Regina--UNC Memorial Hall, Friday, June 13, 8pm; Sunday, June 15, 2pm
Regina--Passion and Greed, Served Southern Style
Starring
Christine Weidinger, Malcolm Smith, Barbara Peters, Rick Piersall, Danielle Talamentes, Denise Payton, Kerry Jennings, Steven Jepson, Michael Kilbridge, Charles Streeter, Michner Beasley and Charles Stanton.
Christine Weidinger, Regina Giddens
North American soprano, Christine Weidinger, made her singing debut on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera as Musetta in “La Bohème” with Renata Scotto and Luciano Pavorotti. She has starred in most of the world’s opera houses. She has appeared through out the world, including appearances in Berlin, Nice, Hamburg, Munich, Monte Carlo, Montreal, Vancouver, Puerto Rico, Caracas, Santiago de Chile, Los Angeles and San Diego and more.
She immediately became a favorite with the public and the New York press. The New York Times called Miss Weidinger “a young artist well worth watching.” She nonetheless chose to leave the Met after three years to obtain
experience in European theatres.
Considered one of the finest Mozart singers in the world, she performed the difficult role of Elettra, her debut role at La Scala. Miss Weidinger gradually added more dramatic roles to her repertoire, as well. In addition to Aida, which she performed in Bielefeld as well as Caracas, and the “Don Carlo” Elisabetta in Bielefeld and in Buenos Aires, she has sung Odabella in “Attila,”Amelia in “Ballo in maschera,” Leonora in “Trovatore,” Madama Butterfly, and Senta in “Der
fliegende Holländer.”
Once recognized as one of the best Susannas in the world, she has more recently sung the Countess at the Liçeo in Barcelona and in Santiago with Maurizio Benini conducting. She has sung the fiendishly difficult role of Konstanze more than 150 times in major theatres all over the world, including the Vienna State Opera, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Bologna, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Lille, and Monte Carlo. The late Götz Friedrich once said of her, “She is not simply the best Konstanze in the world; she is the only one!”
Malcolm Smith, Horace Giddens, Regina's husband
One of America’s leading basses, Malcolm Smith has appeared with the world’s major operatic and symphonic organizations. He has performed with such renowned companies as the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Hamburg Opera, Munich Opera, Vienna State Opera, and the Paris Opera Bastille, among many others. He has been heard in concert repertoire with the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles and Vienna Philharmonics, and the Baltimore, Montreal, and National Symphonies.
Most recently, Mr. Smith performed Verdi’s Requiem with the Springfield Symphony (MA) and the role of Duc de Verone in Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the Spoleto Festival USA. During the 2006/07 season, he sang Verdi’s Requiem with Helena Symphony (MT) and Oroveso in Norma with Mercury Opera.
Malcolm Smith made his European debut at the Spoleto Festival in Tristan und Isolde and his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1975 in La Gioconda. He toured Japan with the Metropolitan Opera and appeared in the world premiere of Robert Ward’s Abelard and Heloise at the Charlotte Opera. Mr. Smith made his New York City Opera debut in Prokofiev’s Flaming Angel, which he also performed at the Opera Bastille in Paris. Subsequent performances and recordings of Handel’s Samson and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 firmly established him on the American scene as an artist fluent in both opera and oratorio repertoire.
A native New Yorker, Mr. Smith holds degrees from the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music and Columbia University, has studied at Indiana University, and is currently listed in Who’s Who in America.
Synopsis of Regina
The opera Regina is based on the play, “The Little Foxes" by Lillian Hellman. The main conflict of Regina is between the aristocracy and middle-class industrialists, but the opera also focuses upon what it means to be accountable for one’s actions.
Regina is set in the Southern town of Bowden, Alabama in the spring of 1900. Regina Giddens and her brothers Ben and Oscar Hubbard have a plan to build a series of cotton mills in the South. For this plan to work, the siblings need Regina’s husband Horace to assist with a third of the money. Horace, who is in the hospital with heart trouble, refuses to have any part in the business. Regina is upset by this news and decides to send her daughter Alexandra to bring Horace back home.
Meanwhile, Regina is preparing to host a party in order to win over a wealthy man named Mr. Marshall so that he will finance the business. Before the day of the party, Oscar recruits his son Leo to help with the moneymaking ploy. Oscar tells Leo, who happens to work at a bank, that the plan may succeed if Horace’s bonds are removed from the bank. Horace and Alexandra return just before the party gets underway. While everyone is having a good time, Leo goes to the bank and steals the bonds which Ben and Oscar use to finalize the deal with Mr. Marshall. Regina does not find out about her brother’s actions until Horace tells her that his bonds are missing. She is excited by this news because now she has potentially harmful information, yet Horace will not let Regina get ahead. Regina is so angry that she denies Horace his heart medicine and he dies of a heart attack.
When Ben and Oscar see that Horace has died, they are approached by Regina who threatens them with their crime. She threatens jail unless the brothers give her seventy-five percent of the business. Now Regina has what she wanted, her money. But, the opera ends with Alexandra telling her mother that she is leaving, and thus Regina is alone and fully accountable for the actions that have left her desolate.
Marc Blitzstein, Composer
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein was born in 1905 in Philadelphia. From a young age, Blitzstein was very musical. His first public piano concert was at the age of seven. In 1924, Blitzstein became one of the first students at the Curtis School of Music. Two years later he went to study in Europe with Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg. When he was merely 23 years old, Blitzstein had already written Piano Sonata. That same year Blitzstein met Eva Goldbeck and the two got married, even though Blitzstein was a homosexual. In the late 1920’s, Blitzstein tried his hand at writing opera and produced Triple Sec and Parabola and Circula. At that point, Blitzstein decided opera was “trash” and “rotten nineteenth-century stuff,” therefore he started writing more musicals.
In 1936, Blitzstein’s wife Eva died suddenly. Blitzstein was devastated and began pouring into his work and became very involved in politics. Thus, Blitzstein created his most famous work, a political opera called The Cradle Will Rock. When World War Two commenced, Blitzstein joined the Air Force and became the music director for the American Broadcasting Station in London. During this time, Blitzstein wrote his best-known choral piece, The Airborne.
After the war, Blitzstein returned to New York where he was asked to write music to Lillian Hellman’s play, The Little Foxes. Thus, Blitzstein’s most frequently performed composition and great American opera was born- Regina. Although Regina was a highly successful opera, it was not Blitzstein profited most from his adaptation of Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, from which came a song that can still be heard on the radio today- Mack The Knife.
Blitzstein continued to compose opera and musical theater pieces. But these projects were less familiar and some of them were even considered “artistic failures.” In 1963, Blitzstein decided to take a break and visit Martinique for the winter. While he was there, Blitzstein was robbed and beaten and ended up dying of internal injuries. On that day, America lost one of its brilliant composers, yet even today, his music lives on.