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The Comic Intermezzo at Lake Forest College Lake Forest, Ill - On Friday, April 11 at 7:30 pm, Lake Forest College Department of Music will present the ensemble "The Comic Intermezzo" in the first modern staged production of Domenico Sarri’s 1731 comic chamber opera "La Furba e lo Sciocco (The clever woman and the foolish man”) The concert will be held in Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel on the middle campus of Lake Forest College. The performance is free and open to the public. A reception follows the performance, for more information please call 847-735-6010. The husband and wife duo of Peter and Kathleen Van De Graaff rediscovered the opera in the archives of the San Majello Conservatory in Naples, Italy, while there in 1998 and are now bringing the work to the stage. The modern concert premiere was presented by the Comic Intermezzo and the Ars Antigua in January of this year in Chicago. The "Intermezzo" was an art form which flourished in the early to mid 18th century and was enormously popular throughout Europe. It was a form of comic chamber opera, generally scored for soprano, bass and string ensemble, and was inserted in between the acts of the larger "opera seria". Several of the greatest of the baroque composers wrote intermezzos, including Pergolesi, Telemann and Hasse. Domenico Sarri (1679-1744) was a composer who was prominent in Naples during the first two decades of the 18th century. He wrote primarily operas and excelled at writing intermezzos. Peter and Kathleen Van De Graaff have been rediscovering and performing intermezzos since 1985 and have given the modern premieres of works by Johann Adolph Hasse, Leonardo Leo and Sarri. They have performed these live on WFMT and throughout the United States, and gave the Asian premiere of Hasse’s "Miride e Damari" in Tokyo. They perform the operas in English, fully-staged and costumed. Their busy singing careers also include engagements with the Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera, Music of the Baroque, the Chicago String Ensemble, and many other orchestras and opera companies in the US and in Europe. In June, they will be performing the Sarri opera at the St. Louis Early Music Festival, and the Hasse opera at the Grand Teton Music Festival. Kathleen is professor of voice at Lake Forest College and St. Xavier University and Peter is an announcer on WFMT, Chicago where he has been the host of LaSalle by Night for the past 14 years. Their Lake Forest College concert will begin with songs and duets by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn. Randall Manges, music director at Winnetka Congregational Church, will be the pianist. Lake Forest College is a private liberal arts institution located 30 miles north of downtown Chicago. The College has 1,300 students representing 45 states and 43 other countries.
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