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

Opera singer Robert Merrill died this weekend, at his home in New Rochelle, New York. The baritone sang with the Metropolitan Opera for over 30 years. He also helped introduce opera to a wider audience, with regular appearances on talk shows, and at Yankee Stadium, singing the national anthem. NPR's Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr has an appreciation.
— Read more at NPR

Opera, essentially a romantic art form, has inspired some of the greatest love arias of all time. When up-and-coming singers with the Seattle Opera perform Saturday night at the Everett Theatre, the audience will meet characters who are celebrating -- and struggling with -- love. The Seattle Opera's Young Artists Program picks 10 singers out of a national field of 600 applicants. For 20 weeks, the singers study, rehearse and perform across the state.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

The Philippine opera gala is in cooperation with the Music Theater Foundation of the Philippines, the UP College of Music, and the UST Conservatory of Music. The event is a part of the forthcoming "Ikatlong Tagpo: The 2003 National Theater Festival" slated in November and is presented by the CCP in cooperation with the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. Program includes: "Bakit" from Eliseo Pajaro's "Binhi ng Kalayaan;" "Kay Tamis ng Buhay," "Sisa" and "Sinong Nagpapatay" from "Noli Me Tangere;" The Mad Scene and "Napakahaba na ng Gabi" from Francisco Feliciano's La Loba Negra...
— Read more at Manila Bulletin Online

CELEBRITY names pop up so frequently in conversation with Peter Owen you almost believe the Oscar-winning wig maker to the stars really is blase about his work. His work means Peter gets Up, Close and Personal (Michelle Pfeiffer's wigs in the 1996 movie) with a veritable feast of showbiz names, creating wigs and make-up. From Tom Hanks' harrowed looks as the man dying of Aids in Philadelphia, to Sir Ian McKellen's impressive beard in the Lord of the Rings trilogy - which brought Peter the Oscar - his credits read like the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
— Read more at ic NorthWales

The Washington National Opera opened Giuseppe Verdi's classic opera "Il Trovatore," this Saturday past at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Chock-full of showy arias and, of course, the famous "Anvil Chorus," this production is distinguished by its first class cast of soloists including the District's own Denyce Graves singing the challenging role of the gypsy Azucena for the very first time (Audiences, however, can expect some cast changes after the Nov. 8 performance).
— Read more at Washington Times

Jerry Springer - The Opera is fighting for its life. And, ironically for a show which partly owes its success to a fabulous clutch of reviews, it's an entanglement with a British newspaper which, claim the producers, has brought the show to its knees. "It is on a knife-edge," a source close to the show told Playbill On-Line.
— Read more at playbill.com

WITH the budgetary constraints of recent years, West Bay Opera has opted to replace one of its three full-scale operas with a concert version, performed with a full orchestra. Last year's sparkling production of Jacques Offenbach's operetta masterpiece "La Perichole" was a success and this year it is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last opera -- actually, an operetta -- "La Clemenza di Tito." In this concert version, the singers, in modern clothing, perform in front of an onstage orchestra holding scripts, speaking the lines in English and singing the arias in the original Italian. English language translations are projected on screens during the singing.
— Read more at Alameda Times-Star

Opera singer Robert Merrill, famed for his renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner at the New York Yankees' baseball stadium, has died in New York. The baritone sang for 31 consecutive seasons with the city's Metropolitan Opera and also performed alongside Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

OperaOnline.us the one year old Internet magazine of the northeast has released its first annual "Best Of" selections for the 2003-04 opera season. "We hope to make this a regular annual feature of our publication," said OperaOnline.us founder Paul Joseph Walkowski. "Our base has been growing fast and the response to this feature has been better than we expected." Opera shouldn't be dry or uninteresting Walkowski says. "We decided to adopt an Academy Awards kind of format and look at all facets of the operas we visited and reviewed. We looked at best performances in all categories, best theater, best chorus, best directing, best costumes -- everything, and then put them all on our web site at OperaOnline.us in an atractive format, and, well, the number of hits to that article have caused us to keep it up for the full year. The readership loves it, the singers appreciate it and the opera companies are delighted to receive the attention." Walkowski, says readership of his site has steadily grown and seems to enjoy a large word of mouth "bump" every time they do a new review or write about someone in opera.
— Read more at Xtvworld.com

Those key ingredients make themselves apparent in the San Francisco Opera's latest production of the high-powered drama, yet the recipe falls a little flat. It's hard to say what exactly is missing from the classic work.
— Read more at San Francisco Examiner

The Virginia Opera has staged Giacomo Puccini's last work, "Turandot," three times in the past dozen years, but never as winningly as in the production brought to Richmond this weekend. The production is big - very big - on visual spectacle, from Barbara Mesney's monumental, spacious set to costumes by Deborah Landis and Robert Morgan and choreography by Todd Rosenlieb.
— Read more at TimesDispatch.com

At last, "Nosferatu" is indeed here. A gifted group of singers - no strangers to acting - gave "Nosferatu" the polish and panache a fine opera needs at the world premiere Friday night. Mayor Chuck Tooley graced the Alberta Bair Theater stage to proclaim "Nosferatu Day," and a glittering assemblage of celebrities and arts supporters saluted this haunting work by composer Alva Henderson and librettist Dana Gioia.
— Read more at billingsgazette.com

Today, John Baur, a professor at the University of Memphis, will stage the debut of his portrait of one the world's great social architects. And if all goes well, the production, in Memphis for a week, will travel -- possibly including a stop in Sarasota.
— Read more at Herald.com

For those who saw Robert Lepage's epic farewell to the 20th century, The Seven Rivers of Ota, at the 1998 Adelaide Festival, The Busker's Opera has been eagerly anticipated. Its narrower range and absence of high moral seriousness makes it a very different work, one that needs to be understood and enjoyed not in a lengthy progression - Ota ran for seven hours - but rather in many teasing layers.
These consist of the history of one particular popular opera, John Gay's 1728 The Beggar's Opera, including its modern version by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, The Threepenny Opera; the rigid gate-keeping of the Brecht and Weill foundations that closed a Lepage reworking of it; and a range of popular music that finds its most liberated forms in the hands of street performers and buskers.
— Read more at theage.com.au

How a brash and steamy boom-and-bust town, tied to the shifting fortunes of world oil and rooted in the blues, came to dominate American contemporary opera has long intrigued the music world. But to David Gockley, who has been running the Houston Grand Opera for 32 of its 50 years, the question is not so much how or why, but what next?
— Read more at The New York Times

THREE students hit a high note in their operatic careers when they were selected to perform at the Royal Opera House. Reigate Grammar School student Declan Hall was celebrating after playing a principal role in the opera Werther at the world-famous Covent Garden venue.
— Read more at icnetwork.co.uk

SEATTLE - Guiseppe Verdi's tuneful and tragic 'Rigoletto' is one of the top 10 in the world of opera because of its compelling story and beautiful music. Verdi's story of intrigue and violence, in which a hunchback is transformed from a scheming court jester to a tragically broken man, is told with dramatic action and a flow of gorgeous music.
— Read more at heraldnet.com

Even the most august opera houses have to keep an eye on the bottom line, and the Metropolitan Opera's should swell appreciably with this new production of Mozart's 1790 masterpiece, directed and featuring costume designs by Julie Taymor ('The Lion King'). Displaying the sort of brilliantly imaginative puppetry and staging that made 'The Lion King' one of the biggest theatrical hits of all time, this version of 'The Magic Flute' should become a Met perennial.
— Read more at Reuters.com

The Utah Opera season has opened with a production that makes a statement. It has been ten years since the company has performed this work and since audiences have heard the voice of 'Aida'. Called the grandest of all operas because of this triumphal march, rich with pageantry, movement and Verdi's memorable music, 'Aida' follows the timeless themes of a love triangle intertwined with an Egyptian/Ethiopian conflict.
— Read more at KSL News

Giuseppe Verdi's tragic opera "La Forza del Destino" arrived at Covent Garden clouded by controversy following conductor Riccardo Muti's abrupt withdrawal after a tiff over alterations in the scenery.
Covent Garden musical director Antonio Pappano had just four weeks to prepare to conduct, certainly not enough time in the estimation of two critics who roundly criticized the Royal Opera, which was staged based on the production at Milan's La Scala. A third, however, called the production a triumph over bad material.
— Read more at Dar Al Hayat

"It's mostly very clipped and formal, but parts of it have been getting increasingly, wonderfully wilder and wilder in the last few years."
William Christie is describing his famous French garden in La Vendee, which has featured in many glossy magazines -- but he could also be describing himself. American-born Christie made an enviable reputation as a rather high-minded, even severe, director of Les Arts Florissants, one of the leading early music groups, showered with international awards, particularly for their revivals of early French composers such as Lully, Charpentier and Rameau and transcendent versions of Monteverdi.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

After years of trying to get his first chamber opera off the ground, Israeli composer Ari Ben-Shabetai will finally see his dream come true, thanks to the organizers of the Seventh Annual Israeli Music Festival in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv's Fifth Tempus Fugit - International Biennial for Contemporary Music.
— Read more at jpost.com

In opera, a few notes can signify a lot. Take the opening chords of Mozart's masterpiece "Don Giovanni." Two bone-chilling strokes reveal the horrendous fate that awaits the title character at the end of the opera. They boldly declare Giovanni's haughty grandeur and insatiable lusts, and personify the supernatural forces bent on his destruction.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

LAST night at the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, Scottish Opera continued its ambitious double bill of 20th century musical drama, Bela Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Arnold Schoenberg's challenging monodrama Erwartung.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

They're calling Saturday's performance of Tales from the Beijing Opera a show for kids 5 and older but it's pretty cool for adults, too. Tales kicks off the new Rosenthal Next Generation Theatre Series, the 16-show weekend series aimed at getting kids excited about live theater.
— Read more at cincinnati.com

When South Shore Conservatory's Opera by the Bay presents a very special production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," Cohasset native Meredith Hansen Skinner will be among the cast.
Directed by Artistic Director Beth MacLeod and Associate Director Beth Canterbury, this "reduced" version of "The Marriage of Figaro" (cut from four to two hours) is the company's first foray into a major mainstream opera, and provides an opportunity for the four-year-old adult opera troupe to spread its wings and grow as an opera company. The production runs Saturday, Nov. 6 in Hingham and on Sunday, Nov. 7 in Duxbury.
— Read more at TownOnline.com

"Dialogues of the Carmelites" is a meditation on death by men on the far side of middle age, contemplating their own mortality. The story of 16 nuns guillotined by French revolutionaries in 1794 is true. Georges Bernanos, in his play 150 years later, used history to confront his own terminal cancer. Francis Poulenc, six years from his own death in 1963 and witness to the slow dying of his closest friend, took up the thread in this chaste and touching opera.
— Read more at The New York Times

An all-female opera about lesbian love in a fashion studio will launch English National Opera (ENO) artistic director Sean Doran's first full season. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is a new work about obsession and jealousy and based on a play and film of the same name by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, opera singing was an art of improvisation and ornamentation, an aspect that's been largely lost nowadays. Rebecca Evans' wondrous appearance with the Marin Symphony on Sunday night helped restore a little of that old-fashioned unpredictability
— Read more at sfgate.com

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. A Binghamton-based opera company's educational program is receiving a boost from the state -- the state of Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts has awarded a grant to the Tri-Cities Opera Company to fund a touring program that will expose children in northeast Pennsylvania to opera.
— Read more at wstm.com

THE programme credits Adrian Noble as the director of Glyndebourne's production of The Magic Flute, but it might well have just said zookeeper. For Noble's only noteworthy response to this fascinating work is to fill the stage with giant animals: to be specific, a penguin, tortoise, rooster and two cuddly lions that would plainly prefer to be swaying to Hakuna Matata than to Mozart.
Noble's apparent aim is to turn The Magic Flute into a banal pantomime, but Glyndebourne on Tour's production barely hits that misguided objective. In this limp revival (now staged by Frances Drysdale) too many crucial moments go for nothing; characters wander on and off the stage, lost in the dreary nowhere-land evoked by Anthony Ward's abstract designs.
— Read more at Times Online

Music lovers will be eagerly anticipating the coming Thursday as it is the day the Seventh Beijing Music Festival opens which will run to November 5. Raising the curtain with the opera "Romeo & Juliet" co-produced by Chinese and French artists, the three-week long festival will present 27 performances including symphony, chamber, recital, opera, folk and modern music. Yu Long, artistic director of the annual festival, says the general quality of this year's event is higher than the previous six years' with not one concert lacking top musicians. Some figures and names may add weight to his words:
— Read more at Beijing festival top-heavy with maestros

SAN FRANCISCO -- Like coffee addicts denied their caffeine, Toronto opera lovers have begun to twitch since the final curtain was lowered on the Canadian Opera Company's fall season at the Hummingbird Centre over the weekend. That is the way of all operatic flesh in Toronto, where our major company traditionally mounts a couple of operas at a time, with intervals that can stretch into months in between.
— Read more at TheStar.com

PARIS -- When Rolf Liebermann, the newly installed as boss of the Opera de Paris, tried to commission a work from Olivier Messiaen almost 30 years ago the composer resisted, feeling that he had no particular gift for theater. Messiaen finally took on the job, choosing as a subject the emotional and spiritual voyage through life of St. Francis of Assisi. The work had its premiere at the Palais Garnier in 1983, then got a second production at the Bastille in 1992, where it has just been given a third production.
— Read more at IHT

Opera Boston has chosen this relatively unfamiliar work to open its season. Director Rick Lombardo issues a warning. "This is definitely not a family show -- it is quite bawdy. 'Parisian Life' is about the life of lust and partying. It is fun, sexy, and colorful. There are two can-can sequences to enjoy watching."
— Read more at Boston.com

NEW YORK -- The star of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "The Magic Flute" didn't sing a single note. Julie Taymor, the award-winning director of Broadway's "The Lion King," received the loudest cheers following Friday night's premiere, an unusual reception from an audience that ritually boos production teams after openings.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Buoyed by strong vocal performances from three of its leads and bolstered by fine acting from the rest of the cast, Salt Marsh Opera's "The Mikado" delighted an audience of about 350 Friday at The Chorus of Westerly Performance Hall.
— Read more at TheDay.com

World-famous opera vocalist Moncerat Caballier will give a concert at the Azerbaijan State Opera and Ballet Theater on November 4. The music will be accompanied by the Azerbaijan State Symphonic Orchestra. The goal of Caballier's visit to Azerbaijan is to step up Azerbaijan's influence as one of Europe's culture-rich countries and promote academic arts, a source from the Theater said.
— Read more at BakuTODAY.net

American soprano Deborah Voigt has withdrawn from this month's Vancouver Opera production of "Der Rosenkavalier," in which she was to sing the role of the Marschallin for the first time.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

FOR a stage director, it's always good news when an opera house calls offering you a job. But you don't always get to pick which opera you're offered. Tazewell Thompson, 50, a stage director and playwright, certainly wasn't prepared for the offer that the New York City Opera and Glimmerglass Opera made him after he directed "Porgy and Bess" at City Opera in the spring of 2000.
— Read more at The New York Times

We recently received a note from the folks at Trafalgar Square Books announcing their newest publication: A Passion for Opera Learning to Love It: The Greatest Masters, Their Greatest Music by Peter Fox Smith.
— Learn more at Trafalgar Square Books

It took Moya Henderson nearly 20 years to bring her opera Lindy to the stage. It had just four performances in Sydney. "It didn't even make it down to Melbourne," says the composer flatly. "Where is it going next? Probably nowhere." Her frustration is tangible - and when you consider the battles to get a new Australian opera to the main stage, it's easy to empathise. Few survive beyond their premiere season, most vanishing into the ether after their brief moment in the sun.
— Read more at smh.com.au

Indianapolis Opera has spent most of its nearly 30-year history avoiding contemporary works. Since the company opened in 1975, 19th-century Italian favorites have ruled, particularly the dramas "La Boheme," "La Traviata," "Rigoletto" and "Madama Butterfly" -- with four productions each. The fifth local production of "The Barber of Seville," an Italian comedy, will open Friday.
— Read more at indystar.com

Julie Taymor's much-anticipated production of Mozart's The Magic Flute premieres at the Metropolitan Opera tonight. Taymor, the Tony Award-winning director of Disney's The Lion King on Broadway, is making her Met debut as director, as costume designer, and as co-puppet designer. Her staging makes use of masks, puppets, kites, stilts, and (literally) kaleidoscopic sets by set designer George Tsypin.
— Read more at Playbill

The undead. That's what "Nosferatu," the name of the opera that Rimrock Opera Company of Billings will premiere in Billings Oct. 22-23, means in Hungarian.
— Read more at Laurel Outlook

"There's boozing and bonking, stabbing and snorting," gasp the posters for English National Opera's revival of Calixto Bieito's production of Don Giovanni. Perhaps the promise of such a cornucopia of vice will lure tattooed clubbers -- or 11-year-old schoolboys -- to stampede the box office, but I doubt it somehow. Honestly, how pathetic.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

The Opera Company of North Carolina is pleased to announce a gala and concert featuring one of opera's most celebrated mezzo-sopranos. On November 12 at 7:30 PM, OCNC opens its season with Susanne Mentzer in Concert in Fletcher Opera Theater at the BTI Center for the Performing Arts. The American mezzo-soprano is a familiar face at the world's most prestigious opera houses, festivals and concert halls. Widely admired as a specialist in trouser roles, Mentzer is also known for her portrayals of classic femme fatale and ingenue roles.
— Read more at biz.yahoo.com

The fat lady has already sung for Verdi's La Traviata. Will she sing again for Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin?
Royal Opera Canada (ROC), formerly Opera Mississauga, has already cancelled a six-show run of La Traviata that was to take to the stage this weekend through Oct. 9 at the Living Arts Centre (LAC).
— Read more at Mississauga News Online

Was she or wasn't she? Licia Albanese is adamant. "Diva? Hah! I was never a diva. No, no. What does it mean? Only God makes a diva. No, just call me a plain singer with lots of expression." For almost seven decades, the opera world has begged to differ. Plain never applied to Albanese. At the mere sound of the Italian soprano's voice, listeners have reached for their handkerchiefs and their lists of superlatives.
— Read more at sfgate.com

You can always rely on Opera North to produce something a touch different. Last time round, they brought us the successful Eight Little Greats season... a collection of mini magic moments in bite-sized chunks.
— Read more at ic Newcastle

Stagecraft is often about teamwork and machinery, an illusion created by artists and props coalescing in tenuous balance. There can't be a much starker illustration of this than what has been going on at the Civic Opera House here, as the Lyric Opera of Chicago prepares to reprise its memorable production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle, in which, among other startling things, the Rhinemaidens perform on bungee cords and the Valkyries are propelled on their ride by trampolines.
— Read more at The New York Times

Seeing new or even relatively new modern opera often involves leaving Indianapolis, although operagoers don't always have to venture as far away as New York or the West Coast. This season, several companies in the Midwest and South will present late-20th- or early-21st-century operas by such well-known composers as John Adams and William Bolcom.
— Read more at indystar.com

Czech soprano Magdalena Kozena, whose affair with former City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Simon Rattle scandalised the classical music world, has been named artist of the year at the industry's answer to the Oscars. The 31-year-old opera singer won the accolade at the Gramophone Awards.
— Read more at ic Birmingham

Vancouver Opera has named Jonathan Darlington its new music director. The U.K.born former vocal coach, who has been the company's principal conductor for the past two years, is a resident of France and the music director of Germany's Duisburg Philharmonic. "Vancouver Opera has such a tradition going now, that I just want to carry on that tradition and make the music-making as good as I possibly can," Darlington told the Straight, modestly declining to elaborate on his other goals.
— Read more at Straight.com

FOUR centuries after a Florentine committee invented a new musical art form called opera, composers are still grappling with the creative conundrum they presented. That is: to produce a synthesis of drama and music in which the words would be sung in a clear and natural way.
Monteverdi rose to the challenge and wrote the first opera masterpiece, Orfeo, in 1607. Others through the intervening centuries have attempted to stay true to opera's founding principles and steer the art form back on course when they felt it was losing its way.
— Read more at The Australian

Robert Schlather, chairman of the Board of Trustees of Glimmerglass Opera, has announced that Joanne Cossa, the company's general director, has tendered her resignation due to family health concerns which have kept her from her post for much of the past month. Her resignation is effective immediately.
— Read more at CoopersTown Crier

After working his box-office magic with William Shakespeare, Sir Kenneth Branagh is turning his attention to opera. The actor and director, who brought the Bard to the masses with his stirring Henry V and the star-filled Much Ado About Nothing, is to direct and possibly star in a big-screen version of Mozart's The Magic Flute, to be made in English.
— Read more at Belfast Telegraph

There are voices at the Metropolitan Opera, and then there is The Voice.
The voice, that is, of its Saturday afternoon broadcasts, a 73-year-old offering that the Met holds up as a venerable institution in itself. The opera house said yesterday that a new announcer would take over as host of the program.
— Read more at nytimes.com