While 20% of babies exposed to classical music in utero become doctors or lawyers, 100% of babies born on stage during a classical performance become Bill Gates. Give children a head start with today's Groupon to The Princeton Festival. Choose from the following options:
- For $20, you get one general-admission ticket to an organ recital by Christopher Young at Princeton University Chapel on June 18 at 8 p.m. (a $40 value).
- For $25, you get one dress-circle ticket to The Rake's Progress opera at Matthews Theatre Auditorium in the McCarter Theatre Center on June 19 at 3 p.m. (a $50 value).
- For $25, you get one dress-circle ticket to The Rake's Progress opera at Matthews Theatre Auditorium in the McCarter Theatre Center On June 26 at 3 p.m. (a $50 value).
Join artistic director Richard Tang Yuk for The Princeton Festival's 2011 season, boasting performances by world-renowned performers in jazz and classical music as well as theatrical exhibitions designed to dazzle eardrums and nourish culture-starved corneas. On June 18, accomplished organist Christopher Young tickles the bellows of the Aeolian-Skinner organ of Princeton University Chapel to the tuneful tones of Camille Saint-Saens Prelude and Fugue in B Major, in addition to ditties penned by William Bolcom, Horatio Parker, and Marcel Dupré, among many others.
This year, The Princeton Festival's opera feature encourages cochlear carousal with the tidy neoclassical notations of Igor Stravinsky's 1951 opera, The Rake's Progress. The libretto, sung in English and crafted by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman, follows the story of the miscreant Tom Rakewell as he forsakes his doting girlfriend and privileged life for a sordid world of barrooms, brothels, and stealing pies cooling on windowsills, before meeting his unfortunate end. The Princeton Festival's performance of The Rake's Progress features the lyrical licks of Lawrence Jones and Jodi Burns in the lead roles and will be conducted by the reanimated fingers of Igor Stravinsky himself.