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

This month, British conductor and harpsichordist Harry Bicket makes his Met debut, leading the company's first-ever production of Handel's Rodelinda, a masterwork seldom heard until recently. Bicket's first step into the Met is the culmination of hard work followed by chain reactions of luck. In 1996, Bicket was at the Glyndebourne Festival in Sussex, England, assisting William Christie in what quickly became a famous production of Theodora, Handel's oratorio of Christian sacrifice (released earlier this year by Kultur on DVD). Bicket was in heady company: his collaborators included not only Christie but director Peter Sellars, choreographer Mark Morris, Dawn Upshaw playing the title role and other impressive singers (Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, David Daniels) in principal roles, all united in a rare staging of one of Handel's most demanding works.
— Read more at Opera NewsOnline

That glittering gigastar, Dame Edna Everage, will make her Metropolitan Opera debut Dec. 31. Everage, who is currently delighting Broadway audiences in Back With a Vengeance, will be part of the Metropolitan Opera's New Year's Eve gala performance of Il Barbiere di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville). Everage will appear in the second act of the Rossini opera during the "music lesson scene." The scene, which finds Rosina and Count Almaviva in a lovers' tryst, will boast the unique vocals of Everage.
— Read more at Playbill News

George Frideric Handel's "Rodelinda" will receive its Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast premiere on Saturday, January 1, 2005, at 1:00 p.m., Eastern Time, over the Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network. The opera will be broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, and will be heard locally over radio station
— Read more at Metropolitan Opera International Radio Broadcast Information Center

San Diegans can celebrate the new year Austrian-style on Jan. 1 at the annual "Salute to Vienna" concert at Copley Symphony Hall. For the sixth year in a row, the Strauss Symphony of America will return to San Diego with an all-new program of Austrian-style New Year's music and dancing. The concert is expected to sell out.
— Read more at North County Times

MILAN - For more than 200 years, Antonio Salieri's obscure opera "Europa Riconosciuta" ("Europa Revealed") was forgotten. Before its return to La Scala this month, the opera had not been performed since the theater's inauguration in 1778, when castrati sang the leading roles. That was also long before nasty gossip, literary hyperbole and Hollywood myth helped to sink the Italian composer into musical history's footnotes as Mozart's murderer, and thrust his operas into oblivion.
— Read more at The New York Times

In a house where world premieres are rare and successful ones even rarer, I suspect the Vienna State Opera feels it must produce at least one recently composed, audience-alienating work each season, so as to say "we tried", with respect to promoting contemporary music. To this end, George Enescu's Oedipe was revived last winter in a brilliant production, magnificently sung (it returns in April 2005). This year, we have the first reprise of Alfred Schnittke's Gesualdo since its world premiere in 1995, three years before the composer's death.
— Read more at FT.com

The Lyric Opera of Chicago began life in the highest style, with Maria Callas making her American debut. Fifty years on, it is probably in better health than any other opera company in America. Almost every performance is sold out, and the budget is in the black. Admittedly, you have to go elsewhere for radical ideas about production and repertory; Matthew Epstein, the artistic director, recently left after encountering opposition to his more adventurous plans. But the Lyric has a history of being one of very few American houses--the Houston Grand Opera and the Opera Theatre of St. Louis also come to mind--where premieres are routine, and that's radical in itself. Usually, the collective genius of administration acts to stifle new opera, on the theory that audiences want only the aged, imported European product. True, if you hand out commissions to middle-of-the-road composers who prove maximally unobjectionable to the governing board, or to career academics who wouldn't know a narrative arc if it hit them in the head, you will perpetrate expensive fizzles. If, on the other hand, you hire composers who love the logic of theatre more than the sound of their own voices, you may end up with a joyous hit like William Bolcom's "A Wedding," which opened at the Lyric this month.
— Read more at The New Yorker

So how do you spell the title of this Janacek opera? This one has us stumped. Send us a note and let us know your thoughts.
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PERHAPS I'm naive, but despite the well-publicized troubles of the classical music business - contentious negotiations with players' unions at the major orchestras, shortfalls in fund-raising, cutbacks in programming - the vitality, quality and variety of performances during 2004 make me quite encouraged about the state of classical music. Take opera. In February, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, introduced Thomas Ades's ingenious adaptation of Shakespeare's "Tempest," an audacious work by a young English composer so fired by his concept that he simply did not care about practicalities.
— Read more at The New York Times

James Levine is certainly the musical man of the year, although he has led only six concerts so far as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His programs have been fresh, exciting, varied, and challenging, and the orchestra is playing on a new level with attention to detail -- and plenty of dramatic sweep. Levine's aim is not to please everybody all of the time. Certainly some members of the audience have resisted the new and demanding works on the programs; Levine is not into supplying easy listening, even in familiar pieces. On the other hand, Symphony Hall has been fuller than usual, and with an infusion both of young people and of distinguished figures in the musical community who did not make a habit of attending performances by Levine's predecessor Seiji Ozawa.
— Read more at Boston.com

SCOTTISH Opera's finances had been a source of behind-the-scenes drama for several, years but this summer its troubles took centre stage when the Scottish Executive issued its solution to the national company's soaring debts. Scottish Opera's new round of financial difficulties was revealed as it completed its award-winning Ring Cycle in August 2003. Following months of leaks about its future, the Scottish Executive announced a controversial "rescue package" on June 7.
— Read more at sundayherald.com

This was a wonderful year for singing. At the Metropolitan Opera, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila consolidated her dominance of the kind of psychologically probing roles for which movie actresses win Oscars. Her voice is spectacular -- a gleaming, powerful, rippling thing, like a horse's flank -- but what people remember is the way she makes the stage snap to attention. In the spring, Mattila slinked through Strauss' "Salome" and right out of her costume, which would have seemed an attention-getting gimmick if the public had not already been riveted on her every move. She ended the year with a completely different sort of sensation, playing Janacek's unhappy adulterous Katya Kabanova with muted muscularity.
— Read more at Newsday.com [thanks to vilaine fille]

The Juilliard School in New York City has trained some of the world's most prominent singers since opening its opera department in 1930, including Leontyne Price, Simon Estes, Renee Fleming and Audra McDonald. The school continues to attract undergraduate and graduate students pursuing specialized music educations. "By high school I had decided to go into music instead of taking the easy way out, like becoming a dentist or accountant," said tenor Ross Chitwood, 20, who grew up on a dairy farm in Sulphur, Okla. "When I walked into the lobby of Juilliard, I knew it was the right place for me."
— Read more at The New York Times

With only 20 minutes to go before the 10th annual "Comfort Ye" concert at the West Park Presbyterian Church, on the upper West Side, Lauren Flanigan found herself moving boxes filled with canned fruit and vegetables away from the piano. "This will become insane in a minute," she told volunteers, and sure enough, within minutes, the doors of the church opened and scores of people poured into the sanctuary, carrying the price of admission - cans, jars and boxes of food or blankets, coats, diapers and checks for $40.
— Read more at New York Daily News

Andrea Bocelli, the hugely popular Italian tenor, has sold more than 40 million CDs worldwide with his passionate renditions of heart-tugging ballads. Now he's turned his efforts to opera, which he wants to share with his pop fans. But critics say Bocelli doesn't have the range to tackle opera. Tom Vitale reports.
— Listen at NPR

IN what appears to be an 11th-hour bid to shore up their case for state government funding, Melbourne's two pro-am opera companies are merging. The Melbourne Opera Company and Melbourne City Opera this week announced they will merge to form VicOpera, a new company whose name bears more than a passing resemblance to that of the eight-years-dead Victoria State Opera.
— Read more at The Australian

Based on a wildly improbable premise, Franco Zeffirelli's "Callas Forever" achieves some briskly intimate entertainment on its odd terms. Basically a love note to opera diva Maria Callas, it seems soulfully targeted for the in-group that a character calls "ghastly Callas queens." Certainly the attention given to the gay tryst of Callas friend and producer Larry Kelly (Jeremy Irons) and a young painter (Jay Rodan), along with the perfume of operatic incense, supports that stereotype.
— Read more at Union-Tribune

The funeral of Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, one of the 20th Century's greatest opera stars, has taken place in her home town of San Marino. Tebaldi died at home at the age of 82 on Sunday after a period of illness. Among those attending the private ceremony in the tiny independent republic of San Marino was fellow Italian opera singer Katia Ricciarelli. A public memorial service will be held later on Wednesday in front of La Scala opera house in Milan.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Leaders of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra are divided over an investigative report that failed to assign personal blame for deceptions that turned the orchestra's acquisition of a collection of rare string instruments into an embarrassment. They also differ over just how damaging the episode will be. A report prepared by three board members and issued last week said that a committee of trustees, staff members and musicians was wrong, during the negotiations for the collection, not to have told the full board that some appraisers had valued it at far less than the donor said it was worth - and that there were doubts about some of the instruments' authenticity.
— Read more at The New York Times

The world of grand opera is abuzz. In the last two months, two of the world's most famous houses, La Scala in Milan and La Fenice in Venice, have opened after major reconstruction. London and Barcelona have new houses. The Bastille Opera in Paris has a new and daring director, Gerard Mortier, and City Opera, New York's second company, is busy seeking a new and larger home.

At the same time, almost unnoticed except among dedicated fans, New York is losing one of the oldest and best-loved facets of its opera life: after some 36 years, George Jellinek's weekly radio program, "The Vocal Scene," is going off the air. The final broadcast is tonight at 10 on WQXR-FM, where the show originated in October 1969. The first program was titled "Love in Opera." Tonight's finale will be called, appropriately enough, "Leave Taking" and will be devoted to operatic farewells and Mr. Jellinek's own.
— Read more at The New York Times

A core group of people who were once associated with the now-defunct Opera Festival of New Jersey have announced the formation of a new nonprofit company, The Princeton Festival, which will be based at Opera Festival original's home, the Allan P. Kirby Arts Center of The Lawrenceville School. Under the artistic direction of Richard Tang Yuk, a conductor on the Princeton University faculty, the Princeton Festival will make its debut July 3 with the first of four performances of Steven Sondheim's Tony Award-winning "Sweeney Todd" (1979), one of the handful of Broadway productions that appears to have successfully established itself in the operatic repertory.
— Read more at zwire.com

The search committee appointed by the San Francisco Opera board to find a successor to General Director Pamela Rosenberg has been pondering the problem throughout the fall. Now the panel is nearing the end of its deliberations, according to sources close to the search process, and could be ready to name a candidate within the coming weeks. What's riding on this decision? Only the artistic and financial health of the company for many years to come
— Read more at sfgate.com

"Opera should not only mean that we sit down and have a story told to us," British composer Michal Nyman has said. "It should concern more." In Nyman's newest opera, Man and Boy: Dada, more is less -- a scant plot played by a three-person cast in a series of vignettes to a minimalist score. The focus is on ideas, some straightforward and dramatically effective, others obscure and heavily dependent on knowing the period and characters. The result is an intriguing and yet oddly ineffective work.
— Read more at The Prague Post Online

In the last few seasons, Karita Mattila has cemented her status as the Met's indispensable soprano of the blockbuster drama. She swaggered to the rescue in "Fidelio," shimmied out of her gown in "Salome" and stubbornly survived opera's habitual sopranocide in Janacek's "Jenufa." In the revival of the composer's other paean to oppressed womanhood, "Kat'a Kabanova," her character makes the opposite decision, flinging herself out of a curdled marriage into another man's embrace, dementia and finally the river's sweet oblivion.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Welsh opera star Bryn Terfel made his debut as Wotan in the Royal Opera House's new production of Wagner's Das Rheingold on Saturday with a performance hailed by one critic as 'career-defining'. The next great Wotan has arrived. Bryn Terfel sang the role of Wagner's head god for the first time on Saturday night in the premiere of The Royal Opera's new production of Das Rheingold, a macabre staging likely to provoke controversy. With his burnished bass-baritone, impeccable diction and intense acting, he gave a memorable performance that is likely to deepen over the next decade as he performs Wotan on the world's great stages. With impeccable singing and fleet conducting by Covent Garden music director Antonio Pappano, the performance was greeted with extended applause from the sell-out crowd.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Concert performances provided some of the most electrifying opera of the year, writes Rupert Christiansen.
There were times when I despaired. The screaming point came at the Edinburgh Festival, where successive performances of Pelleas et Melisande, Il trovatore (both emanating from Hanover State Opera) and Orfeo ed Euridice (Opera North) exemplified everything that is wrong with opera today -- specifically, crassly conceptualised productions which trash the score, and the dearth of good, let alone great, singing.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

The blue-blooded Sloans of Lake Forest have just married off their son, a randy military-school cadet, to the bubbleheaded daughter of Snooks Brenner, the nouveau riche owner of a Louisville trucking company. The bride's people drip vulgarity. The groom's relatives are snooty hypocrites. It's only a matter of time before the families' dirty little secrets threaten the bonds of unholy matrimony. That was the plot outline of director Robert Altman's satiric film, A Wedding, which audiences found diffuse and chaotic when it was released in 1978. The prospects that a failed movie would succeed as an opera [A Wedding] 26 years later did not appear good
— Read more at South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Theaters, museums and opera houses are conservative by definition: they are dedicated to conserving works of art. In modern times, pieces conceived as challenges to the status quo have been inexorably folded into it. A new place of conservation, the lovely Alexander Kasser Theater at Montclair State University, opened on Oct. 7, and on Wednesday it presented the first American performance of a new opera about Kurt Schwitters, the radical conceptual artist whose collages and publications, associated with the Dada movement, are now part of the fine art canon. The opera, "Man and Boy: Dada," by Michael Nyman and Michael Hastings, had its premiere in Germany in March.
— Read more at The New York Times

When Light Opera Works (LOW) set out to search for a new artistic director earlier this year, the Evanston-based company could have gone in any number of directions. After all, for the last 24 seasons, this organization has focused on that hybrid form known as operetta -- a somewhat quaint way of saying that it produces musical theater in which the focus is on the "legitimate" voice, and in which the presence of a large, live orchestra is considered essential.
— Read more at suntimes.com

Italian soprano Renata Tebaldi, one of the great post-World War II opera divas who Arturo Toscanini said had the "voice of an angel," has died, a family friend said Sunday. She was 82. She died in the Republic of San Marino where she had moved several months ago to be close to the sea, said a family friend, who asked not to be named. Tebaldi performed in opera houses from Italy to the United States and was as admired for her dramatic stage presence as the purity of her voice. Her breakthrough came in 1946 when she auditioned in Milan for the great conductor Arturo Toscanini.
— Read more at Reuters.com

When the history of the Metropolitan Opera around the time of the millennium is written, Karita Mattila will deserve her own chapter. The Finnish soprano has in recent seasons become known for her indelible portrayals of heroines caught in emotional crisis, the latest being the title character of Leos Janacek's "Kat'a Kabanova," which she performed for the first time at the house on Friday night.
— Read more at Newsday.com

University of Chicago musicologist Philip Gossett had come in to the office early Thursday to do some photocopying for his class when he spotted a letter in his mailbox. It informed him he had won the $1.5 million Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award, an honor for which he never even knew he was being considered.
— Read more at suntimes.com

PATRICIA Ferguson, Scotland's minister for culture, has put her head above the parapet this week to boost her profile - and the profile of the arts, of course - and to improve her reviews, which have been lacklustre so far. She would like it to be known that just because she has spent part of the Scottish winter basking in the Antipodean summer as the sports bit of her portfolio demands, does not mean she is neglecting culture. As a matter of fact, she is dedicated to culture; she has been to an art gallery in Dundee, saw three -- yes, three! -- pantomimes last weekend and has even managed to squeeze in a trip to Paris.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

He is already a superstar in the world of opera, but many believe bass-baritone Bryn Terfel took a step toward greatness with his debut in Wagner's "Ring" cycle in the notoriously taxing role of Wotan. Terfel, the son of a Welsh sheep farmer, received a rapturous response at London's Covent Garden, where a radical new production of Richard Wagner's four-opera epic kicked off on Saturday with "Das Rheingold."
— Read more at Reuters.com

The struggle over virtual music between the Opera Company of Brooklyn (OCB) and the musicians' union has flared up again. CAMI Hall, located across from Carnegie Hall, cancelled OCB's fundraising sample presentation of virtual music on Tuesday night, apparently because Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians was preparing to protest the event. Local 802 opposes the company's use of virtual music, specifically Realtime Music Solutions' instrument, the Sinfonia.
— Read more at backstage.com

The Charles Simonyi Fund for Arts and Sciences, based in Seattle, announced a $1 million gift to the Metropolitan Opera's $150 million campaign to keep its Saturday broadcasts on the air. Last year, ChevronTexaco announced it was going to terminate, after 63 years, its sponsorship of the live broadcasts from New York.
— Read more at nwsource.com

BRITISH conductor Richard Hickox has moved to Sydney to take the helm of Opera Australia - but he also intends to enjoy the surf. He arrived with his family from England on Tuesday to begin his new job today as OA's music director, and has settled into an apartment in beachside Coogee.
— Read more at The Australian

Richard Hickox barely had time to adjust to the time difference before he walked into his first industry controversy. "I'm sorry that I have to spend my first morning in Australia defending the company," the newly appointed music director of Opera Australia said yesterday. Hickox, who officially begins his tenure at the company when he conducts a gala concert at the Opera House on New Year's Eve, was responding to claims by some of the stars of the critically acclaimed production of the Ring cycle that they will be forced to go overseas because of lack of work here.
— Read more at smh.com.au

SCOTLAND'S culture minister sang the praises of opera yesterday, pledging she would do everything she could to promote the beleagured Scottish Opera company and boost its audiences across Scotland. Patricia Ferguson told The Scotsman that she cared "passionately" about opera in Scotland. "I want to see Scottish Opera excel in everything it does, and I want to promote it as far as I can," she said.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

A Manhattan concert hall stopped the Opera Company of Brooklyn from holding a planned event there Tuesday evening after a musicians' union scheduled a protest against the company's use of a so-called virtual orchestra machine. The event, which the opera company said was a fund-raiser and celebration of its new board of trustees, was to be moved to another venue, said Jay D. Meetze, the company's founder and artistic director. Meetze didn't disclose the new location.
— Read more at Newsday.com

FUTURE historians who examine the fate of British arts under New Labour should start with the disintegration of our national opera companies. This month, Scottish Opera, Welsh and ENO find themselves without effective artistic leadership or much hope of renewal. In Scotland, Sir Richard Armstrong has resigned as music director in the face of savage cuts and the reduction of his company to a part-time operation. Most regard his leap as too little, too late. The demolition of Scottish Opera has been a long-planned joint production by a barbarous Scottish Executive and a clueless Arts Council.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Marking the 60th Anniversary of the New York City Opera, writers of the internationally known Opera News magazine recently paid tribute to one of the industry's most illustrious performers of old - Johanna Meier.
Meier, who is known throughout the Queen City area as the founder of the Black Hills Summer Insitute of the Arts and the daughter of Black Hills Passion Play founder Josef Meier, was recently featured in the December edition of Opera News. The magazine, a very old and respected publication produced by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, reviews opera and opera singers from all over the world. Meier's article, written by Eric Myers, highlights her 37-year operatic career which took off with the New York City Opera, and details her current activities here in the Black Hills.
— Read more at zwire.com

If you visited AllAboutOpera.com during the Met broadcast of I Vespri Siciliani this past Saturday and tried to view the libretti link(s) please click here and let us know what you experienced. Several visitors have noted that they were unable to see the libretti pages.

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Otto Schenk's productions at the Metropolitan Opera have been elaborate and built to last. By human standards his staging of "Contes d'Hoffmann" ("Tales of Hoffmann"), Offenbach's remarkable exercise in the bitterly comic (or is it the farcically tragic?), has made it from 1982 into young adulthood. Now 22, it had its first performance of the season on Friday. It looked older than its years. Spalanzani's workshop still entertains with its Rube Goldberg gears in motion and larger-than-life mechanical toys. Mr. Schenk lighted Crespel's living room and Giulietta's Venetian Palace dimly to begin with, in keeping with the dark side of an ambiguous drama.
— Read more at The New York Times

If ever the composer William Bolcom sought an apt operatic subject for his trademark diversity of styles, he found it in Robert Altman's 1978 film A Wedding, which starts off by documenting the wedding ceremony of a groom from the upper-crust Sloan family and a bride who is the daughter of a truck driver turned nouveau-riche distributor. As the wedding progresses, members of the two families gradually establish their identities, and the result is an enormously funny film about death, sex, drug addiction, religious fanaticism, adultery and even racism.
— Read more at FT.com

In the fiendish little genre of books that eviscerate pop culture idols, those written by the idols' confidants earn for their authors a place in a special circle of hell. "The King and I," Herbert Breslin's story about his life as the manager of Luciano Pavarotti, reminds us of another tattletale screed about another king with a heavenly voice and immeasurable charisma. Breslin outs his man just the way Elvis Presley's bodyguards did in "Elvis: What Happened?" as a king baby with out-of-control appetites, badly dyed black hair and a tendency to fudge hitting high notes. Like Presley, Pavarotti is a big, slow-moving target whose continuing disintegration only adds to his fascination.
— Read more at The New York Times

The classical recording business still has its problems, and it is anyone's guess how the Sony-BMG merger will affect the industry, but obituaries are still premature. Perhaps more labels are beginning to find virtue in the necessity to live small. For whatever reason, the number of truly excellent CD's seems to have risen over the last year or two. So it is with pleasure that the classical music critics of The New York Times here list some of their favorite CD's from 2000.
— Read more at The New York Times

The sound of grumbling is as much a part of the opera world as the sound of singing. And much of it has been heard here recently over the choice of Antonio Salieri's long-forgotten opera "Europa Riconosciuta" for the reopening of the Teatro Alla Scala after nearly three years of renovation.
— Read more at The New York Times

A new voice is set to make her Metropolitan Opera debut this weekend; however, she probably won't be singing a single note. Margaret Juntwait will take over from Peter Allen as the host of the opera company's Saturday afternoon broadcast. Juntwait, 47, is only the third regular host -- and the first woman -- since the series began in 1931. Allen began in January 1975, a day after the program's original host, Milton Cross, died.
— Read more at CBC News

Milan - Italy's cultural cognoscenti flocked on Tuesday to the gala reopening of the sumptuously refurbished La Scala opera house, restored to its former glory after a three-year makeover. Screen icon Sophia Loren and fashion guru Giorgio Armani set the tone for a night of pomp and glamour as they entered together in a maelstrom of flashbulbs, with actors, artists and models mingling with presidents, prime ministers and royalty.
— Read more at iol.co.za

The Handel revival rages onward, sometimes upward, even at the Metropolitan Opera. The company did not discover the Baroque composer until 1984, when Rinaldo was mustered as a vehicle for Marilyn Horne. Samson arrived two years later, a favour for Jon Vickers, and Giulio Cesare followed in 1988. Purists found the theatre, capacity 4,000, too big, the approach too romantic. Still, most were grateful that attention had been paid. Now Rodelinda has been added, a glamorous showcase for Renee Fleming.
— Read more at FT.com

Charlotte Shockley got her Christmas tree up this year, and she saw it one last time at her Wyoming home, glittering with ornaments she'd had for years, before moving to Hospice of Cincinnati Monday and dying there that night. "She loved Christmas. It was her favorite holiday," said Leann Ward, a friend. Ms. Shockley, 88, was a singer, journalist, educator, and beloved member of the arts community.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Italian opera star GIUSEPPE DI STEFANO has been brutally attacked by vicious robbers, who left him with serious head injuries. The 83-year-old tenor and his wife were assaulted in their car as they left their villa in Kenya, 440 kilometres (273 miles) from capital city Nairobi.
— Read more at contactmusic.com

An opera company's reach should exceed its grasp, as the poet almost wrote, or what's a theater for?
Oakland Opera Theater, the smart, ambitious little outfit that had a resounding hit earlier this year with its production of Philip Glass' Egyptian extravaganza "Akhnaten," has overreached -- not grievously, but noticeably - - with its new undertaking, an updated version of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Lucio Silla is Ceausescu and Honecker and Hitler rolled into one, a despot in a suit at the end of his tether. He wants Giunia, Cecilio's wife, the way a child wants a coveted toy. His palace is crumbling around him, his citizens are on the brink of revolt. As certainties melt and shift, tensions mount. Anything could happen. Does opera get any better than this? The Netherlands Opera's Lucio Silla has the suspense and sudden twists of a thriller and the character insights of a psychodrama. It has detail and humour. And it has such music that after three hours and 40 minutes you wish the performers would start straight away at the beginning again.
— Read more at FT.com

La Scala, one of the world's most celebrated opera theatres, reopened to the public and to music Tuesday after nearly three years of renovation that cost about $67 million US. "We achieved some sort of miracle by finishing work within the deadline. It's something that all Milanese must be proud of," said Deputy Mayor Riccardo De Corato as the city celebrated the return home of the Milan company. La Scala performances were held in Milan's modern Arcimboldi theatre after the renovation began in 2002.
— Read more at canada.com

'CALLAS Forever," Franco Zeffirelli's worshipful cinematic tribute to his friend Maria Callas, is the kind of what-if movie you might have expected to be made about Elvis Presley but not about the quintessential opera diva of the 20th century. A lip-synching hall of mirrors, it is essentially a piece of highbrow karaoke. Where Elvis inspired an entire industry of impersonators, Callas was vocally inimitable. She may have been memorably portrayed as a woman and voice teacher on the stage in Terrence McNally's play "Master Class," but no one has recreated the sound of her singing voice at the peak of its majesty.
— Read more at Alameda Times-Star Online

CHICAGO - It was a different sort of opera crowd that stared up at the singers, mesmerized by "The Magic Flute." In a city where black-tie opera patrons have paid as much as $12,000 a seat for performances celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, squirming schoolkids received Lyric performances of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" for free in their school auditoriums.
— Read more at kansascity.com

BY rights, this should be the moment to announce that a Japanese director named Amon Miyamoto has conquered America - or at least that small but very glittery swath of America called Broadway. Mr. Miyamoto's production of "Pacific Overtures," Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's 1976 musical about American gunboat diplomacy as visited on 19th-century Japan, opened last night at Studio 54. And if any musical in this uncertain season could be anticipated as a guaranteed succes d'estime, it was surely this one.
— Read more at The New York Times

MILAN -- POLITICIANS who meddle with myths invite trouble. And so it was when the mayor of Milan decided that renovation of the Teatro Alla Scala, Italy's most revered opera house, would require it to close for three years. Even before the first stone was removed, the moaning and mourning had begun. Lawsuits to block the project soon followed. And when aerial photographs showed that the back half of the theater had been torn down as part of the renovation, disaster was proclaimed. Yet to the astonishment of many, in an opera world where passions can be as heated offstage as on, this particular drama appears to be ending happily. On Tuesday, the exact day promised more than three years ago, La Scala will reopen for business, its elegant 18th-century auditorium now twinned with a high-tech 21st-century backstage. And at $78 million, the cost of the project is very close to what was originally budgeted.
— Read more at The New York Times

Some two dozen Handel operas were first presented at the King's Theater in London, an intimate house of 850 seats. That his works would ever be performed in an auditorium the size of the Metropolitan Opera's, with more than 3,700 seats, would have been inconceivable to Handel. One choice for the Met would be simply to acknowledge that it has the wrong house for Handel, and that's that. The alternative, though, is to find the right work, the right cast and the right way to present a Handel opera effectively, which the company has done with its premiere production of Handel's "Rodelinda," which opened on Thursday night.
— Read more at The New York Times

Sir Richard Armstrong will stand down at the end of the current season in July 2005, although he will operate as an advisor for the next two years. Chief executive Christopher Barron paid tribute to his achievements and said his "uncompromising artistic direction" had made the company what it is today.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

The big operatic news in Los Angeles last weekend should have been the debut appearance of Dame Kiri Te Kanawa with Los Angeles Opera. Te Kanawa, one of the great operatic stars of our lifetime, has never graced the LAO's stage before, in large part because as the local company grew in stature and drawing power, her career was moving toward retirement. She now rarely performs in operas, preferring the shorter time commitment of the recital.
— Read more at U-Press Telegram

In the anti-MTV world of classical music, there's rarely been a video screen that didn't make great music seem worse.
Years ago, the Philadelphia Orchestra offered close-ups of Yo-Yo Ma on video screens at the Academy of Music; core audience members left, threatening to cancel subscriptions. The Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia used all manner of visuals in its concerts up through last season, but stopped in response to mixed audience reaction and a financial climate that lends itself more to consolidation than experimentation.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Music at Christmastime usually brings thoughts of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker' ballet, but last holiday season and this one, the big holiday offering at the Los Angeles Music Center has been Puccini's beloved opera "La Boheme."
Last January, director Baz Luhrman's Broadway production of Puccini's 1896 masterpiece, with a moveable feast of a cast, a jazzed-up production and a reduced orchestra, opened at the Ahmanson Theater. "Boheme' is now back, this time at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in a revival of Los Angeles Opera's successful production created by film director Herbert Ross, featuring a purely operatic cast and a full orchestra in a series of 12 performances that continues through Dec. 19.
— Read more at U-Press Telegram

Since 1991, Opera Kansas has presented professional opera in Wichita. Though the Wichita group presents a free one-act opera each spring at the River Festival, its showpiece is a holiday opera put on annually over Thanksgiving weekend.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

You don't often get the chance to hear a medieval opera. But that's what on offer on Monday when Huddersfield University's Early Music Ensemble, under director Lisa Colton, put on the three-act Play Of Daniel. The story, of course, is from the Old Testament, and the earliest and only surviving manuscript from the Middle Ages appears to have been copied in the early 13th century.
— Read more at ichuddersfield.icnetwork.co.uk

Jacqueline Pierce will be appearing in the Concert Chorale of the Outer Banks' production of "Amahl And The Night Visitors." Under the direction of conductor Forest Warren, Pierce will perform the lead role of Amahl's mother. A mezzo-soprano, she has appeared as soloist with the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic and the National Symphony - to name but a few. She also has sung as a contractor for professional choral ensembles in New York City whose choruses have performed at Carnegie Hall and with the New York Philharmonic, the American Symphony and the Brooklyn Academy of Music among others, under the baton of Zubin Mehta, Sir Colin Davis, Leonard Slatkin, Kurt Masur and many more.
— Read more at The Outer Banks Sentinel

Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis visited the Old Museum Arts Centre last night, and in the hands of the children of St Joseph's Primary School, Slate Street, becamethe boy who turned into a beetle. BUG OFF!!! is a wonderful education project that has become a notable performance piece in its own right.
— Read more at Belfast Telegraph