Thanksgiving Archives

Thanksgiving

November 23, 2017 By Ian Sidden

Happy Thanksgiving to any American readers, whoever and wherever you are.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American loved ones and readers. We obviously don’t have the holiday in Germany, so I’ll be spending this evening at the Generalprobe (final dress) for Roxy und ihr Wunderteam, which opens this Saturday. I’ll eat a big lunch though and consider all the things for which I’m thankful.

If you do have a holiday today, I hope it’s warm and fun.

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 25, 2010 By Ian Sidden

Right now, it is 39 degrees here in Pennsylvania, and the forecast calls for sleet (actually it just started snowing). Fun!

So this will be a relaxed and mostly indoors Thanksgiving. Rebekah and I had been thinking of taking a drive around the area to explore, but that’s out (my pickup is terrible with weather). So I suppose we’ll make the place look nice and eat a simple dinner. We had our main Thanksgiving dinner last Saturday with my dad and my good friend Jon, so I don’t feel much compulsion to make an ornate feast.

Yet Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s a day to remember to be grateful for what we have and the people who fill our lives with happiness. This remembrance can be as large or as small as we like and can be religious or secular, but that act of remembering and being grateful is what’s important. It’s powerful. Hopefully, we remember throughout the year, but if we start taking life for granted then there’s Thanksgiving to remind us.

Great holiday.

Thanks for reading. I hope you have or had a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Photo by Felixco, Inc. / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Premiere: Fernand Cortez

Tonight we premiere our production of Gaspare Spontini’s Fernand Cortez, ou La conquête du Mexique at Opernhaus Dortmund. This is after a two year delay; originally we were to have premiered this in 2020, but history intervened. There are many versions of this opera floating around, and we are doing a version that has – […]

Premiere: Frédégonde

Here’s one I’ve been looking forward to for awhile. Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering Frédegonde for the first time in Germany. It’s a work inspired from the early history of the Merovingians in what is now France and the ongoing feud between two of the queens, Brunhild and Frédegonde. The work was composed by […]

“Ständchen” by Schubert, Guitar and Voice Arrangement

Here is a performance of my self accompanied guitar arrangement of Franz Schubert’s “Ständchen”.

PREMIERE: Tosca

Tonight at Opernhaus Dortmund, we’re premiering our “Tosca”, which is the first premiere including the chorus since March 13, 2020.

One Year Later

On March 13, 2020, we had our last large premiere at Theater Dortmund with the chorus onstage. We performed “Die Stumme von Portici” to a nearly empty auditorium, a so-called Geisterpremiere. We nevertheless, of course, gave it our all. There have been other premieres since then as the lockdowns have come and gone, but so […]