#ThrowbackThursday: Princeton at Lincoln Center

“Princeton’s young singers and musicians did very well.” So declared a New York Times reviewer in a December 1982 recap of the Princeton University Opera Theater’s sold-out performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio at Lincoln Center.

Fidelio had started out as a campus production the previous spring. The performance so impressed the Beethoven Society that it sponsored the Princeton University Opera Theater performance at Lincoln Center. Michael Pratt, who conducted the opera — and who still conducts the University Orchestra and directs the program in musical performance — was hailed by the Times as a “real hero,” displaying a “sense of just the right tempo … careful phrasing and well-planned dynamics.”

More than 30 years later, the Princeton University Opera Theater is still singing strong. In January 2014, it staged a performance of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea in Richardson Auditorium, and next January, it is slated to perform Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Jonathan Dove’s Tobias and the Angel.