Rising opera star from Edina comes home for A Holiday Special COVID and a Christmas special bring rising opera singer Liv Redpath home.
By Rob Hubbard Special to the Star Tribune December 18, 2020 10:22am Text size Copy shortlink:
Gretel got her.
Liv Redpath was an Edina eighth-grader when that fairy-tale character who s seduced by a witch s giant gingerbread house convinced her to become an opera singer. She sang the role at age 14 in a production of Engelbert Humperdinck s Hansel and Gretel staged by Minnesota Opera s youth program, Project Opera. After I sang that Gretel, I was totally hooked, she said last week.
Save this story for later.
At the close of a catastrophic year in the performing arts, the annual ritual of cobbling together a list of highlights takes on a woeful cast. To begin with, I saw only three in-person events after mid-March. Although I watched dozens of performances online, sitting at my desk day after day lent the experiences a sense of sameness, of solipsism. The power of joining an audience resides in yoking your individuality to a collective, however temporary or disparate. In our electronic watchtowers, we seem to command a wide landscape, but ultimately we rarely leave the cocoon of the self. The COVID-19 year has trapped us all the more completely in the digital bubbles from which we so often long to break out. In a related development, the tech monopolies that already control too much of the cultural landscape have tightened their grip.