Hurricane Irene is blowing more wind than a Wagnerian soprano at the end of the Ring Cycle and she's wreaking havoc up and down the eastern seaboard. A number of performances have been canceled because of the storm, including all of today's performances on Broadway. The Metropolitan Opera has delayed the start of its Summer HD Festival. The two opera screenings scheduled for Saturday, August 27 and Sunday, August 28 have been canceled. The festival will open on Monday, August 30 at 8:30 p.m. with Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride," which had been scheduled to start at 8 p.m. that evening. The festival runs through Sept. 5.
The closing night of the Mostly Mozart Festival at Avery Fisher Hall, scheduled for 8 p.m. Saturday, has also been canceled.
We can't think of many operas that have natural disasters in the plot other than Catalani's "La Wally," where the heroine dies in an avalanche. Unfortunately, the well-known arias are for soprano and tenor. The closest we could come was John Adams' masterpiece "Doctor Atomic" where there is a nuclear explosion. Here is Gerald Finley singing the great baritone aria "Batter my heart" from the end of Act I:
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