameau’s Platée which featured the Mark Morris Dance Group. From 1999 to 2001, Beckwith was the artistic director of the Lake George Opera Festival, during which time he conducted performances of Il Barbiere di Sivilglia, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, Madama Butterfly, Il Re Pastore and Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos.
Stage Director Marc Verzatt maintains an active career directing opera, operetta and musical theater throughout the United States and Europe. He began his career as an assistant stage director for the Lyric Opera of Chicago and was soon appointed as acting coach and stage director of the Lyric Opera of Chicago's young artist program, Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. For the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Verzatt directed a concert version of Massenet's Le Cid with Placido Domingo and was the assistant director and movement coordinator for their Ring cycle.
With Westminster Opera Theater, Verzatt has directed Handel’s Oreste, Claude Debussy’s L’enfant prodigue and Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges. In Europe, his directing engagements have included Bastien und Bastienne with the Gürzenich Oper Cologne and La Serva Padrona with Sinfonia Stuttgart. In addition, Verzatt became staff assistant director to the new opera house in Aachen, Germany where he directed Der Graf von Luxemburg, and also spent a year as resident director for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express in Bochum, Germany. Mr. Verzatt was recognized by Classical Singer Magazine as the “2006 Stage Director of the Year.”
Tickets are $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors. All tickets can be reserved by calling the Westminster Box Office at (609) 921-2663 weekdays between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. The Princeton Regional Schools Performing Arts Center is located in Princeton High School on Walnut Lane at Franklin Street in Princeton.
Submitted on April 24, 2008
