Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
The Yale Baroque Opera Project, under the scholarly leadership of Ellen Rosand, is once again addressing the work of Francesco Cavalli. (I wrote about their Giasone last year.) A production of Scipione affricano, from 1664, plays on Dec. 10 and 11.... Next week, Puccini's ever-underrated La fanciulla del West opens at the Met, with Deborah Voigt in the title role. The Dec. 10 performance falls on the one-hundredth anniversary of the opera's world premiere. Read all about it at Deborah Burton's absorbing Fanciulla 100 site. Included are film and audio snippets of Puccini in New York.... The Cage Against the Machine project in the UK has again brought 4'33" into the news. On Dec. 9, Kyle Gann lectures on Cage's silences as part of the Unsound Lounge at the Goethe Institut in NYC.... Marion Lignana Rosenberg has a head start on the Verdi bicentennial with her Verdi Duecento site.... Who could resist home movies of Sibelius? (Via David Nice, Jessica Duchen.) ... Worth noting: a Music Mondays presentation of Ligeti works for one to five performers, with the Sospiro Winds, Miranda Cuckson, Jacob Greenberg, and others. It's on Dec. 13, at Advent Lutheran Church uptown, and it's free.... The Steve Reich seventy-fifth anniversary season is now upon us: AXIOM present Music for 18 and the Triple Quartet at Tully on Dec. 9. Also, the fierce youth of the Yale Percussion Group play Reich's Sextet on Dec. 12 at Zankel. Music for 18 will be heard again on Feb. 18 at the Armory, as part of Eighth Blackbird's Tune-In Festival; Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain is on the same bill.
