Well here I am. I'm not a professional musician, but I was raised in a world of professional musicians and consider myself an educated fan. I was raised in Manhattan as the daughter of a Metropolitan Opera mezzo soprano, and I myself studied solo piano at Juilliard while in high school. I'm trying to keep up my piano skills, but my current full-time job rests at home with my two little girls.
I thought I'd start off by sharing the program notes I recently wrote for my mother's production of Cosi fan Tutte, Mozart's comedy which she is currently directing at the University of Nebraska where she now teaches. My mom's sung Cosi in a number of productions, but I myself didn't know the opera very well. I saw the San Francisco Opera's production of it in 2004 with Frederica von Stade as Despina, a part for which she was deservedly well-renown. I remembered the rest of the cast being stellar too, and in searching around to find who they might have been, I found this nifty site of SF Opera archives where you can look up any past performance.
That 2004 production played Cosi as a lighthearted farce, as evidenced by this photo of Flicka and the seaside resort set designs, when in fact the plot has a malicious undertone which my mom has chosen to play up in her production. So after quite a bit of absorbing research, here's what I came up with.
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