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

No one has ever known for sure what fate Mozart and his librettist intended for the two couples in his comic opera Cosi fan tutte.
Everyone's happy at the end, but does Ferrando end up with his original lover, Dorabella, and Guglielmo with his sweetheart, Fiordiligi Or, after following the advice of the men's scheming friend Alfonso, do the men trick the sisters into falling permanently for each other's fiance? Beacon Journal

Six of Opera Australia's seven productions in the State Theatre next year will be new to Melbourne, with three receiving their national premieres.
— Read more at theage.com.au

Going to this performance was rather like dropping into a German or Italian production in some provincial city, where there is nothing specially distinctive about any of the participants, yet somehow the whole performance wins through.
— Read more at FT.com

The annual Richard Wagner Festival, which turns this otherwise sleepy provincial little town every year into a center of pilgrimage for tens of thousands of opera aficionados, has strict rules of etiquette which set it apart from other summer music festivals.
Here are some of the do's and don'ts for those who don't want to embarrass themselves on their first visit to Bayreuth.
— Read more at Taipei Times

Proposals for 88 redundancies at Scottish Opera have been attacked by one of the nation's most famous artistic figures.
Composer Peter Maxwell Davies condemned the package of job cuts just days after the Opera's Chair, Duncan McGhie, announced his intention to stand down next March.
— Read more at BECTU News

Like the Beatles song, Perry Lorenzo is here, there and everywhere.
The popular Seattle Opera education director has zoomed around the world as a speaker on general musical issues, and a zealot for opera in particular. Articulate, witty, great with kids and unpretentious, Lorenzo switches into high gear whenever a new Seattle Opera production is looming on the horizon.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

SIX rave reviews in three national broadsheet newspapers of operas by Rossini and Handel is not bad going, and Buxton Festival has achieved that this year.
Rossini's The Turk in Italy may not contain familiar tunes, but with an amusing and tight production by Giles Havergal, and zippy conducting by Wyn Davies, it proved to be a very entertaining evening in the gilt laden Frank Matcham Opera House.
— Read more at CheshireOnline

The Art of Great Singing with Fadel Friedlander-Fulkerson - Fadel brings you classic recordings by the world's greatest singers. On tonight's show, she explores the greatest available recordings of Bizet's popular opera, "Carmen." Includes performances by Rise Stevens, Placido Domingo, Lawrence Tibbett and many, many others. Sunday 8 PM - 9 PM EST
— Learn more at WUOL

In many quarters opera still maintains an image as genteel and civilized entertainment, but that stereotype was long ago jettisoned in this thrill-seeking city. Directors here, it seems, seldom meet an opera that a little sex and over-the-top violence can't fix.
— Read more at The New York Times

In a quarter of a century years Opera Cabaret of Endicott has certainly grown and so has its roster of accomplished opera singers. Opera Cabaret, which will perform its 172nd show, Those Lazy, Hazy , Crazy, Days of Summer, this weekend, offers an evening unlike any other. It's a casual night out at the Sons of Italy in Endicott with a show that combines lighthearted comic songs, Italian art and folk songs, Broadway tunes and, of course, opera, performed by persons ranging from the sincere or the semi-professional to professional singers, some of whom earn $1,000 or more a night to sing in other communities but who happen to live in Greater Binghamton.
— Read more at pressconnects.com

NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Placido Domingo, general director of the Washington National Opera, about the life and work of conductor Carlos Kleiber, who died last week. Kleiber was known both for his eclectic performances and his independence -- he never signed on with a company, but rather guest-conducted as he pleased.
— Read more at NPR

TWENTY-SIX years ago a local cafe and restaurant piano player had an idea: Translate the librettos of famous foreign language operas into English and present them in intimate, bare-staged venues.
Did that work? It sure did. And soon it acquired a name: Pocket Opera.
— Read more at Alameda Times-Star

Of the many things you can do with (and to) opera, there is "updating," spoofing, and producing a work really well. Then, there is David Scott Marley.
His 1996 adaptation of Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, now revived at Berkeley Opera in a sparkling production, transcends a single approach. Bat Out of Hell switches the action from 19th century Paris to dot-com-era Berkeley. Marley souses the work in comedy, irony, satire, and good-natured humor; and--most importantly--he makes almost all of it work as a whole.
— Read more at Berkeley Daily Planet

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and his cohort of female bodyguards are to take center stage in an opera commissioned by one of Britain's leading companies.
The opera is tentatively scheduled for February 2006, the English National Opera said Thursday.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Cincinnati Opera got lucky last summer with soprano Catherine Malfitano.
The renowned singing actress, one of the most versatile in the business with more than 60 roles to her credit, took on a mythological monster (William Bolcom's "Medusa"), a jilted woman (Poulenc's "La Voix Humaine") and the world's vices (Weill's "The Seven Deadly Sins") all in one evening. In the first two, she was the only character. It was a triple-header long to be remembered at Music Hall.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

AARON COPLAND thought that opera was like an addiction. Composers were either hopelessly drawn to this problematic genre, which he called "la forme fatale," or chronically ambivalent about it.
Leading the Italian division of the hopelessly hooked were Verdi and Puccini. It's hard to imagine their writing anything but opera.
— Read more at The New York Times

This opera by Durham-born composer Will Todd, to a libretto by long-time collaborator Ben Dunwell, gets its world premiere at Buxton Opera House at the weekend.
But it was fitting that this preview performance was staged in Durham. A bleak footnote in its history is that a young pitman, Will Jobling, was hanged there in the 1830s after being wrongly accused of murder.
— Read more at icnewcastle.icnetwork.co.uk

Like dainty foreigners in a western descending the stagecoach into the wilds of frontier America, two French operas are on display here in Central City.
In this narrow valley of used-up gold mines, the Wild West is no more: bullets do not fly, rather quarters. Central City and the adjacent Black Hawk are low-stakes casino towns ($5 minimums, if you please). Behind the cowboy-Victorian facades and plate glass windows of what were once hardware stores or dry goods emporiums one detects the electric glow of slot machines.
— Read more at The New York Times

8 PM - 9 PM EST - "The Art of Great Singing with Fadel Friedlander-Fulkerson" - Fadel brings you classic recordings by the world's greatest singers. On tonight's show, she explores the greatest available recordings of Verdi's grand opera, "Aida." Includes performances by Richard Tucker, Renata Tebaldi, Jussi Bjorling, Leontyne Price and others.
— Learn more at WUOL

In recent seasons, Central City Opera has scored triumphs with productions of such operas as "Summer and Smoke" and "Gloriana," which were probably unfamiliar to all but a handful of attendees. In each case, the company made a powerful case for the reappraisal and revival of these undervalued works. Now it has done the same for "Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame (The Juggler of Notre Dame)."
— Read more at DenverPost.com

1:30 PM: EST "Saturday Afternoon Opera" - Dean Haynes continues as host for this season of classic operatic recordings. This week, Verdi's "Rigoletto," features Sherrill Milnes in the title role. Also stars Joan Sutherland as Gilda, Luciano Pavarotti as the Duke, and Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess. Richard Bonynge conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and Ambrosian Opera Chorus. Truly a classic!
— Learn more at WUOL

A handwritten copy of the original score for Jacques Offenbach's last opera, "The Tales of Hoffman" - thought lost in a fire - has been found in the Paris Opera's archives, opera management announced Thursday.
— Read more at expatica.com

As always, this year's Buxton Festival is centred upon its charming "period" Opera House; and as usual its operas are chosen to fit its intimate scale - no "reduced" versions of bigger pieces. Artistic director Aidan Lang's programme is ambitious nonetheless: there will be Astor Piazzolla's "tango operita" Maria de Buenos Aires, Benjamin Britten's Turn of the Screw from the English Touring Opera, and the premiere of Will Todd's polemical The Blackened Man (about 19th century colliery workers), second prize winner in the 2000 Verdi Competition for Lyric Opera.
— Read more at FT.com

You won't hear pounding rock rhythms in Utah Festival Opera Company's musical productions. The tunes in Saturday night's performance of Lerner and Loewe's "Brigadoon" may appeal more readily to the Lawrence Welk crowd than the "me" generation.
— Read more at The Salt Lake Tribune

"A LITTLE NIGHT Music,'' the Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler musical that opened an extended run at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Saturday night is just the kind of light, bright, comic and serious fare that is sure to attract a new audience to Los Angeles Opera productions.
— Read more at San Bernardino County Sun

For a generation raised on Disney, "La Cenerentola" (Cinderella) is something of a shock -- no fairy godmother, no pumpkin turned into a coach and no glass slipper. Most of the magical fantasy is deleted, but in its place is Gioacchino Rossini's delightful music and comedy at every turn.
— Read more at The Salt Lake Tribune

WELSH National Opera's summer season opens at North Wales Theatre and offers three passionate but tragic ladies of opera.
The programme opens on Tuesday July 13 with an elegantly stylish new production of Verdi's La Traviata directed by celebrated duo, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser.
— Read more at icnorthwales.icnetwork.co.uk

Michael Ballam stepped into the spotlight last night to welcome the audience to the Utah Festival Opera's 12th season.
Ballam started the company in 1993 as the general director, and the festival has already made its way to the top of Money Magazine's list of summer opera companies.
— Read more at BYU NewsNet

Like the lascivious Don in Mozart's "Don Giovanni," an opera orchestra is consigned to the pit.
But not for its sins.
The space beneath the stage is the orchestra's address in the opera universe. Being there has its rewards and its challenges, said conductor Xian Zhang and members of the Cincinnati Symphony, who perform in Cincinnati Opera's "Don Giovanni" at 8 p.m. tonight, Saturday and again on July 16 at Music Hall.
— Read more at cincypost.com

You may run out of patience before Gilbert & Sullivan's "Patience" ends, but stick around for the second act at Glimmerglass Opera because the light opera gets better and better.
Perhaps it is the difference in times, with Gilbert's words losing some meaning to an American and modern audience, but the satire of late 20th century poets and artists -- including Oscar Wilde and James McNeil Whistler -- and their worshippers is mired down in the long first act.
— Read more at uticaod.com

A planned performance by the English National Opera in London's Trafalgar Square has been called off because of storms sweeping southern England.
— Read more at reuters.co.uk

Milan's La Scala opera house will reopen temporarily in December after an ambitious three-year restoration, officials said Wednesday. After a few weeks of performances, the company will return until April to its temporary home, the Teatro degli Arcimboldi, while workers test new set-changing machinery, La Scala superintendent Carlo Fontana said Wednesday.
— Read more at Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The opera isn't over until the accountants sing -- and at yesterday's annual meeting, that tune went right down to the wire as Seattle Opera administrators struggled to balance the hefty, $20.7 million 2003-04 budget
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Alban Berg's expressionistic masterpiece "Lulu" is a shattering work about the quintessential femme fatale, her mysterious charms, her litany of victims and her ultimate destruction in a world whose rules and hypocrisies she could never suffer. The score brims with the kind of lush and ravishing 12-tone music that only Berg could write, but he left it unfinished at his death in 1935.
— Read more at The New York Times

As Wagner-loving cities go, this one ranks up there. The world premieres of four Wagner operas took place here between 1865 and 1870, including a triumphant first performance of "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg." That opera has since become a local favorite, and the Bavarian State Opera has made the work an annual tradition at its popular summer festival.
— Read more at The New York Times

There are things most people don't know about Stephen Sondheim's extraordinary musical, "A Little Night Music."
For instance, the name of the film by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman that suggested the story to Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler. (It is Smiles of a Summer Night.") Or that Sondheim's best-known song, "Send in the Clowns," the staple of cabaret performers the world over, originated in this show and is, in context, a very different song than it usually becomes all alone.
— Read more at Redlands Daily

Rakhmaninov and Puccini are not Glyndebourne composers. Rakhmaninov wrote no full-length operas; Puccini has traditionally been viewed with a sneer. But with this double-bill, built on the theme of greed and its perils, both composers feel at home
— Read more at FT.com

In January 2003, just 18 months into her tenure as the general director of the San Francisco Opera, Pamela Rosenberg had to grapple with a budget deficit of over $7 million and the worst economic contraction in the Bay Area in 40 years.
She had been recruited from the Stuttgart Opera in Germany, where she had built an international reputation for championing neglected contemporary fare, like Luigi Nono's cutting-edge "Intolleranza," and commissioning new works.
— Read more at The New York Times