Date: 31 October 2024 (Thu)
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Room PQ304, 3/F, Core P, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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Opera has given us some of the world’s best tunes, which have long been and still are used in advertising, cartoons, television and movies and have been adapted in musicals and popular music. So even if you have never been to an opera, you surely know a lot of the music already. This talk will look at some of opera’s best-known melodies by such composers as Mozart, Puccini, Bizet, Rossini and Wagner and show how they’ve been used, often in very funny ways, for everything from Bugs Bunny to Broadway, from rice krispies to car companies, from figure skating to razor blades.
About the Speaker
Peter Gordon, lived in Hong Kong since 1985, works with leading opera companies in Hong Kong and Guangdong and gives regular opera talks at the Dante Alighieri Society as well as at Alliance Française, Opera Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong and the Asia Society. He developed the version of Giacomo Puccini’s “La bohème” that will be performed at PolyU on 28 November.