Classical Music in Incline Village Lake Tahoe by Classic Tahoe

Culture Abounds with Classical Music in Lake Tahoe – by Nick Cisik

Last night I attended a performance given by the Classical Tahoe Orchestra on the Sierra Nevada College campus. It was an evening of opera entitled Mozart Onstage: the Drama of Love. It featured four singer/actor fellows from the San Francisco Opera Adler Fellowship program and was a delightful evening.

I was lucky enough to find out about Classical Tahoe through my good fortune, hearing Maestro Joel Revzen, the artistic director and principal conductor of Classical Tahoe, being interviewed on Capital Public Radio. This led me to do further research online where I found that Classical Tahoe is a four-week classical music festival held on the forested campus of Sierra Nevada College, only a half hour's drive from Truckee. During those three weeks there are six full-orchestra performances given, three chamber music programs, as well as a free family concert and a pre-K Music and Movement class. 

The performances are given within the comfort of the Classical Tahoe Pavilion located right on campus. Last night the venue was packed with at least three hundred guests, all of whom listened attentively as the music of world-class performers washed over them. It was a night of arias and semi-staged scenes from some of the most revered works in operatic history. The subject matter was Love and the selections for the evening came from such venerable composers such as Verdi, Donizetti, and the star of the night, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. There were many stars shining that night, not only in the night sky's canopy, but on stage as well. As our hostess that evening, Cindy Rhys, put it, we were hearing "...the voices of tomorrow today," and she was not gilding the lily. The four Adler fellows brought every ounce of their talents to bare, commanding the attention of the audience with each emphatic note they produced. The orchestra, I later found out, was partially made up of former and current Metropolitan Opera Orchestra instrumentalists. This made complete sense after hearing the exquisite sounds resonating from the pavilion stage earlier in the evening.

Fortunately for us all, there are still four performances left in this summer's festival, so anyone with an appreciation for the classics should take full advantage. Enjoy!        

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