Today's Opera News -- Metropolitan Opera Schedule -- AllAboutOpera.com

Declarations of independence don't get much more enchanting than the personal jaunt - odyssey would be too strong a word - taken by the title character of Britten's chamber opera "Albert Herring." Within one night, with the help of plenty of liquor and some scrupulously unspecified erotic companionship, the repressed young grocer snips his mother's apron strings and emerges, finally, as his own man.
— Read more at sfgate.com

When Opera Holland Park launched in 1996 there was no declared intention to strike out into uncharted artistic territory - but there was a very distinct desire to do something different. In our second year in existence, a conversation in the office led us to a CD of Mascagni's Iris, an oriental schlockhorror opera.
— Read more at This is London

It is everybody's right to fall in love with bad opera. August Everding, the late stage director and a leading light of the German theater world, who was responsible for plenty of bad opera in his day, said this to me many years ago. He was offering support for the provincial opera houses in German cities like Pforzheim or Passau, where people outside metropolitan centers have a chance to experience live opera for themselves.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

True story: After catching Sunday's matinee opening of the Summer Opera Theatre Company's eminently enjoyable "Carmen" in Washington's Harman Center for the Arts, my wife and I had dinner at a downtown restaurant.
Later, as we were leaving, a twentysomething hostess asked what we had just seen. Eyeing our programs, she answered her own question. "Eew, opera. I don't like opera."
— Read more at Washington Times

If you couldn't get to the New York Metropolitan Opera, and missed the broadcasts in cinemas, never fear.
EMI is to issue six recent live opera performances from the Metropolitan Opera - Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, Verdi's Macbeth, Tan Dun's The First Emperor, Puccini's La boheme and Manon Lescaut, and Britten's Peter Grimes. Each was filmed in high-definition, has been screened at cinemas worldwide and features Met celebrities conducting interviews backstage. Many also contain other bonus features.
— Read more at Gramophone

Although Santa Fe Opera generally holds the lead in presenting contemporary opera to American audiences, it has been playing catch-up with the major Britten operas. The company finally staged Peter Grimes in 2005 (the production by Paul Curran will come to Washington National Opera this season) and, as we expected, takes up Billy Budd this summer. The Francesca Zambello production from Washington National Opera in 2004 was a blockbuster, but Santa Fe has turned again to Paul Curran for this new production. Whatever else the staging has in store, the company has notified its outdoor theater's neighbors that three cannon shots are fired during the performance.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

If part of the aim of free, informal outdoor concerts is to lure new listeners to a genre, the New York Grand Opera Company's enjoyable performance of Verdi's "Traviata" on Wednesday surely won a few new devotees.
The amplified, fully staged performance at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park was conducted by Vincent La Selva, the Grand Opera's indefatigable artistic director, who founded the company in 1973. A Verdi specialist, Mr. La Selva staged productions of all 28 of the composer's operas in chronological order from 1994 to 2001.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The opera season doesn't start for another five months. We're still in the midst of the summer doldrums, for heaven's sake.
So why were 400 opera fans packed into the Harriet Himmel Theater Tuesday night? Why, getting their booster shots, of course. After all, one can't be expected to survive an entire summer without one's Verdi.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

We've just added a new section to our site. It contains links to many of your favorite opera scores, libretti and guides. Check it out!
— Read more at AllAboutOpera.com

A weekend in Santa Fe was a cultural delight - highlighted by two superb opera performances by the Santa Fe Opera company.
Large, lecherous, greedy, incorrigible and comical, Sir John Falstaff, playing the buffoon in Verdi's "Falstaff," gets his comeuppance in the end.
— Read more at El Paso Times

It's opera on a grand scale -- times three.
Hours before Opera New Jersey opens its summer season at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center, interns in the costume shop are hem ming and pressing for that night's performance of "La Traviata," while onstage some 40 singers and dancers are sweating their way through the first tech rehearsal for "The Merry Widow."
— Read more at NJ.com

Europeans call it Regietheater, or director's theatre. Americans call it Eurotrash. It's a matter of priorities and perspectives.
Once upon a time, opera performances were essentially about singing. Scenery was something decorative in the background. A tree looked like a tree. If it was wrinkled or faded, no one cared as long as the tenor sounded loud and the soprano sounded sweet. Drama became part of the equation only if the singer on duty happened to care about acting. The stage director was a traffic cop, often anonymous.
— Read more at FT.com

The Sarasota Opera has canceled a world premiere for the Sarasota Youth Opera planned for next year because the composer is unable to complete it in time.
Noted composer Ned Rorem was commissioned to write the music for "Little Nemo," based on Winsor McCay's comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," which appeared in newspapers in the early 20th century.
— Read more at HeraldTribune.com

After all his years in the business -- the acting classes, the academic degrees, the bit parts in small productions and the bigger roles in bigger shows, the highs and the lows, the yeses and the nos, the disappointments and the triumphs and the accolades -- the burning career question of the moment for Lawrence Redmond is this:
Can he be a Jerry Springer for the ages?
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

It was the kind of story handed down from generation to generation. Johannes Rath remembers hearing it told, over and over, when he was growing up in an apartment above the family's workshop in Vienna in the 1980s.
The story was that the first ovation in the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center erupted when the chandeliers rose toward the ceiling on opening night, Sept. 16, 1966.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Smaller opera companies try to mix their offerings between the unusual fare that keeps things lively and the tried-and-true repertoire that brings subscribers in. For the Festival Opera in Walnut Creek - which has largely mastered that delicate balancing act - the point of interest is coming next month, with Britten's Shakespearean charmer "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Wolf Trap Opera is in the midst of a season that, it should be said, is a wild success. After appropriately performing a concert version of Candide in the Filene Center, the company has focused on three unusual choices in the more suitable Barns, beginning with Verdi's early comedy Un Giorno di Regno, continuing this month with Handel's Alcina, and next month with Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

[Opera director Laurent Pelly talks to Rupert Christiansen about bringing his 'brutal, greedy and obese' Hänsel and Gretel to Glyndebourne]
Laurent Pelly suddenly looks very solemn when I half-jokingly ask him if he is someone unusually in touch with that popular psychobabble phenomenon, the inner child. "This is something very important if you work in the theatre. It's about understanding the double meaning of the word 'play'; it's about feeling joy, too."
— Read more at Telegraph

The brother of conductor James Levine says the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera music director has had surgery in New York to remove a kidney.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Frank Matcham's masterly opera house is certainly getting a lively workout at this year's Buxton Festival. After the Teutonic whimsy of Lortzing's The Poacher on opening night, four more operatic rarities were staged on the next two evenings. True, Handel's Samson is neither rare nor an opera. But it's unlikely that this turbulent oratorio has been presented before as a gloss on modern-day Gaza, with the chorus required to quick-change from Zionist settlers into gun-toting Palestinians, and Samson portrayed as an imprisoned terrorist - a ?suicide bomber? who uses his strength as his explosive.
— Read more at Times Online

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of "Don Giovanni," he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera "La Grotta di Trofonio," premièred two years before "Don Giovanni," contains some strikingly similar demonic noises.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

For all of this community's affluence, superb venues, and ample IQ points, opera hasn't been the most dependable presence here, though this fifth season of Opera New Jersey may be a positive turning point. The opening-weekend productions of La Traviata and La Cenerentola filled the niche of quality summer opera in a congenial chamber setting more successfully than ever before.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Women of various statures and dispositions have figured prominently in opera - the strong, the weak, the resolute, the uncertain; without them, opera surely would not have evolved into the grand exercise in art that has emerged over more than 300 years.
For the opening salvo in Berkshire Opera's 24th season Friday evening at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, the company focused on some of those heroines, none of them obviously unsung.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

The composer of an opera who unsuccessfully sued the London Evening Standard for libel was declared bankrupt yesterday after failing to pay £67,000 in legal fees to the newspaper.
Keith Burstein's attempts to get a stay against the costs order made at a previous hearing by the court of appeal were rejected as he failed to convince the chief registrar, Stephen Baister, that payment should be delayed until he has a chance to take his case to the European court of human rights.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

The Metro Lyric Opera celebrated 50 years of Shore productions Saturday night without any fanfare from founder and director Era Tognoli.
Tognoli, who joins the 80-and-up club this year, was rumored to not be feeling up to speaking onstage, but was said to be in attendance behind the scenes. Regardless, her tireless influence was felt by every soul, audience and performers alike.
— Read more at Asbury Park Press

"Carmen" is not new to the Hollywood Bowl. On July 8, 1922, three days before the first season of "Symphonies Under the Stars," the Los Angeles Philharmonic, itself only 3 years old, mounted a lavish production of Bizet's opera. The cast numbered nearly 500. Massive sets of Seville surrounded the brand-new amphitheater. When soprano Marguerita Sylva, who starred, rolled into Union Station five days earlier, reporters were there to greet her as if she were a movie star. Proceeds from the performance financed the installation of the Bowl's first benches.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Taking opera to the regions is no easy task, but after a strong spring season with Don Giovanni, Susannah and Anna Bolena, English Touring Opera has now announced the two productions for its autumn tour.
Dvorak's underrated masterpiece Rusalka will be presented alongside La tragédie de Carmen, Peter Brook's revision of Bizet's Carmen.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Grand Rapids arts community will soon enjoy a new facility, for a long time group of performers.
Opera Grand Rapids is making plans for a new home. The group officially closed on a piece of property on Fulton Street on Thursday, July 10, 2008.
— Read more at wzzm13.com

Nobel literary laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott are collaborating on a new opera due to be unveiled this fall at the Globe Theatre in London.
The piece, according to the Guardian newspaper, is based on Heaney's acclaimed play The Burial at Thebes and will be set in a South American republic.
— Read more at cbc.ca

The first opera company in the history of central Appalachia will open with a comedy reminiscent of the wry and wacky humor made famous by Monty Python. Gilbert and Sullivan's famous operetta, "The Pirates of Penzance" will be presented by Highlands Light Opera in six performances throughout the region.
— Read more at The Herald-Dispatch

In Theodor Adorno's famous dictum, writing poetry "after Auschwitz" was a barbaric notion, but what about opera after the war? The genre was pronounced dead by modernists who wanted a clean break from the past. Pierre Boulez called for the destruction of all opera houses as relics of an obsolete tradition. Some went as far as implicating music itself in the great German plunge into the abyss. This bountiful well, they suspected, had been poisoned.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

It's a small world after all.
Who would have thought that folks from New Zealand, Serbia, Russia, England, China, Spain, Denmark and Vernal would all converge this summer in beautiful little Logan?
"We have eight nations represented. We truly are an international opera company this summer - and we need to be because of the works we've chosen," said Michael Ballam, founder and general director of Utah Festival Opera, which is celebrating its 16th birthday this season.
— Read more at Deseret News

Behind the world-class opera singers, impeccably designed sets and jubilant orchestra at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown is a scene audiences have yet to see up close. Frantic and chaotic, but precise, the company's backstage workhorses scurry around to move sets and lighting and change costumes and props.
— Read more at Democrat and Chronicle

When Indianapolis Opera relocates next spring to a Greek Orthodox church building on Pennsylvania Street, the move will put the company less than half a mile from its current headquarters.
But the relocation could revolutionize the opera's performances, adding edgier shows to the standards it will continue to perform at Clowes Hall.
— Read more at The Indianapolis Star