Manuel de Falla's La vida breve is one of those operas you've heard (or heard about) but rarely seen. It's not that staging the work is so difficult, it's just that, like many one-acts, it gets passed over because it's not a full evening long.
Enter West Bay Opera's Jose Luis Moscovich, who has ingeniously solved the problem of what to pair with the tale of a woman's abandonment by a fickle lover by skipping back a couple of centuries to the iconic operatic tale of abandonment, Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
“Thus, on the fatal banks of Nile/ Weeps the deceitful crocodile” is Dido's famous charge against Aeneas, but it could be pressed against a raft of fickle operatic men. Passion, lust, betrayal — isn't that what we're always told opera is about?