Nelson Martinez appears this weekend as the jester Rigoletto.
The public events at the Miami Summer Music Festival get underway with an appearance by opera legend Deborah Voigt on Saturday night at Barry University, but there are a couple other musical happenings this weekend that also are worthy of note:
The jester and the curse: Raffaele Cardone’s plucky Miami Lyric Opera brings two performances of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto to the Colony Theatre on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. One of the three middle-period operas of Verdi’s maturity (the others are La Traviata and Il Trovatore), Rigoletto is a fast-moving melodrama of aristocratic decay, innocence, filial love and revenge gone wrong that contains music audiences have loved since the opera premiered in 1851, including “La donna é mobile,” the song of the salacious, predatory duke, and “Caro nome,” the aria of a young woman awakening to the power of love.
Cardone’s cast includes Nelson Martinez as Rigoletto, the jester whose daughter is the only bright spot in his life, and soprano Tina Gorina as Gilda, whose affection for the duke sends her father on a murderous mission. Miguel Angel Lobato is the duke of Mantua, and Lissette Jimenez is Maddalena, sister to the contract killer Sparafucile, sung by Alexis Trejo.
Doris Lang Hosloff conducts the Miami Lyric Opera Orchestra and chorus in performances at 8 p.m. Saturday and 4 p.m. Sunday. Cardone does the stage direction, and if you miss these shows, you can catch it again Aug. 15 and 16 at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center. Tickets for this weekend’s shows are $37, and can be had by calling 305-674-1040 or visiting www.colonytheatremiamibeach.com. The theater is at 1040 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach.
Organist Matthew Steynor, director of music at Trinity Cathedral in Miami.
Organ recital: The very fine British organist and choir director Matthew Steynor, who has been director of music at Miami’s beautiful Trinity Cathedral since 2007, offers a recital Sunday evening in preparation for a trip to London, where he’ll be playing at no less august a venue than St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The music Steynor has chosen reflects his wide-ranging, inquisitive taste, and includes the familiar J.S. Bach chorale prelude In dir ist Freude (BWV 615), as well as pieces by the great school of 20th-century French organists, including Jean Langlais (his Soleil du Soir and Soleil de France) and Louis Vierne (Hymne au Soleil). If you’re starting to see a theme, you’re right: Other sunny pieces on the program, called “Music of the Light,” include Sunshine and Sunset, two pieces by the celebrated early 20th-century Anglo-American organist Edwin Lemare, and Clement R. Gale’s Sunshine and Shadow.
Steynor also plans music of Herbert Howells (Paean), Theodore Dubois (Fiat Lux), the rarely heard Mexican composer José Jesús Estrada (Chacona), and two contemporary works: Dennis Janzer’s Flourish Like the Palm Tree and the Estonian master Arvo Pärt’s Mein Weg hat Gipfel und Wellentäler. Steynor says he gave this recital a trial run in the Bahamas last week (he spent a couple years there after graduating from Cambridge), and it worked well.
Miami has a sizable number of first-class musicians like Steynor who may not have high public profiles, but have earned tremendous respect in their own particular niches. While at Trinity, Steynor founded the Anglican Chorale of Southeast Florida, and last month presented a reading of Thomas Tallis’s tremendous Spem in alium. You can’t do that if you don’t really know what you’re doing, and if you stop by the free concert Sunday evening at 6, you can make a donation to the cathedral’s organ renovation fund and hear a concert by a Miami musician who’s worth knowing much better.
The cathedral is at North Bayshore Drive and the Venetian Causeway, sheltered amid high-rise hotels and condos near the Carnival Center.
