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

SATURDAY Mitridate (Mozart)
— Learn more at WQXR.com

SATURDAY Idomeneo (Mozart)
— Learn more at NPR

SUNDAY

Olli Kortekangas - "Messenius and Lucia"
Jukka Linkola - "The Journey"

— Learn more at Sunday Morning Opera with Sandy Steiglitz.

[This season at the Met, Renée Fleming will sing two of her favorite roles - Thaïs and Rusalka - and star in the company's opening-night gala. America's favorite soprano talks to F. PAUL DRISCOLL about the year she calls "one of the high points of my career."]
When OPERA NEWS visited Renée Fleming at her Manhattan home in early May, she looked cool and relaxed despite the demands of a schedule that would fell most of the rest of us: her previous ten days had been crammed with recording sessions in Munich, singing "Over the Rainbow" at a party at Buckingham Palace hosted by Prince Charles and headlining a gala in Montreal.
— Read more at Opera News

DEEP IN the womb of the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, a famous novelist is giving a world-class mezzo-soprano a piece of her mind. Dressed in loose-fitting black pants and a matching T-shirt, lots of heavy, silver jewelry and eccentric-looking orthotic sneakers, Amy Tan makes explosive, diagonal slicing movements with her arms. "My mother used to do this," says Tan, tapping into her past. "Now you try."
Charged with playing the role of the mother figure, LuLing Liu Young, in San Francisco Opera's adaptation of Tan's 2001 novel "The Bonesetter's Daughter," which will have its world premiere here Saturday, the glamorous Chinese opera singer Ning Liang nods her head.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

In his New York City apartment, Placido Domingo keeps a small embroidered pillow that proclaims: "If I rest I rust." It certainly is the right motto for the globe-trotting tenor's nonstop lifestyle.
One moment Domingo was in Beijing performing before thousands at the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games. Seemingly the next, even before the torch had time to cool, he was onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to discuss the opening of Los Angeles Opera's 23rd season.
— Read more at Press-Telegram

Deborah Voigt takes on the title role in Ponchielli's grand, passionate drama, La Gioconda, for the first time in the United States and only the second time in her career. She is joined by Olga Borodina as her rival, Laura, and, in the role of La Cieca, Polish contralto Ewa Podles, who returns to the Met for the first time since 1984. The cast also includes Aquiles Machado as Enzo, Carlo Guelfi as Barnaba, and, in his Met debut, Orlin Anastassov as Alvise. Conductor Daniele Callegari makes his Met debut. Performances run from September 24 through October 9, 2009.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Renée Fleming will will be joined by Ramón Vargas, Thomas Hampson, Dwayne Croft and others for the Sept. 22 Opening Night Gala that kicks off the Met's 125th Anniversary Season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Soprano Karita Mattila, who electrified Met audiences in the title role of Richard Strauss's Salome in 2004, returns as the voluptuous Judean princess this season, beginning September 23. Two of her fellow Finns are making their company debuts: Juha Uusitalo as Jochanaan (John the Baptist) and Mikko Franck, who will conduct. The cast also includes Ildikó Komlósi as Herodias, Kim Begley in the role of Herod and Joseph Kaiser as Narraboth. Performances run through October 16. The matinee on Saturday, October 11, will be transmitted live worldwide as part of the The Met: Live in HD series.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

For those who mourned the demise of the Washington National Opera's opening-night simulcast on the Mall, the company has come through with a walk-off home run.
On Sept. 13 at 7 p.m., a live broadcast of "La Traviata" will be screened not to the Mall, but to Nationals Park. When the stadium opened in late March, much was made of the state-of-the-art Jumbotron; now, that screen will be used to air Violetta's death. If only they could use instant replay.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

[This season, superstar soprano Renée Fleming claims the city as her own, rocking the Met and appearing on the side of a bus near you.]
Taking Renée Fleming for granted is far too easy. We should know; we've been doing it for years. A prominent lyric soprano for more than two decades, Fleming, 49, has been a creative force at the Metropolitan Opera since the mid-'90s. She is without question the reigning American opera singer worldwide, and one of the few to attain a broader general appeal. At a time when the memory of Beverly Sills guest-hosting The Tonight Show verges on the surreal, Fleming sings on Letterman, and Daniel Boulud has named a dessert after her.
— Read more at Time Out New York

The Washington National Opera naturally wants to increase the audience for opera in the nation's capital. To that end, its last couple seasons have featured a free simulcast of one of its productions via an immense screen on the National Mall. Large crowds have shown up, with better or worse results depending on the weather. This year, the company has just announced, it will slightly modify this program, by offering its free broadcast to crowds in Nationals Park, in imitation of a similar initiative at San Francisco Opera.
— Read more at DCist.com

"The Fly is an opera for the 21st century," says composer Howard Shore, referring to his newest work, which has its American premiere Sept. 7 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as part of LA Opera's 2008-2009 season.
Shore spoke from Paris, where LA Opera's partner, Theatre du Chatelet, debuted the two-hour work on July 2. He is now in Los Angeles, working alongside conductor Placido Domingo and director David Cronenberg to rehearse The Fly for its six performances
— Read more at filmmusicsociety.org

[No honking and screaming for Lawrence Brownlee, who has forged a major career by singing with consummate ease. JAMES C. WHITSON visits with the bel canto stylist extraordinaire.]
As I recall a recent "shock and awe" assault on the role of Cavaradossi, Lawrence Brownlee shakes his head. My impersonation of the tenor bracing for a great bellowing "Vittoria!" draws a chuckle. "He was amping up," he ruefully observes.
— Read more at Opera News

The guard has changed in Valhalla.
Two half-sisters, great-granddaughters of Richard Wagner, will jointly take the reins of the Bayreuth Festival dedicated to his music, officials announced on Monday, dashing an effort by a rival family branch working in concert with Gerard Mortier, the general director of New York City Opera.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

A little more than 15 years ago, Maestro Raymond Harvey got a call from a friend who asked him to conduct an opera for a small company in El Paso.
A California resident at the time, he tried to find information about the company only to learn there were no listings for it anywhere.
— Read more at El Paso Times

OPERA fans won't have to travel to London for the opening night of the Royal Opera House's 2008/2009 season because the Vue Cinema in Plymouth will be screening the production live from Covent Garden.
It's the first live opera presentation from Vue Entertainment, and the Barbican Leisure Park venue is one of 25 Vue cinemas in the UK to screen Don Giovanni live next Monday, September 8, at 6.45pm.
— Read more at thisisplymouth.co.uk

ON a steamy evening in early July six musicians - four Beijing opera percussionists, a player of the double-reed instrument called the suona and a rock singer who also plays suona - paused while rehearsing in a studio at the China National Beijing Opera Company here.
The music for "The Bonesetter's Daughter," a new opera based on Amy Tan's best-selling 2001 novel, lay open before them, but the composer, Stewart Wallace, was cheerfully encouraging the musicians to deviate from the score.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

[Wolfgang Wagner has bid farewell to the Bayreuth opera festival in Germany after 57 years at the helm.]
The 88-year-old blinked back tears as the annual music festival, founded by his grandfather - composer Richard Wagner, came to a close on Thursday.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Rufus Wainwright's first opera, Prima Donna, will not be performed at the Metropolitan Opera as expected. The New York opera company had commissioned Wainwright to create a work that would "appeal to the largest possible American audience," reports the Los Angeles Times. Prima Donna, however, is completely in French.
— Read more at Advocate.com

The Bayreuth Festival's ruling body was to pick Monday which of Richard Wagner's descendants will run the annual summer fest devoted to his music in the latest act of a bitter, decades-long family saga.
The festival was founded by the composer in 1876, and for the past 57 years it has been run with an iron fist by his grandson Wolfgang Wagner, 42 of them in sole charge.
— Read more at AFP

Japan's Kazushi Ono on Monday officially took up his new position as principal conductor of the Opera de Lyon, the opera house in the southeastern French city said.
— Read more at AFP

The Opera Company of North Carolina has hired Timothy Myers to serve as its principal conductor and artistic advisor.
Myers will spend 14 weeks in Raleigh during the 2008-09 performance season and will conduct the Opera Company's productions of I Pagliacci, Cenerentola and Rigoletto.
— Read more at Philanthropy Journal

At first glance the stylized movements of the group of adults and teenagers attached to one another's wrists with long crepe ribbons seemed to be some kind of avant-garde twilight tai chi. But these exercises on the Red Hook Marine Terminal docks in Brooklyn, against a striking backdrop of Governors Island and the Manhattan skyline, were part of preparations last week for the Vertical Player Repertory production of Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann." It opens on Friday in this picturesque outdoor spot.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Metropolitan Opera opens its 2008-09 season on September 22 with a gala performance that kicks off its 125th anniversary, starring Renée Fleming in three fully-staged scenes, including some of her most acclaimed portrayals. Costumes for Fleming have been specially created for each of the scenes in the Opening Night Gala by three of the world's legendary fashion designers: John Galliano, Christian Lacroix, and Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Cleveland Museum of Art is going operatic.
It will screen five admired opera films in September, starting with Ingmar Bergman's seminal 1975 version of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
— Read more at Cleveland.com

The other glittery slipper will drop when glamour diva Angela Gheorghiu makes her Bay Area recital debut at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley on Sept. 6.
The superstar soprano, 42, first stepped foot onstage here last fall, making her local operatic debut as Magda in San Francisco Opera's production of Puccini's "La Rondine." While the production itself was not the highlight of the S.F. Opera season, Gheorghiu's performance itself drew loud shouts of "Brava!" from audiences and a string of superlatives ("radiant," "lustrous," "flawless") from critics.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

FORTY-THREE YEARS ago, an opera company was born in Westfield, N.J. Dedicated to grand opera, the group quickly became designated the official New Jersey opera company by the state legislature.
For four decades, Alfredo Silipigni led the New Jersey State Opera, winning international accolades and speeding the careers of young stars, including Placido Domingo.
— Read more at Asbury Park Press

American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato goes from strength to strength as an artist. In the last couple of years she's sung a total of seven new roles, including Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Paris Bastille, the title part in Massenet's Cendrillon in Santa Fe, Octavian in San Francisco, Handel's Ariodante in Geneva, the composer in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos in Madrid and the title role in Handel's Alcina in Milan. In this wide range of repertoire in houses all over the world, DiDonato has won critical praise and an increasingly large fan base.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

It's perhaps not surprising given the metamorphic theme of David Cronenberg's 1986 film "The Fly" (a remake of the 1958 original) that the story has recently been transformed into an entirely different art form: the opera.
After opening in Paris to mixed reviews, "The Fly" has flown into Los Angeles, where it opens Sept. 7 for six performances.
— Read more at jam.canoe.ca

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has dropped plans to write an opera for the Metropolitan Opera after the New York opera company rejected his plan to write it in French.
The Montreal-raised Wainwright has written most of the libretto for Prima Donna in French and says the language fits too well with the music to change it at this point.
— Read more at cbc.ca

Longtime Annapolis sailor Jason Stearns sailed into his debut role as that most famous sailor - Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman - at the prestigious summer opera festival in Savonlinna, Finland, last month.
Back home, the veteran opera singer recounted the rigors of performing in the Olavinlinna Castle, a 15th-century fortress.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

The 16th annual Bel Canto recital will be held Sunday, Sept. 7 at the Martin Lipscomb Performing Arts Center.
Baritone John Packard has been added to the lineup. A prominent contemporary performer, he has been characterized as a charismatic young "rich-voiced" baritone.
— Read more at MaconNews.com

The Cleveland Museum of Art is going operatic. It will screen five admired opera films in September, starting with Ingmar Bergman's seminal 1975 version of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
The Bergman film, which features baritone Hakan Hagegard as Papageno, will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5 and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 7. The work is sung in Swedish.
— Read more at cleveland.com