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Opera Returns to New Orleans

May 7, 2006
New Orleans - When Robert Lyall, the artistic director and conductor of the New Orleans Opera, set about programming this year's spring season two years ago, he was determined to open with "Jenufa," a dark, complex work by the Czech composer Leo Janacek. Then Katrina hit New Orleans and left both the city and its opera company adrift. "Jenufa" features a scene of a boy drowning, and Lyall recognized at once that the opera "would be singularly inappropriate" for a season opener. "It was uncomfortably close," he says.

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source: Phil Wahba, The Express-News