Arts reporter and critic Rosemary Ponnekanti keeps you in touch with the arts and culture scene with the help of other News Tribune writers, critics and editors.
Rosemary Ponnekanti is the arts reporter at The News Tribune, and has been a classical music nerd nearly all her life. Besides spending way too much time in galleries, museums and concert halls, she occasionally brings a whistle or double bass to Celtic jam sessions, and insists on singing "Happy Birthday" in four-part harmony.
Other contributors include:
> Arts & entertainment editor Craig Sailor
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There's certainly a lot happening in Tacoma this Saturday arts-wise: Joel Myers dancing in Move!, a "Play Buffet" of local playwrights' new works, women's glass art at Traver Gallery. But for die-hard Wagner fans, Seattle is the place to be Saturday night, when the annual Seattle Opera Wagner competition hits the stage. Eight international singers will battle it out with orchestra-accompanied arias for two $15,000 cash prizes, plus an audience-vote and an orchestra-vote prize.
They nicknamed it "Wagnerian Idol" last year, due to the following (apparently) in the crowd. And actually, with the Wagner-mad friends I have myself, I can understand it. (Sort of.)
I'm not in the Wagner-mad category myself, but if I go, I'll put in my vote for fellow Aussie, mezzo Deborah Humble.
Other contestants are tenor Erin Caves from Stockton, California; tenor Jason Collins from Beaufort/Seneca, South Carolina; bass-baritone Darren Jeffery from Cambridgeshire, England; bass Peter Lobert from Jena, Germany; tenor Michael Weinius from Stockholm, Sweden; mezzo-soprano Nadine Weissmann from Berlin, Germany; and soprano Elza van den Heever from Johannesburg, South Africa.
The judges are made up of a handful of opera experts from around the world, including Stephen Wadsworth, frequent director of Seattle Opera productions, including the 2001 and 2005 Ring cycles and upcoming 2009 Ring; and Eva Wagner-Pasquier, daughter of Wolfgang Wagner and an artistic advisor to the Aix-en-Provence Festival.
The competition begins at 7:30 p.m. in Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, Seattle Center. Tickets 800-426-1619 or 206-389-7676 or www.seattleopera.org
One of the best movies ever made about adolescence, in the humble opinion of this writer, anyway, come to Grand Cinema on Friday. It's "American Teen," a documentary that focuses on five seniors attending a small-town high school in Indiana. Director Nanette Burstein spent a year following the kids around, and in the process gained their trust to such an extent that she was granted an astonishing amount of access to them, their families and their friends. Private moments, some of them excruciatingly painful, play out before her lens in real time, and give the picture an immediacy and intensity rarely seen in documentaries.
These seemingly ordinary kids are anything but ordinary once the viewer gets to know them through this extraordinary film.
For show times, go to www.grandcinema.com
