Yesh Li Blog: Central City Opera Weekend 2009

Friday, July 17, 2009

Central City Opera Weekend 2009

We just returned from another wonderful weekend in Central City, Colorado. We saw two of the three operas in the Central City Opera House Association season.

The three couples arrived at our favorite Bed and Breakfast, the Chase Creek Inn, on Friday night.

Here's the group gathered in the Dining Room.

On Saturday afternoon, we saw the musical "A Little Night Music" by Stephen Sondheim. It was a lighthearted farce, and we enjoyed it very much.

Reviews:

CCO makes much of "A Little Night Music"

Daily Camera, July 6, 2009

Soprano McNair very much "still here"

Denver Post, July 3, 2009

Sunday afternoon we saw the opera "Lucia di Lammermoor." It was also very enjoyable but quite different from the Sondheim musical, not at all lighthearted.

Mad about her: Central City's spellbinding "Lucia"

The Denver Post, June 30, 2009

CCO Stages luminous "Lucia"

Daily Camera, June 29, 2009

Russian soprano finds depth in madness of "Lucia"

The Denver Post, June 21, 2009

Incredibly, the Central City Opera House, opened in 1878 and in its 77th year after reopening in 1932, has never performed a Handel opera. This year, that all changes, with the performance of Rinaldo.

Reviews:

A spellbinding staging of "Rinaldo"

Denver Post, July 14, 2009

Opera has a crush on Handel

Denver Post, July 5, 2009

Central City Opera House, Opening Night, 1932

Former Weekends

2008 2007

1 comment:

Bonnie said...: looks like you saw some great operas !; 3:58 AM

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Why Yesh Li Blog?

Why do I have a blog? Quite simply, I have a blog to share my favorite things with others. The right side of the blog has a long list of links to some of the places on the Internet that I visit often. In addition to sharing those with others, I often come here myself to find a quick link to where I am going.

Bonnie, our eldest, led the way into blogging with her Simple Beauty Blog, and later with her extremely popular Beans Blog. I decided I would give blogging a try and thought "I have a blog" might be a clever name, but in English it sounded rather lame, so I did it in Hebrew, a language I love more and more the more I learn it.

What does Yesh Li Blog mean?

We would translate (i.e. interpret) yesh li blog to mean "I have a blog" in English, but the literal Hebrew means "There is for (or to) me a blog." You cannot literally say "I have" something or other in Hebrew. It is always "there is for me," or "there is for you," or "there is for us," etc. Hebrew, the language of the Bible, is showing us that we are really stewards of what has been provided for us and for our use. Rather than private ownership, perhaps a better term for what we "own" would be private stewardship.

Languages have been my passion since at least the fourth grade, when I studied Spanish from a library book called Fun with Spanish. In high school, I was the rara avis that became enamored of Latin. In later U.S. Navy tours of duty in Spain, Italy, and Japan, we did our best to learn the local languages. Along the way, I studied some Russian and picked up some Greek by studying etymologies and some Chinese by studying Japanese writing systems.

My first introduction to Hebrew was in the early 1980s, when I took a correspondence course, but it was not until the past decade that my primary focus has been on this wondrous language. It has been deeply rewarding, and especially in the past few years since we met Ori, an amazing Israeli woman, who has become not only my primary Hebrew mentor but also our good friend. Moreover, the small group of people who meet weekly to study Torah in Hebrew in Boulder have become dear to us and enriched our lives greatly. Further, reading Jewish commentaries on the Web of the weekly Torah portions has deepened my own faith and opened up new understandings of the scriptures we share and of Christian writings based on those scriptures.

The pursuit of words has been an essential part of my life for many years (since birth?). Many things have changed in my life, but I don't see that part of it changing any time soon (until death?). Lehitraot! Shalom, Chaverim!