Summary: Listen to the Concert Preview! This unique program, led by James Levine and featuring casts of internationally acclaimed vocalists, presents two short 20th-century operatic masterworks in concert performances. Stravinsky wrote his Latin-language "opera-oratorio" Oedipus Rex in collaboration with the French multi-talented playwright and artist Jean Cocteau. Their choice of Latin for this austere masterpiece lends the familiar story a sense of ritual. Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle", one of a trio of stage works defining the composer's lush, brilliant, and exotic music of the 1910s, is based on Charles Perrault's dark fairy tale of Duke Bluebeard.
