Opera at the new Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre

My mom recently got tickets for the opera Turendot and asked me to join her. I am not normally a fan of opera, but one of my favorite pieces of music is a movement from this opera. It's called Nessen Dorma, and was famously sung by Luciano Pavarotti. I gladly accepted.

We stopped off first at Top Spice, one of my favorite Thai restaurants. The mango chicken was just as good as I remembered it!

Then we were off to the opera. Cobb county's new performing arts center (or as they spell it, "centre") is the new home of the Atlanta opera, and is a fantastic building. My mother later shared with me that one of our old church members was the architect and wanted to know what we thought. Well, simply put, it was fantastic. I was greatly impressed by the use of some type of stone that was back lit. It reminded me of the alabaster from Egypt that vendors would shine a light through to show that it was genuine. Very beautiful.

The show itself was much like I expected an opera to be. There really isn't much action on the stage. It's more just a bunch of folks singing, which just doesn't hold my attention. (Hey I'm from the internet generation. Having a short attention span is pretty much an epidemic at this point.) However, the fantastic costumes, sets, and lighting did catch my attention. They were fantastic! What really saved me in this opera were the projected translations. Thanks goodness for the translations, or I would have been lost. Then came the precious Nessen Dorma, the wonderful Tenor solo I was looking forward to. It was great, but it seemed so short compared to the rest of the opera. It was over before I really had begun to enjoy it.

All in all it was a good night. As we left I got my mom to take this jokey picture of me holding a "light saber". It is really just one of the lamps on the sidewalk in front of the center.










============================

Links of Interest

Internet People - An animated compilation of wacky stuff from the internet.
Wilhelm Scream Compilation - Hollywood's most famous stock-audio scream and all its uses.
Lunation - One photo of the moon every day during the lunar month - notice the "wobble" called libration. Source
25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer - This is so true it's not funny.