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'Let Me Die' to premiere at Opera Philadelphia's annual fest

PHILADELPHIA — There’s a lot of dying in Joseph Keckler’s performance piece premiering at Opera Philadelphia’s third annual festival. In fact there’s little else.

Keckler has put together a compilation of his favourite operatic death scenes — from “Aida” to “Madame Butterfly” to “Romeo and Juliet” — for a rapid-fire 80-minute show. He says he thought it would be interesting to “put all these deaths together, since it’s the event that people wait for in opera.”

He is calling his show “Let Me Die.”

The festival also offers the world premiere of “Denis and Katya” by Philip Venables and Ted Huffman, as well as Handel’s “Semele” and Prokofiev’s “The Love for Three Oranges.” It opens September 18 and runs through September 29.

The Associated Press