WRTI’s Saturday opera broadcast, on Nov. 7 at 1 p.m., is a special collaboration with our partners at the Academy of Vocal Arts, as we present a fall 2025 performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro).
Figaro opens Mozart’s trilogy of collaborations with the Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, and it really only faces competition from the second in that trilogy, Don Giovanni, as Mozart’s greatest Italian opera. Its 1786 opening run of nine performances seems laughably humble considering its status as one of the most performed operas today. Its lasting appeal, as the AVA production’s stage director Tara Faircloth puts it, is thanks to “Mozart's attention to human frailty, how we misunderstand and hurt one another, but also how we really long for connection and community.”
The opera is based on a play of the same by Pierre Beaumarchais, the sequel to another famous play-turned-opera: The Barber of Seville. The source material for Figaro was banned in Vienna by the Austrian Emperor, fearing that its themes would create conflict between the classes. So, to turn the play into an opera, Mozart and Da Ponte had to make changes, redirecting most of the blame for the characters’ troubles from the aristocracy to women, but that’s largely a facade for the class story which remains.
AVA painted these issues with their costume design, a brightly colored palette reminiscent of Wes Anderson films (quite appropriate for an opera nearly entirely in a major key). There were noble characters dressed in certain colors, different ranks of servants dressed in others, and when the characters swapped costumes, the audience got to see the different ways certain characters were addressed when perceived to be noble or not. The singers who portrayed Figaro and Susanna, Cumhur Görgün and Jasmine Rose respectively, dropped by to talk about the show, including the color choices and other explorations of these issues; you’ll hear an abridged version of our conversation at intermission, and you can listen in full right here.
Tune in to WRTI at 1 p.m. on Nov. 7 — or stream at wrti.org, on the WRTI mobile app, and on your smart speaker — to hear the Academy of Vocal Arts’ fall 2025 production of The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro).
CAST
Cumhur Görgün, Figaro
Jasmine Rose, Susanna
Joshua Klein, Count Almaviva
Alexa Frankian, Countess Rosina Almaviva
Katherine Dobbs, Cherubino
Raúl Morales Velazco, Bartolo
Maiya Williams, Marcellina
Cole McIlquham, Basilio
Daniela Machado, Barbarina
Ryan Wornall, Antonio
Sergio Mandujano, Curzio
Joseph Colaneri, conductor
