Portland Opera's 2017 season on the theme of "Great Love" has great variety in that its music spans five centuries.
The company's second four-production spring/summer season in Keller Auditorium and the Newmark Theatre will be preceded by a February production in the Hampton Opera Center, the first of a "Winter Vino e Voce" series. Plus, in April, the company revives its "Big Night" concert.
The lineup (dates are 2017; "m" denotes a matinee):
SONGS OF LOVE AND WAR (Feb. 17, 19m, 21, 23, 25, Hampton Opera Center): All his life Monteverdi wrote madrigals, nine books of them, many of them virtually operatic scenes. Madrigals from the last three books (published 1619, 1638, 1651) will be staged in the intimacy of a 250-seat space.
BIG NIGHT (April 8, Keller Auditorium): Operatic selections by Mozart, Wagner, Verdi and Puccini, plus Broadway tunes are promised.
LA BOHEME (May 5, 7m, 11, 13, Keller Auditorium): Four young artists and the women that two of them love wrestle with romance, poverty, cold and consumption amid the glow of warm friendship and Puccinian lyricism in the 1896 tear-jerker that is possibly the most beloved opera of all.
MAN OF LA MANCHA (June 9, 11m, 15, 17, Keller Auditorium): Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ride and impossibly dream again in Mitch Leigh's 1964 musical, structured as a play-within-a-play, performed by Cervantes and other prisoners as they await a hearing during the Spanish Inquisition.
COSI FAN TUTTE (July 14, 16m, 20, 22, 26, 29, Newmark Theatre): Mozart's classic comic opera of 1790 challenges cherished illusions about romantic love. An older man bets two young men engaged to two sisters that he can prove their fiancees unfaithful. He has the men pretend to go off to war, return in disguise and woo each other's girl.
THE DIFFICULTY OF CROSSING A FIELD and THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL PASSION (July 28, 30m, Aug. 3, 5, Newmark Theatre): An Ambrose Bierce story of a man's disappearance and a Hans Christian Andersen tale of a girl who sells matches in the cold are the basis of David Lang's sparsely scored 2002 and 2007 musical-theater pieces. For the latter, Lang won a Pulitzer. The pairing is billed as a West Coast premiere.
-- Mark Mandel, for The Oregonian/OregonLive