Continuing its mission to offer a high quality music and cultural Festival for Oklahoma audiences, OK Mozart marked its 31st season this past June, taking a musical trip to Italy, the place where 17 year old Wolfgang received the Papal Order of the Knight of the Golden Spur for his extraordinary musical gifts. Presented June 6th through the 13th, Festival 2015 offered a series of orchestral concerts, chamber music performances and a semi-staged production of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, as well as a full program of related cultural activities in its showcase events. Recorded concerts are held at the Bartlesville Community Center and St. Luke's Episcopal Church and just this past summer, OK Mozart renovated its offices and opened a new small concert venue, Aurora Hall in downtown Bartlesville.
Mozart’s two-act opera Don Giovanni, was written for Prague, premiering there in October of 1787 and staged in Vienna in the following year. The great popularity in Prague of Mozart’s previous opera, The Marriage of Figaro, led the theatre’s impresario to commission a new opera and Mozart wanted to keep the same librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, for the new work. Da Ponte based his libretto on the well known story of Don Juan, the notorious libertine of fiction and his eventual descent into hell, dramatized in the 17th century by the Spanish playwright Tirso da Molina and the subject of an opera by Giuseppe Gazzaniga. For Mozart, it was an unusually intense work, and it was not entirely understood in his own time. Within a generation, however, it was recognized as one of the greatest of all operas. The Amici New York Orchestra and Bartlesville Choral Society presented the piece in a semi-staged version conducted by Constantine Kitsopoulos, on Wednesday, June 10th at the Bartlesville Community Center and featured a gifted cast of singers chosen from across Oklahoma. Performance Oklahoma presents the production “abridged” to fit within the two-hour broadcast timeslot in the fourth and final edition of the series from OK Mozart 2015.
Performance Oklahoma airs Saturday night at 8pm on Classical 88.7.