VIDEO: Get A First Look At Heartbeat Opera's Radically Staged Version Of DON GIOVANNI

After last season's much-buzzed-about Butterfly and Carmen, HEARTBEAT OPERA-the daring young company whose unconventional orchestrations and stagings of classic operas have been called "a radical endeavor" by Alex Ross in The New Yorker - returned to Baruch Performing Arts Center with its fourth annual Spring Festival May 2-13, 2018.

Heartbeat premiered adaptations of two operatic masterpieces, both radically staged, trimmed down and re-orchestrated: Mozart's DON GIOVANNI and Beethoven's FIDELIO.

Now, check out video highlights from DON GIOVANNI below!

Once again at the helm were Heartbeat Co-Artistic Directors Louisa Proske and Ethan Heard and Co-Music Directors Jacob Ashworth and Daniel Schlosberg. These four graduates of the Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Music founded Heartbeat Opera in 2014 and have since brought a number of great works of the operatic canon into the 21st century through visionary adaptations, offbeat chamber music arrangements, and visceral productions that put the singers and instrumentalists at the center of the work.

MOZART'S CLARINET The novel element in Mozart's original orchestration of DON GIOVANNI is the prominence of the clarinets, which at that very moment were coming into their modern form as the primary voice of the winds. After a life-long fascination with the clarinet, Mozart finally had access to good players with remodeled instruments, giving him new coloristic expression for a group of late works that peaked with his iconic chamber music masterpiece, the Clarinet Quintet. Daniel Schlosberg's new orchestration of DON GIOVANNI-for clarinet, string quartet, bass, and harpsichord-takes Mozart's lead in his own Quintet to cast the clarinet, like Giovanni himself, as the outsider. The clarinet has a unique capacity to be both the loudest sound, impossible to ignore, and to blend in almost to the point of being imperceptible. Like Giovanni, the clarinet is a shapeshifter.

For tickets and more visit www.heartbeatopera.org

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