LA Opera Opens September 8 with Beethoven's Fidelio

LA 2007/'08 season opens Saturday September 8 with Beethoven's Fidelio at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown LA. It is followed by Verdi's Requiem on September 9th.
Z.

Here's the excerpt from the [LA Opera] website...

Beethoven's Fidelio
True love's fidelity triumphs over tyranny.

Music Director James Conlon opens LA Opera's season with Beethoven's Fidelio, a celebration of humanity's desire for freedom and justice. More than 200 years after its premiere, this drama of wrongful imprisonment and the triumph of true love remains as relevant as ever.

Unjustly incarcerated by a ruthless oppressor, Florestan languishes in a secret prison, held without charge or trial. His wife Leonore, desperate to find him and willing to die if she must, adopts the disguise of a young man - Fidelio - and becomes the jailer's assistant, hoping to free her beloved husband.

This astonishingly forceful contemporary production resonates with edge-of-your-seat excitement and matchless music, complete with stunning arias, inspiring choruses, two of the most famous quartets in all of opera, and exuberant orchestral writing.

Verdi
Giuseppe Verdi

Intensely dramatic in nature, Giuseppe Verdi's transcendent Requiem is a heartfelt rumination on life and death, singing of faith, doubt, heaven and hell with breathtaking beauty and thrilling suspense. Plácido Domingo conducts the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra and the Los Angeles Opera Chorus - prepared by Grant Gershon in his debut season as Chorus Master - in the Company's first ever presentation of the transcendent Requiem. The impressive quartet of world-class vocalists includes Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, American mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, and in their Company debuts, German tenor Jonas Kaufmann and German bass René Pape.