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Jun. 23rd, 2016 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretVery excited to report that tonight I will be crossing one of the items off the live opera bucket list I made a few years ago. I'll be seeing Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes at the Princeton Festival tonight!
I first was introduced to Peter Grimes in my college opera appreciation class, on DVD, and was instantly charmed by it. The nautical tone painting is perfectly picturesque, from the evocative shanties to the grippingly potent tempest. But more than a mere exemplar of Britten's mastery of the color of the orchestra, Peter Grimes feels deeply personal as an account in its indirect way of Britten's own queerness and of society's failure to cope with it. I've wanted to see it live ever since and now, roughly a decade after that first exposure, I will.
On the other hand, I'm a little uncertain about the venue. Princeton Festival is a summer arts festival in the Princeton area that stages an opera, a musical, various chamber classical and jazz performances, a lecture series, and some visual arts exhibitions every summer. It is a charming idea, but the actual art is sometimes fairly amateurish. Not necessarily my first choice to see an opera I've been waiting to see for so long, but hopefully it will come off well tonight.
I first was introduced to Peter Grimes in my college opera appreciation class, on DVD, and was instantly charmed by it. The nautical tone painting is perfectly picturesque, from the evocative shanties to the grippingly potent tempest. But more than a mere exemplar of Britten's mastery of the color of the orchestra, Peter Grimes feels deeply personal as an account in its indirect way of Britten's own queerness and of society's failure to cope with it. I've wanted to see it live ever since and now, roughly a decade after that first exposure, I will.
On the other hand, I'm a little uncertain about the venue. Princeton Festival is a summer arts festival in the Princeton area that stages an opera, a musical, various chamber classical and jazz performances, a lecture series, and some visual arts exhibitions every summer. It is a charming idea, but the actual art is sometimes fairly amateurish. Not necessarily my first choice to see an opera I've been waiting to see for so long, but hopefully it will come off well tonight.