By Sean Martinfield [Huffington Post, 2 June 2015]
Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard appears with conductor Charles Dutoit and the San Francisco Symphony this week in Ravel’s one-act comic opera, L’Heure espagnole. (The Spanish Hour). The program opens with Ravel’s brief “morning song,” Alborado del gracioso and concludes with Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain featuring pianist Javier Perianes. The opera (not quite an hour) also features tenors Jean Paul FouchÈcourt and John Mark Ainsley, along with baritones Jean-Luc Ballestra and David Wilson-Johnson. Isabel sings the role of Concepion, a clockmaker’s wife with way-too-much time on her hands. And with three potential lovers in the shop – two of them hidden in tall standing clocks – each counting the minutes until her buffoon of a husband returns, Isabel says, “She’s hysterical! A woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”
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