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CHILDREN somehow know that they are not supposed to like opera. Why do the singers sound so funny? they ask. Why do they have to sing in foreign languages? Why are they so fat?

The conductor Robert Ashens meets these reactions head on when he introduces opera to schoolchildren. 'I haven't come here to make you like opera,' he told an audience of sixth graders at the Isaac E. Young Middle School here recently. He had come, he said, simply to show them what opera is: spectacular storytelling set to music, an art form with a 500-year-old Western tradition.



To begin the program, which was sponsored by the Westchester Hudson Opera Company, Mr. Ashens introduced a soprano who might have come from the set of the students' favorite television show. Young and long-haired, wearing a short, scoop-necked dress and black tights and heels, Lielle Sara Berman was not quite the helmeted, oversize Brunhilda they might have been expecting (Hershenson, The New York TImes, 1996).

 

 (​For complete article:  http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/12/nyregion/sixth-graders-introduced-to-opera.html)



Opera Review: A forgotten monument to carousing and clanging.

I Cavalieri di Ekebu, a rare gem, restored at Lincoln Center, New York. 

"In the final scene, when the abandoned iron works goes back into operation, Zandonai's clanking, driving music created a raucously exuberant din in the hall, especially as conducted by Robert Ashens..." (Tommasini, The New York Times, 2000).

 

(For complete article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/arts/opera-review-a-forgotten-monument-to-carousing-and-clanging.html)

 

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