Opera on the Beach!

It’s Christmas! Yay! My xmas festivities so far have been amazing, great family moments, loads of fantastic food and truly good music. The playlist I made for the for the xmas party include, Michael Buble’s  Christmas CD (who is such a terrific singer), the soundtrack from Love Actually (my favorite Xmas movie of all time), some tracks from the Glee Xmas cds, some musical theatre songs sung by Joyce DiDonato, the calmer Beatles songs, Frank Sinatra and Nat Cole King. I got exactly what I wanted, an amazing Jamie Oliver cook book (I LOVE to cook, I can’t wait to get my hands on Opera Cooks) and Havaianas Cheshire Cat Flip-flops (I loooove flip-flops, since I’m from a seaside town it’s like common sense fashion around here). That’s basically it that I got yesterday, because I’ve asked everyone for money since I’m going to New York on February and I wanna buy thousands of opera scores, hundreds of cds and a couple of dvds.

So since it’s Christmas I’m going to talk about a concert here in my city that is sort of like a Xmas tradition and it’s one of the only moments the big public gets to hear classical music. By the way, right now my mum is talking to some aunt who called to wish us a Merry Christmas and is already talking about how me and my sister are only hooking up and how unfortunate it was that I broke it off with my boyfriend. Don’t you just love that?

So the lord works in mysterious ways, and even when I want to do something that is considered normal I end up going to a concert instead. I was gonna go to the movies with some friends, but then I heard there was this great orchestra called OSESP (which is one of the most important orchestras in the country) playing at the beach. So I ditched my friends (who were late by the way, they saw it coming) and called another friend who said she was going and went to the beach. To my utter and complete delight and surprise they were actually doing opera! ‘Cause they always come and play, but it’s always orchestral pieces, never with singing! But there they were with fantastic soloists and the OSESP choir (in which I have a great friend who sings in, he’s big time good) doing the highlights of Porgy and Bess!

It was fantastic! It was around 8 when I got there, but since it’s summer here the sun was starting to set, so it was quite an experience, fantastic music and a magnificent view.  I didn’t get to hear “Summertime” which they probably did in the beginning since they were following the order of the piece. I arrived at “My Man is Gone Now”, which was breathtaking. The guy playing Porgy was crazy good, just awesome, his “I got plenty of nothing” was superb, the color of his voice was very really beautiful, quite enticing. Another great performer was the guy playing Sporting Life, I have to look up who was who in this, but he sounded like a wonderful musical theatre professional, he nailed it, he even danced a little, both his songs were the ones that got the biggest applause.

There was a great number of people there, I’m going to guess a thousand people, but I’m really bad at guessing, here are some pictures from where I was, but there were loads and loads of people standing behind me.

And of course the beautiful Sunday sunset we had as a background for such a wonderful early evening.

But of course things are so well organized in this country that I simply cannot find the cast list, but I will look for it later, I gotta go now, since the guests have arrived and we're having a Christmas barbecue by the pool, that is one good thing about living in the tropics, we don't freeze at Christmas, but I'd rather freeze and have a decent opera program than this.