Vivaldi

The company is finding the fun in the composer's seldom-heard Ercole su'l Termodonte.

It’s a good fit and some of it is challenging, but I really enjoy singing this music, and at the same time I’m thinking about the character.” While POP’s last outing, La bohème AKA “The Hipsters” AKA “La Brew’hème,” was performed at two breweries in December, the troupe’s season closes with The Pirates of Penzance at Heritage Square Museum in May. Shaw said that the orchestra consists of a string quartet along with an extra cello, plus oboe, flute, and trumpet, as well as a theorbo. I looked into the story because I was unfamiliar with the legend, and I read what I could find. Some of it is what I want to do, but more is what we haven’t done. This production is much more of a love story than the original tales.” “Josh was aware I’d done that, and it turned out that I went on in just a couple of days. Soprano Janet Todd, who sings the role of Ippolita, Antiope’s sister, moved to Los Angeles in 2018 and auditioned for POP a year later. “We were very young, and Calisto was very dotty, very over the top,” recalled Shaw. Vivaldi’s 16th opera is based on the ninth labor of Hercules, in which he’s tasked with capturing the sword of Antiope, the queen of the Amazons. With Ercole only the second Baroque outing in POP’s history — its first was a production of La Calisto in 2014 — Shaw explained that this opera, unlike the earlier offering, has not been updated. 6 and running for three weekends at the Highland Park Ebell Club, this staging may not feature seven castrati as the opera did during its 1723 premiere in Rome — there was a papal ban on women in opera then — but it does promise to be both a sonic and visual feast.