To welcome spring, newoutpost ventured west for the opening night performance of Nashville Opera’s production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann on Thursday, April 4th. Despite being one of the biggest musical capitals in the United States, opera lags behind the more obvious musical genres in Nashville, and part of the company’s donation drive outlines becoming a medium tier regional outfit by 2020 as a prime goal in its printed literature. Though small, the company can most certainly surprise us from time to time, and recently staged a production of Puccini’s Tosca for rising star soprano Jennifer Rowley. Your friends at newoutpost attended a more than valid performance of Verdi’s Otello (not an easy piece to pull off by any standard) which featured Mary Dunleavy as Desdemona and Clifton Forbis in the title role. Thus, Nashville Opera is always in our radar when planning our traveling schedule, and when it ambitiously announced a staging of Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, we could not help ourselves and embarked in a short pilgrimage. In the process, we failed to prepare ourselves for the possibility that the company may have bitten off more than it could chew.
