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

"Every day, the news from Iraq feels like splashes on the telescreens in Oceania," Thomas Meehan remarks, with a touch of fury in his voice. Meehan is talking about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he and his fellow writer JD McClatchy have turned into an opera libretto for composer-conductor Lorin Maazel. Meehan - an operatic first timer, who describes himself with self- deprecating humour as "stepping from the crass world of Broadway to the crass world of opera" - is best known in the UK for Mel Brooks's musical The Producers, though he has a huge number of Broadway hits and screenplays to his credit, including Annie, Hairspray and Brooks's remake of Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be. McClatchy, well established in the US as a poet, teaches creative writing at Yale, and has already written several librettos, of which Emmeline, for Tobias Picker, is perhaps the most familiar.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

As far as I'm concerned, Victoria Clark -- back on Broadway this season at the Vivian Beaumont Theater in Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza -- can do no wrong onstage. The singing actress was a comic delight as Smitty in the Matthew Broderick revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and her performance as down-and-out prostitute Fraulein Kost (she eventually replaced Michele Pawk) in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Cabaret was stirring, thrilling -- and in the Act I finale "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" -- disturbing. Not only did she make a huge impact in these relatively small roles, but she was also a standout in the Tony-winning musical Titanic, where she was both comical and touching as second class passenger Alice Beane, a role that also allowed the actress a chance to display her rangy, powerful belt.
— Read more at Playbill News

Chief executive of Scottish Opera Christopher Barron will become the third senior management figure to leave the troubled company within 15 months when he takes up a new position with Birmingham Royal Ballet in October. Barron has been joint chief executive of both Scottish Opera and Scottish Ballet since 2000. However, the two boards were split last year after the operaâ??s escalating debts forced a restructuring deal on the company, making Barronâ??s dual position untenable. His departure, which had been widely speculated for some time, follows that of chairman Duncan McGhie, who stepped down in July 2004, and music director Richard Armstrong, who announced in December that he would leave in the summer.
— Read more at The Stage Online

Tenor Eric Cutler has won the 2005 Richard Tucker Award, the Richard Tucker Music Foundation announced. The Tucker Award is presented annually to "an American singer posed for the start of a major national and international career." It includes $30,000 and the opportunity to perform at the high-profile Richard Tucker Opera Gala in January.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The contrast couldn't have been more severe. The last time soprano Renee Fleming was available for a one-on-one interview in Houston, the capital-D diva arrived in Houston Grand Opera's library dressed and coiffed as if headed to lunch at Tony's. For his interview at the same table, Bryn Terfel, the world's leading bass-baritone, wore a short-sleeve sports shirt that he hadn't tucked into his jeans. Afterward he ambled down the street to get sushi.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

When researching the beautiful and beautifully gifted Renee Fleming for this article, I was at first struck by the wealth of her repertoire - she's performed the lead roles of several famous operas, such as "La Traviata," "La Boheme" and "The Marriage of Figaro," and has recorded many albums and collections, but let's face it - the main question on one's mind when they encounter the diva is, "How is a sound so voluptuous coming out of someone who looks so much like Katie Couric?"
— Read more at The Daily Texan

The Falls Village Day Care Center is presenting Opera Express, a Connecticut Opera family program of Chanticleer and The Billy Goats Gruff on Saturday, May 21 at 7 pm in Gordon Hall at Music Mountain, Falls Village, CT. The grounds are open for picnicking at 5 pm, and the event will occur rain or shine. The concert is one of the Day Care Center's major fundraising efforts of the year, and has sold out in summers past.
— Read more at iBerkshires.com

The Metropolitan Opera has always been sentimental about Faust. Gounod's essentially Gallic reduction of Goethe's ultra-Germanic drama served as the company's first vehicle, back in 1883 and the candy-coated opus has returned for its 714th performance in a new, heavily cut, bravely muddled production staged by Andrei Serban and designed by Santo Loquasto.
— Read more at FT.com [Related news items]

Ten years ago, Kenneth Gayle was one of the newest faces in opera â?? handsome, smart, with a svelte figure, a young voice and a clear idea where he was going. He had toured much of the United States as a youth as part of the Northwest Boychoir and graduated cum laude from the College of Creative Arts at West Virginia University. But the Seattle native couldn't predict the things he would do and the places he would go in the next 10 years. He didn't know, for example, that he would be cast as one of the Three Mo' Tenors, going on the road to sing varied styles of music: opera, musical theater, jazz, gospel, blues, spirituals, and rhythm and blues.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

On May 4, 2005, New Jersey Opera Theater will present in partnership with Riverside Elementary School two performances of an original adaptation of Mozartâ??s The Magic Flute. There will be a morning show presented for the school at 10:00 a.m., and an evening performance at 7:30 p.m. for parents and friends in the community. This is the culminating production of a 5 week project that began this past week as part of New Jersey Opera Theaterâ??s dynamic â??Interacting with Classicsâ?? program.
— Read more at NJOT.org

Mauro Meli, who was replaced by Stephane Lissner as general manager of the Teatro Alla Scala in Milan on Thursday, has spoken out about his departure. "I resigned because it was impossible to do my work," Mr. Meli said from his apartment in Milan on Saturday. Mr. Meli, 50, replaced Carlo Fontana as general manager in February, in what La Scala's orchestra and workers saw as a power play by Riccardo Muti, the company's music director of 19 years. The players and workers began a series of strikes aimed at the removal of Mr. Meli and Mr. Muti, who resigned on April 2.
— Read more at The New York Times

La Scala opera house in Milan has appointed a new artistic director as bosses attempt to recover from a management crisis. Frenchman Stephane Lissner, of Paris's Theatre de la Madeleine, has been given a four-and-a-half year contract.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Fans will be able to watch the Houston Grand Opera's star-studded 50th-anniversary gala on April 30 for free on two giant screens, the company announced. Renee Fleming, Frederica von Stade, and Bryn Terfel are among the singers scheduled to appear at the concert at the Wortham Center. A screen measuring 24 by 30 feet will be set up on the Ray C. Fish Plaza outside the Wortham Center in downtown Houston. The gala will also be shown live via satellite at the Miller Outdoor Theatre, a venue in Hermann Park.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

The performers of Austin Lyric Opera want their potential audience to know that their new perfomance of "The Marriage of Figaro" "is not what most people think of when they think of opera." ALO's latest production, which runs April 29, 30, May 1 and 2 at Bass Concert Hall, is anything but ordinary.
— Read more at The Daily Texan

The celebration of Houston Grand Opera's 50th anniversary season climaxes this week with Saturday's Golden Jubilee Gala featuring soprano Renee Fleming, bass-baritone Bryn Terfel and pop icon Sir Elton John. Tickets start at $250, but those without fat wallets can still enjoy the music -- for free.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

Soprano Angela M. Brown has won the Indiana University African American Arts Institute's first Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award.
— Read more at indystar.com

In opera, embarrassment comes with the territory. Sooner or later, if you're a fine and dignified singer, you will find yourself trapped onstage in a situation or a costume so stupid that the voice of God couldn't save the scene. For Rene Pape, who has the body and bearing of a Hussar and who is probably the world's best basso, the moment came in Act IV of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Faust," the scene in which the illegitimately pregnant Marguerite enters a church to repent and finds a taunting Mephistopheles.
— Read more at nynewsday.com

It is the tragic story of a 15-year-old Japanese geisha who falls in love with a philandering American naval captain. The girl commits hara-kari, or suicide, when her love is not requited. Well-known to opera lovers, the story is Puccini's Madame Butterfly. In the 1960s, Paterson's educated elite could see this and other operatic classics at the starting price of $1.50 in the 600-seat auditorium of School 26.
— Read more at North Jersey Media Group

Lincoln Center Theater's Platform Series, a forum for public discussion between Lincoln Center Theater artists and interested theatergoers, continues its 2004-2005 season on Wednesday, April 27, at 6:30 pm with a pre-performance talk with book writer, Craig Lucas, and lyricist/composer, Adam Guettel, the creators of the new musical, THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, along with Elizabeth Spencer, the author of the novella on which the musical is based. THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, which has just received 11 Outer Critics nominations including best Musical, is the latest production of Lincoln Center Theaterâ??s 20th Anniversary Season.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Opera Tampa's 2005-06 Homes by Helen Opera Series season tickets will go on sale Friday with priority given to renewing season ticket holders. The deadline to renew is May 31. Subscriptions range from $103.50 to $208.50. Premium Golden Circle seat subscriptions are $243.37. Individual tickets will go on-sale to the public July 23. For subscriptions or more information, visit or call the center's ticket office at (800) 955-1045. For more information about the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, visit TBPAC.ORG or operatampa.org. All performances are are at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, 1010 N. MacInnes Place, Tampa."
— Read more at http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/entertainment/11467800.htm

Of Rossini's comic operas, "Barber of Seville" certainly is the most performed, with "Cenerentola" and "The Italian Girl in Algiers" running closely behind. That just might change as more opera companies see possibilities in his "Il Turco in Italia" now that an excellent production from 2002 is available on an ArtHaus DVD (100 369). Here Franz Welser-Moest conducts the chorus and orchestra of the Zurich Opera House.
— Read more at fosters.com

SIR Peter Jonas, the former English National Opera chief who advised the Scottish Executive four years ago to pump more funds into Scottish Opera, has described the departure of its chief executive as a political disaster. Christopher Barron announced last week that he would step down to become chief executive of the Birmingham Royal Ballet in October. He is the second senior management figure to leave the company in a year.
— Read more at scotsman.com

The light is shining in the "Piazza." At least, that's the weather report from the Outer Critics Circle, which has handed 11 nominations to "The Light in the Piazza," the new musical by Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas, based on a novella by Elizabeth Spencer. "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," which opens April 28, follows with 10 nominations and "Monty Python's Spamalot" garnered eight.
— Read more at backstage.com

WITH the cost of recording operas in a studio now almost prohibitive, we are witnessing a boom time for opera on DVD. Opera buffs can hardly keep pace with the number of releases in the last year. And in June alone, Universal Classics plans to put out 18 complete operas on DVD, most of them reissues of productions originally taped and released on video.
— Read more at The New York Times

In "The Light in the Piazza," which opened Monday at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater in New York, it arrives on a gust of wind, blowing a young woman's straw hat across a Florentine plaza and into the hands of a handsome, almost fairy-tale fellow. This enchanting musical celebrates the unexpectedness and intensity of it all, no matter what the roadblocks, and does it with style. "Piazza" is a show of considerable beauty â?? more melodically, emotionally and visually satisfying than any other musical this season.
— Read more at APP.COM

If anyone ever complains - and they often do - that today's theatre bores them, I ask them if they've seen the work of Robert Lepage. Over the past 20 years, this courteous and soft-spoken Canadian, born in Quebec in 1957, has created nothing less than a revolution in the possibilities of what a stage, a play and an actor can be and do. He has directed several productions of other people's work (including Shakespeare), but his originality lies in work that he devises collaboratively. Sometimes these take the form of one-man shows, among them Needles and Opium (about drug addiction), Elsinore (a fantasia on Hamlet), The Far Side of the Moon (reflections on space travel) and now The Andersen Project (about Hans Christian Andersen),- which he performs himself. Others are long multi-part epics which explore the inner and outer journeys which have taken so many people in our migratory era from one society or culture to another - Tectonic Plates, The Dragon's Trilogy and Seven Streams of the River Ota.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Grand opera has been around in Denver since 1983 - most of that time in the round. But this weekend and next, Opera Colorado will serve up its final pair of productions in Boettcher Hall. Next season the company will move into the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. For some, that move comes not a moment too soon.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

After two years of work, composer John Estacio, librettist John Murrell and stage director Kelly Robinson were nervous when they sat down in Calgary's Jubilee auditorium in February 2003 for the first performance of Filumena, their opera about love, broken dreams, rum-running and murder in 1920s Alberta.
— Read more at canada.com network

The list of major operas that James Levine has never conducted is not long. One, of all things, was Gounod's "Faust." But Thursday night Mr. Levine finally moved this enduringly popular work off his to-do list, conducting the premiere of the Metropolitan Opera's new production. You can understand his hesitancy. Gounod's score has some great music, timeless melodies and ingenious dramatic strokes. But there are hokey bits, awkwardly comic scenes and a high quotient of sentimentality.
— Read more at The New York Times

Luxury in sound is as much fun to encounter as in accommodations. Folks who attended the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra program last night or Thursday received quite an earful of aural luxuriousness. Celebrated Russian bass Paata Burchuladze isn't repeating his sumptuous contribution for today's Casual Concert, but the audience will still find plenty of rich orchestration that will feel good to the ears.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Parents learn fairly quickly not to be too surprised with the way their teenagers spend their free time. They take in stride the trips to the mall, extreme skateboarding and the untold hours on the computer. But there is a group of teens in the South Bay that has figured out how to really arch eyebrows -- they spend their Saturdays wearing 17th century waistcoats and belting out arias
— Read more at sfgate.com

FROM the summer of 2003 through the spring of 2004, Dori Berinstein, a filmmaker and theatrical producer, shot hundreds of hours of meetings, rehearsals, work sessions and backstage kvetch festivals that went into the creation of that season's 39 new Broadway productions. In "Show Business," the documentary that resulted, she focuses on four musicals ("Avenue Q," "Wicked," "Taboo" and "Caroline, or Change") as they face their first performances, their opening-night reviews and their hopes for Tony awards. Among the many interlocking (and sometimes antagonistic) constituencies represented - authors, performers, producers, publicists, critics and audiences - perhaps the least understood, and yet most central, are the directors. So the Arts & Leisure section invited Jason Moore, director of "Avenue Q," Joe Mantello, director of "Wicked," and George C. Wolfe, director of "Caroline, or Change" to watch a screening of the movie (which will have its premiere at the TriBeCa Film Festival tomorrow and also be shown on Wednesday and Friday) and talk with Jesse Green about their role in the process.
— Read more at The New York Times

Experience a stunning exhibit of visual artwork and original musical compositions inspired by the life of Margaret Garner.
When: Tuesday, April 26, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Northern Kentucky University, Corbett Theatre Lobby, Nunn Drive, Highland Heights, Kentucky
Admission: Free, though reservations are requested. Please call (513) 241-2742.

— Learn more at cincinnatiopera.org

Toni Morrison leans forward in her chair as if she is about to share a secret. Her veil of royalty drops, and she is no longer a Nobel laureate, a sorcerer of language whose novels, rooted in the African-American experience, have mesmerized readers for 35 years. Suddenly, she is a wily teenager, pulling a fast one on her mother, sneaking out to a Cleveland nightclub in the 1940s to meet Billie Holiday. "Don't tell her," Morrison says, her voice falling into a conspiratorial whisper. "I went with my cousin, and we were underage. I was 16 or 15, and we put on a lot of lipstick and put our hair up in a pompadour or whatever was going on. It was right after the war. Billie's voice was incredible, but she was so scary. She was nice, but a woman knows when she should stay back a little bit." Jazz - especially the great black singers like Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone - remains Morrison's favorite music. But it is opera that has led to the latest twist in her landmark career. Morrison, 74, has written the libretto for "Margaret Garner," basing her text on the same true-life fugitive slave tale at the heart of her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel, "Beloved."
— Read more at North Jersey Media Group

The Light in the Piazza, composer Adam Guettel and librettist Craig Lucas' new musical at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre, will be recorded by Nonesuch on April 25. The locale of the recording session could not be learned at press time.
— Read more at Playbill News

There ought to be a tingle of excitement. The most talked-about English novel of modern times is being brought to the opera stage. The composer is a universally renowned musician, a former head of the Vienna State Opera, now music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The director is a multi-skilled renaissance man, more sought after than Osama Bin Laden. There ought, by rights, to be a buzz about this production.
Yet, a fortnight before the Royal Opera's world premiere, Lorin Maazel's opera of George Orwell's 1984, directed by Robert Lepage, arouses something akin to ambivalence in the crush bar, if not outright embarrassment. It is a matter of public record that the composer has paid the physical costs of the production out of his own pocket, a contribution tantamount to self publishing. It is also no secret that Maazel is 75 years old and has never written an opera before.
— Read more at scena.org

Normally, the world premiere of a composer's first opera to hail a company's 15th anniversary would be a cause for celebration. But for Curtis Tucker, general director of Sorg Opera, the premiere of "The Stranger's Tale" this weekend at Sorg Opera House in Middletown will be bittersweet. The reason: It could be the last performance before the 15-year-old opera company closes indefinitely
— Read more at news.cincinnati.com

He's among the hot breed of fast-rising, young musical-theatre songwriters. Along with such talented composers as Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, The Light in the Piazza) and Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party, Hello Again), Jason Robert Brown appears to be inheriting the mantle of Stephen Sondheim, keeping the genre moving forward in exciting new directions. His best-known work, the dramatic musical Parade (book by Alfred Uhry, direction by Harold Prince), won a 1999 Best Score Tony for composer-lyricist Brown. His intimate character-driven musicals, Songs for a New World and The Last Five Years, are rapidly becoming staples at regional theatres looking for small-scale musicals. New productions of both works recently appeared in the Southland. He also performs and works as a musical adapter-arranger. Besides all of this, he has accepted a spring semester stint as George Burns Visiting Artist at the University of Southern California School of Theatre. "The work I do seems inevitable," says Brown. "I wouldn't consider putting any one of them aside. They are all reflective of me as a creative creature."
— Read more at backstage.com

Somehow I missed the new musical Dessa Rose when it opened last month and, put off by crushingly respectful reviews, I had not rushed to catch up with it. My mistake! While Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas's Light in the Piazza sucks up the sun in Lincoln Center Theater's spacious Beaumont stage, Dessa sits tucked away in the smaller Mitzi Newhouse, with nothing to offer but its glorious, heart-stirring brilliance. Based on a 1986 novel by Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose throws together two historical figures who never met: Dessa, a black woman in pre-Civil War Kentucky who fought back against her master and was sentenced to be hanged, and Ruth, a white woman on a Carolina farm who sheltered runaway slaves.
— Read more at FT.com

NEW YORK - The prevailing philosophy in popular musical comedy can be summed up in four words: wink, wink, nudge, nudge. From The Producers to Avenue Q to Spamalot, Broadway hits revel in glib irony, asking us to join their creators in a celebration of our collective cleverness.
If such shows can be viewed as a reaction to the sober bombast that reigned in the late-20th-century heyday of Andrew Lloyd Webber and his imitators, then maybe The Light in The Piazza (* * * 1/2 out of four), which opened Monday at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, is a sign that artists are ready to open their hearts again and trust audiences to do the same
— Read more at USATODAY.com

Every time Renee Fleming returns to Fort Worth, her stature seems to have increased since her last visit. The 46-year-old Pennsylvania-born soprano is now at the top of her game, applying her keen musicianship and creamy voice to an increasingly diverse repertoire-- she covers Stevie Wonder's "Ma Cherie Amour" and Joni Mitchellâ??s "River" on her upcoming album.
— Read more at fwweekly.com

The board of La Scala chose Frenchman Stephane Lissner as general manager and artistic director, putting a non-Italian in charge of the Milanese opera house for the first time in its history. The appointment fills a power vacuum at the 226-year-old theater after the dismissal of its general manager Carlo Fontana and the resignation of music director Riccardo Muti. Lissner, 52, will keep his current job as director of the annual Aix-en-Provence music festival.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

PARIS Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" in a new production by a leading opera house and with a solid cast is a major event at any time. And so it is with the new production that has just been launched at the OpÃ©ra Bastille, a little more than a century since the Paris opera company first broached the masterwork at the Palais Garnier and about eight years since it first appeared at the Bastille.
— Read more at iht.com

Tomorrow night, the Metropolitan Opera unveils a new production of Charles Gounod's "Faust," its sixth. The musical expectations are high. James Levine, the Met's music director, is conducting the opera for the first time, leading an international A-list cast: the French-Sicilian tenor Roberto Alagna as Faust, one of his signature roles; the Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski as Marguerite, the innocent he seduces and abandons; the German bass Renee Pape as Mephistopheles, an eagerly anticipated role debut; and the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky as the soldier Valentin, Marguerite's brother.
— Read more at The New York Times

Kenny Leon, who is directing the world premiere of Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour's opera, "Margaret Garner," isn't worried that his opera experience is skimpy. All right, "skimpy" oversells the point. Up until now, Leon's opera experience has been nonexistent. But the 48-year-old director is undaunted by the task of bringing Nobel Prize-winner Morrison's words to life in Detroit next month. Challenges, he says, are his sustenance.
— Read more at freep.com

Even by the standards of opera this production of Tristan und Isolde arrived with a fanfare - first at concert performances with video screens in Los Angeles, then decked out as a full staging in Paris. By the time the curtain went up at the Opera Bastille there can hardly be anybody who was unaware that Tristan und Isolde - the Video was here.
— Read more at FT.com

"We hear the celestial voice of compassion expounding Buddha's four noble truths to mortals," is how Peter Sellars describes the love duet from Tristan und Isolde in a programme note for his new production of Wagner's masterpiece.
Once regarded as a great exploration of sex, Tristan has been re-evaluated as primarily a spiritual work of late, as directors and critics stress the influence on Wagner of Schopenhauer and eastern philosophy. Like Nikolaus Lehnhoff at Glyndebourne two years ago, Sellars sets out to explore the metaphysics underpinning the opera's eroticism. His staging lacks Lehnhoff's coherence, though it surpasses it in power.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Christopher Barron, chief executive of Scottish Opera and Ballet since 2000, will leave to become CEO of Birmingham Royal Ballet, Scottish Opera announced. He will take up his new post in October, replacing Derek Purnell, who stepped down last year to become an arts consultant.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Royal Opera House will offer seats at the ballet and opera for just Â£10 in a bid to tackle the common complaint of high ticket prices. The Covent Garden venue has signed a deal with currency firm Travelex to offer tickets online to students, at least 24 hours prior to each show.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Opera's newest diva is coming home.
Angela Brown, the Indiana University School of Music alumna who delighted audiences and critics in her Metropolitan Opera debut last fall, will return to Bloomington on Monday (April 25) to receive the IU African American Arts Institute's inaugural Herman C. Hudson Alumni Award. Established this year as part of the AAAI's 30th anniversary celebration, the award, which will be given annually, recognizes outstanding contributions made in the arts by former members of the institute.
— Read more at newsinfo.iu.edu

And now this bulletin from the arid planet of Broadway: Rumors have been confirmed that a real human being has materialized in a mainstream musical, an environment that has become increasingly hostile to such life forms.
This unexpected creature, of the species American abroad and named Mrs. Margaret Johnson, appears in "The Light in the Piazza," Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas's encouragingly ambitious and discouragingly unfulfilled new show, which opened last night at the Vivian Beaumont Theater at Lincoln Center. Whatever problems there may be with this production, which reaches for the sky with short if well-shaped arms, Mrs. Johnson qualifies as a blessing for those in search of signs of intelligent life in the American musical.
— Read more at The New York Times

Sitting on the travertine steps of Lincoln Center on a startlingly sunny afternoon, the composer and lyricist Adam Guettel is nervously twisting the frayed threads at the knees of his jeans and trying to explain why he wrote a musical about a girl who was left stunted by an accident of privilege. Clara, the coddled heroine of "The Light in the Piazza," was kicked in the head by her pony, and nearly a decade later she alights in Florence with the mind of a 10-year-old and the eager body of a nubile young woman.
— Read more at Newsday.com

THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, a new musical with book by Craig Lucas, music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and direction by Bartlett Sher opens on Monday, April 18, at 6:45 pm at the Vivian Beaumont Theater (150 West 65 St). THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, based on the novella by Elizabeth Spencer, is set in the summer of 1953 and tells the story of a mother and daughter traveling through Italy, the daughterâ??s romance with a handsome, high-spirited Florentine, and the motherâ??s determined efforts to keep the two apart.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Roma wasn't built in a day, and Firenze took time, too -- three years of concentrated stagecraft before Elizabeth Spencer's 1959 novella, The Light in the Piazza, found a secure place April 18 on the large, constantly swirling stage of Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont. It's one of the most unusual and romantic musicals of this, or many a, year -- a florid, Florentine affair whose beating heart belongs to the mother of the bride-to be.
— Read more at Playbill News

"I'm so excited. Anyone would be. We've had the best response I've ever had in my life." -- Star Kelli O'Hara on the opening night audience reaction
"This a jewel. A diamond nestled in a velvet box surrounded by a tiffany ribbon, pristine. Just surrounded by talent, great power, great belief, sure handed steady brilliance. I never doubted it." -- Patti Cohenour, who plays Signora Naccarelli
— Read more at Broadway.com

Legendary soprano Montserrat Caballe will be honored at the Metropolitan Opera Guild's annual luncheon today. On April 20, the 72-year-old singer will appear at the Metropolitan Opera Shop to sign books and recordings.
Soprano Deborah Voigt will perform at the luncheon, and Marilyn Horne and Sherrill Milnes will pay tribute to Caballe. Other figures from the opera world scheduled to attend include Licia Albanese, Marcello Giordano, Dmiti Hvorostovsky, RenÃ© Pape, Paul Pishka, Eve Queler, and Julius Rudel.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

American Opera Projects will present excerpts from four works-in-development -- The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Darkling, Sharon's Grave, and The Summer King -- at South Oxford Space (138 S. Oxford St.) in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The event takes place on Tuesday, April 19 and Wednesday, April 20 at 8:00PM. For reservations call 718-398-4024 or e-mail mgray@operaprojects.org. Ticket prices are $20 for adults, and $15 for students and seniors.
— Read more at http://www.operaprojects.org/

Description: Cincinnati Opera Education presents Enrique Gonzalez-Medina's How Nanita Learned to Make Flan, a new multicultural opera for young people. Commissioned by Cincinnati Opera Education in 2004 and performed in both Spanish and English, How Nanita Learned to Make Flan is based on the popular children's book of the same name by Campbell Geeslin about the young girl Nanita and her adventures in making flan.
Performance Dates:
Sunday, April 24 ~ 3:00 p.m.
Loveland High School
1 Tiger Trail, Loveland

Saturday, May 7, ~ 10:30 a.m.
Mason Middle School
770 S. Mason Montgomery Road, Mason

Tickets: $3 ~ Call (513) 241-2742.

— Learn more at cincinnatiopera.org

Since the days of the Borgias and Medicis, Italian politics has horrified the squeamish. Poisons and daggers, though, are cleaner means of regime change than the backroom shenanigans that drove conductor Riccardo Muti to resign as music director of Milan's Teatro alla Scala earlier this month. During his 19-year tenure, Muti made La Scala's orchestra into a band of unsurpassed precision and suavity. Still, his downfall has triggered more than a little chortling, purportedly on account of his haughty demeanor and conservative taste in repertory and productions.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilainefille]

How a film version of Bizet's famous opera, relocated to a South African township, is seducing the locals An open-top bus lurches through the South African township of Khayelitsha, the opera Carmen blaring from its loudspeakers. Perched atop a row of plastic seats, Andries Mbali, 25, sings along in a rich baritone, while his companions dance in the aisle, stamping their feet on the metal floor and cheering wildly. The melodies are Georges Bizet's, familiar to opera fans around the world, yet the libretto is no longer in French, but rather the tongue-twisting clicks and cadences of the Xhosa language.
— Read more at TIME Europe Magazine

On Tuesday night, between Acts I and II of "Die Walkure" at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Placido Domingo was backstage talking about the Chicago Cubs. "I wish they could have more satisfaction," he said. The great tenor was speaking from the vortex of a rare cultural confluence. Over the last week, the Cubs opened their home season at Wrigley Field, and the city's Lyric Opera was presenting Richard Wagner's four-opera "Ring des Nibelungen," which meant that two of the world's most fervid fan bases were simultaneously encamped on opposite sides of the Chicago River. (The Cubs left town on Tuesday; the "Ring" concludes on Saturday night.)
— Read more at The New York Times

The Santa Fe debut of famed Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, the U.S. premiere of an acclaimed British opera and a gala operatic concert are highlights of the Santa Fe Opera's 50th anniversary season next year, general director Richard Gaddes announced Thursday. Speaking at a news conference in the opera's Stieren Hall, Gaddes said that the company will pay special tribute to late founder John O. Crosby by mounting Richard Strauss' Salome, and also produce a hard-cover, 144-page, half-century commemorative book.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

SIR Richard Armstrong has left the building. The distinguished director of 12 years is the only person to have gone voluntarily in an exhausting and shameful year of downsizing at Scottish Opera. While the company seeks a replacement, Armstrong will continue as adviser and guest conductor. Will he have a role in choosing the new music director? Donâ??t bet against it. So just who are Scottish Opera looking for to lead them into the brave new world beyond 2006? Their statement last week was a little woolly: "a strong and dynamic leader with passion, insight and musical talent ... to maintain and build the companyâ??s world-class reputation for excellence, creativity... (etc etc) ...with a reputation for giving directors and designers opportunities". All well and good, but this opportunity comes with a huge caveat. Money.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Michelle DeYoung, to seriously understate the fact, looked radiant. The first of three performances as Sieglinde and Waltraute in Lyric Opera of Chicago's hugely successful production of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" was behind her, and the American mezzo-soprano seemed to be counting the minutes until she would be back on the Civic Opera House stage making passionate love to Placido Domingo, Siegmund to her Sieglinde in this production. Her cloud of long, crisply crinkled blond hair caught the light like an angel's aureole as she settled into a conference room backstage at Lyric. She was revved up to talk about her transformation from a Colorado-reared, conservative Christian teenager whose chosen life goal was to marry and have lots of children into an opera singer in demand across the United States and Europe.
— Read more at suntimes.com

Grown-ups will tell you all sorts of little facts about the opera of The Little Prince. They will tell you that the composer, Rachel Portman, has written the scores for more than 70 movies and became the first woman to win an Academy Award for film music (for 1996's Emma). They will tell you that Portman's opera has been produced by the Houston Grand Opera and Boston Lyric Opera, and will be done by New York City Opera in the fall, but that the University of Kentucky Opera Theatre will be the first college company to present it.
— Read more at Lexington Herald-Leader

The University Opera Ensemble, directed by assistant professor Charles Turley, will present a program of two short operas with costumes and props next weekend in Beall Concert Hall on the UO campus. The first opera is "La Cambiale di Matrimonio" ("The Marriage Contract") by Gioacchino Rossini. It will be sung in Italian with English supertitles.
— Read more at The Register-Guard

The Light in the Piazza, composer Adam Guettel's long-awaited follow-up to Floyd Collins -- not to mention his Broadway debut -- opens at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre on April 18 after a month of previews. Craig Lucas penned the book for the show, which has already been seen in stagings at both Seattle's Intiman Theatre and, more recently, at Chicago's Goodman Theatre.
— Read more at Playbill News

REALITY changes; myths endure. For more than a century, the Metropolitan Opera has been synonymous with superstardom, so much so that no opera singer's claim on immortality has been secure without seasons of glory at the Met. Long before there was an MGM, the Met was living the classic studio line, "More stars than the heavens." The Met booked stars, and symbiotically, stars made the Met. But while the company's prestige remains intact, its star quotient has declined steeply, with dire consequences at the box office.
— Read more at The New York Times

Huge, dense, taxing, with almost all the action taking place in the heart, Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" is notoriously difficult to stage. Indeed, the composer himself abandoned his first attempt in Vienna in the early 1860's after no fewer than 77 rehearsals. Now, in a daring experiment, the Paris National Opera has invited the American video artist Bill Viola to accompany the work with his own visual commentary.
— Read more at The New York Times

The aesthetics of this new staging have been determined by a co-production deal with Madrid and Houston, rather than by any wish to explore Verdi in a modern context. Like La forza del destino earlier this season, it is an old-fashioned singers' show - safe, bankable, peppered with big-house spectacle but oblivious to the characters' psychology and Verdi's elegantly crafted dramatic situations. The onus for making those situations come alive once again falls on Antonio Pappano.
— Read more at FT.com

Opera North is about to enter that precarious state that has proved so difficult for opera companies in the past: leaving its home base. At the end of May, it will move out of the Grand Theatre in Leeds for a year while refurbishments are undertaken. The Â£31.5m, two-phase renovation and building project involves, in the first instance, construction of rehearsal rooms and an overhaul of the auditorium
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Richard Teitelbaum has built a large catalog of pieces that combine electronic and acoustical timbres, and he has found inspiration in everything from biofeedback machines to traditional Japanese instruments. He also seems drawn to stories of Jewish mysticism gone awry. His "Golem" (1987) was an electronic opera about the legendary artificial man who was built as a protector but eventually runs amok. His latest work, of which he offered glimpses at the Center for Jewish History on Wednesday evening, is "Z'vi," an opera about Shabbetai Zevi, a Turkish rabbi and mystic who declared himself the Messiah in 1665.
— Read more at The New York Times

In the popular imagination, there's a romantic notion that young talent is immediately discernable - that you can hear a student performance and tap this or that performer for future greatness. Well, sometimes it works like that: a talent comes along so striking that even in its raw form it burns bright. But often it doesn't. And this is especially true in the case of young singers. Violinists, after all, have an instrument placed in their hands. Singers have to work to form the instrument at the same time they are learning to use it.
— Read more at The New York Times

Alban Berg's Wozzeck has the power to provoke strong emotions: revulsion, excitement, wonder, or disgust. Adolf Dresen's production treats Georg BÃ¼chner'stale of psychological manipulation, sexual deviancy and homicidal jealousy as day-by-day routine. Dresen glosses over the alienating qualities of the pungent, atonal score in favour of attractive stage pictures, too dumbed-down, too literal to register any impact.
— Read more at FT.com

The conductor of the New York City Opera, Atushi Yamada, other opera officials, representatives from the Japan National Tourist Organization and two mascots for the Aichi World Expo 2005 attended a benefit dinner at the opera house Wednesday for the company's upcoming Japan tour.
— Read more at MSNBC.com

Eleven full-time Lyric Opera of Chicago staff members will be out of a job when the company's new fiscal year begins May 1. On Wednesday, Lyric announced administrative staff reductions of 8.4 percent, and William Mason, general director, estimates that the cuts will save $700,000 in 2005-06. Like most performing arts organizations, Lyric is feeling the effect of the sluggish economy on its ticket sales and annual fund-raising efforts. Though the company expects to end its current 50th anniversary season in the black, Mason estimates that annual ticket sales, which had exceeded 100 percent for 15 consecutive years, will remain closer to 95 percent for 2004-05.
— Read more at suntimes.com

Bass Eric Owens will star in the title role of Grendel, the Elliott Goldenthal opera that will premiere during Lincoln Center Festival's 10th anniversary season. Described as a "darkly comic retelling of the Beowulf epic," Grendel will play four performances at the New York State Theater in 2006: July 11, 13, 15 and 16. The opera, featuring a score by Goldenthal and a libretto by Tony Award winner Julie Taymor and J. D. McClatchy, will also star mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as the Dragon, soprano Laura Claycomb as Queen Wealtheow, tenor Jay Hunter Morris as the warrior Unferth and tenor Richard Croft as the blind harpist Shaper. The company will also include David Gagnon, Jonathan Hays, Charles Temkey, Hanan Alattar, Maureen Francis and Sarah Coburn.
— Read more at Playbill News

The Metropolitan Opera's 2005-06 season will include the world premiere of Tobias Picker's An American Tragedy, a new opera based on Theodore Dreiser's novel, the company announced. The season will also include new productions of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette and Donizetti's Don Pasquale, the company premiere of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa, and a gala performance bidding farewell to Joseph Volpe, who retires next year after 42 years with the company, 16 of them as general director.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Perhaps Verdi's most classically elegant masterpiece, Un ballo in maschera, needs to be performed with a lot more stylistic assurance than Covent Garden's dull new production provides.
— Read more at Telegraph.co.uk

Opera supporter Mitchell L. Lathrop has been listening to opera since soon after his birth. He heard the Metropolitan Opera's broadcast of Wagner's "Die Walkure" from the Los Angeles hospital where he was born, thanks to the Philco radio brought in by his father, an opera devotee.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

Even enfants terribles eventually grow up and become sociable old boys. Peter Sellars's production of Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde,'' the most eagerly awaited production of Gerard Mortier's first season as director of the Paris Opera, tries very hard to please and was received with rapturous applause.
— Read more at bloomberg.com

New Jersey Opera Theater Singer Circle Presents "Arias and Ensembles," an evening of musical delights sung by the stars of tomorrow. The evening will feature Emerging Artists in a 90 minute accompanied concert of well known selections and lesser known works from the operatic cannon.
WHERE: Grounds for Sculpture, 18 Fairgrounds Rd., Hamilton, NJ
WHEN: Friday, April 15 at 7:00 PM
ADMISSION: FREE and open to the public
— Read more at NJOT.ORG

PITTSFIELD-Berkshire Opera Executive Director William Powers and Artistic Director Joel Revzen this week unveiled the details of Berkshire Opera Company's 2005 season, the company's 21st.
— Read more at iberkshires.com

Fedele Confalonieri, the president of the orchestra at La Scala in Milan, stepped down on Monday, a week after Riccardo Muti resigned as musical director. It is surely the stuff of opera ...
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The production, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, includes video art, by artist Bill Viola, that illustrates the themes of the opera: betrayal, transformation, rebirth, memory, and time. Ben Heppner stars as Tristan, and Waltraud Meier plays Isolde. The production runs through May 7.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

There are a number of ways to measure the artistic growth of Michigan Opera Theatre in recent seasons. Certainly, the highly anticipated world premiere in May of Richard Danielpour's "Margaret Garner" represents a flare of aesthetic ambition. So does MOT's increasing number of new productions of operatic staples.
— Read more at freep.com

London's Royal Opera House leads the race for this year's Royal Philharmonic Society Awards with seven nominations. Its performers John Graham-Hall, Ben Heppner and Janice Watson dominate the best singer category.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

The French word mignon denotes something sweet, cute and little. The heroine of Ambroise Thomas's opera of the same name, based on Goethe's novel "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship," is a waif-like figure, referred to throughout the work as a child. When Stephanie Blythe stepped up to the music stand as Mignon at Carnegie Hall in the Opera Orchestra of New York's concert performance on Thursday night and sang her first notes, it was immediately apparent that the opera should be rechristened. How about "Magnifique"?
— Read more at The New York Times

The Royal Opera House has trounced English National Opera in this year's Royal Philharmonic Society awards nominations. ENO only figured at all because John Graham-Hall was short-listed in the singer category for a variety of roles, including his performances in Michael Nyman's opera Man and Boy: Dada at the Almeida, and as Siegfried in ENO's Ring.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Once upon a time, Freedom Fries didn't exist, no one made apologies for charm and grace, and operas like Ambroise Thomas' "Mignon" (1866, revised 1870) ruled the boards. As it happens, April 2005 is a throwback to those innocent days of musical Francophilia in New York. The Philharmonic just performed "Damnation of Faust" by Berlioz; a new staging of Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers" opened yesterday at New York City Opera, and the Metropolitan Opera presents Gounod's once-ubiquitous "Faust" with a promising cast later this month.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilainefille]

CHICAGO -- The quest for gold ignites the early parts of Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelungen," the cycle of four operas that is providing a triumphant conclusion to Lyric Opera of Chicago's golden anniversary season. Yet hunger for wealth and power is but one of many dramatic themes in Wagner's magnum opus. Love and hatred, loyalty and betrayal, social stratification and the progress of history are all themes that Wagner puts in play to create a theater work of unparalleled scope and length.
— Read more at PittsburghLIVE.com

DETROIT -- Toni Morrison leans forward in her chair as if she is about to share a secret. Her veil of royalty drops, and she is no longer a Nobel laureate, a sorcerer of language whose novels, rooted in the African-American experience, have mesmerized readers for 35 years. Suddenly, she is a wily teenager, pulling a fast one on her mother, sneaking out to a Cleveland nightclub in the 1940s to meet Billie Holiday.
— Read more at indystar.com

Wagner called opera 'the total work of art': a combination of all the other arts, it allowed him to play the omnicompetent, totalitarian artist. Then came the invention of cinema, which combined the arts in a less autocratically exclusive way. Composers were eager to be part of this new totality, whose reach was as universal as that of music. The young Shostakovich played the piano at screenings of silent films in Leningrad, and in 1926 Strauss countenanced a cinematic adaptation of Der Rosenkavalier, so money-hungry that he chose not to mind that this - since sound and image couldn't yet be synchronised - was an opera with no singing.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

On Tuesday, April 12, 2005 from 6pm to 9pm, New Jersey Opera Theater will present a vocal master class conducted by Metropolitan Opera Soprano Deborah Voigt. This class will be hosted by Yamaha Artist Services, Inc located on the 3rd Floor of 689 Fifth Avenue (Entrance on 54th Street). Featured in this masterclass are Singer Circle Apprentice Artists of the New Jersey Opera Theater (NJOT). Each artist will perform an aria of his or her choice and following every performance, Voigt will offer each singer specialized feedback from both a technical and interpretive perspective.
— Read more at NJOT.ORG

CHICAGO -- Midway through his three-week "Ring of the Nibelungen" marathon here, Andrew Davis is in characteristically high spirits.
If anything, the English conductor, who becomes artistic adviser of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra next season, seems energized rather than fatigued by his traversal of "the Mount Everest" of opera with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where he is music director. And no, he didn't pursue any physical regimen to prepare himself for the cycle of four operas that lasts about 18 hours that he is conducting three times in successive weeks.
"I'm having a great time," he says, sitting in his living room with the windows open to admit the bracing air from Lake Michigan.
— Read more at PittsburghLIVE.com

Placido Domingo will star in a gala concert Nov. 5 marking the 50th anniversary of the reopening of the Vienna State Opera following World War II.
Vienna State Opera director Ioan Holender said Thursday the program will include excerpts from "Fidelio," "Don Giovanni," "Der Rosenkavalier," "Aida," "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg)" and "Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow)." The operas were staged during the first week of the company's first postwar season.
— Read more at The Herald-Mail ONLINE

The Vienna State Opera's 2005-06 season will include a gala concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of its reopening after World War II, the Associated Press reports. The concert on November 5, which will be broadcast around the world, will feature performances by Placido Domingo, Bryn Terfel, Thomas Hampson, and Angelika Kirchschlager, among other opera stars. Conductors will include music director Seiji Ozawa, Chistian Thielemann, and Zubin Mehta.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

Cincinnati Opera has posted a help-wanted sign for a new artistic director. But for the first time in recent history, the artistic head will report to an administrative leader, and not to the volunteer board president.
"We want them to be our visionary and our artistic leader, to work with us to develop new and fresh ways to do what we've been doing," says Patricia K. Beggs, who was named general director and CEO in November. "We're looking for someone to build on what Nic (Muni) helped us create."
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Puccini's searing mix of love, lust and blood opens Michigan Opera Theatre spring season.
"It's very important never to allow yourself to think you know the answer, because this serves neither the composer nor the music." That slogan appears on the homepage of Kent Nagano's website, before you click through to the part about his plum conducting posts on two continents and his 71 recordings.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

Puccini's searing mix of love, lust and blood opens Michigan Opera Theatre spring season
The setting is a cathedral in Rome, where priests lead a procession of the faithful and choristers intone a Te Deum. It is a political celebration, though premature and misguided. The spotlight finds an elegantly dressed figure in a white wig with a faraway look in his eyes. He is in a reverie, but not in prayer. "Tosca," says Baron Scarpia, the feared and lustful chief of police, "you make me forget God."
— Read more at detnews.com

Alcoholism, depression and loneliness were a few of the things that killed Modest Mussorgsky in 1881. He was 42 years old. He left behind the unfinished piano score of Khovanshchina, a vast historical opera that was, among other things, a criticism of Tsar Peter I. Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich all had a go at completing and orchestrating the opera but it still has not really entered the repertoire. Each good revival makes you wonder why not. Bloodier and more turbulent than Boris Godunov, Khovanshchina is also more politically complex than Mussorgsky's earlier opera. For all that it deals with historical events, the piece is laden with ambiguity and was always intended to be read as contemporary.
— Read more at FT.com

The Dayton Opera's new production of the contemporary opera Little Women isn't guaranteed to make you cry, but you'll undoubtedly be moved by the musical retelling of Louisa May Alcott's literary classic. Mark Adamo, both the composer and librettist of the work that had its world premiere in 1998, didn't simply take Alcott's words and set them to music. He examined the personalities of the book's characters as well as their relationships with one another and found a thematic anchor that has universal resonance regardless of the particularities of the March sisterhood.
— Read more at daytondailynews.com

Humor is not a quality normally associated with Verdi. He was a dour fellow, dubbed "the bear of Busetto" by his long-suffering wife. His first comic opera, "Un giorno di regno," was a crashing failure, and "Falstaff," his final work for the stage, looks more intently into the abyss than most commentators care to admit.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilainefille]

Join a distinguished panel of history, literary, and opera experts for a discussion of the comparisons and contrasts between the true historical events surrounding Margaret Garner and the dramatization of her story in the opera.
When: Sunday, April 10, 4:00 p.m.
Where: Northern Kentucky University, Greaves Concert Hall, Nunn Drive, Highland Heights, Kentucky
Admission: Free, though reservations are requested. Please call (513) 241-2742.
— Learn more at cincinnatiopera.org

One might have thought cheers would greet Deborah Voigt when the soprano made her entrance at the Metropolitan Opera House in "A Masked Ball." Monday night was her first appearance since she recently revealed that she had undergone gastric bypass surgery last June to lose weight.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

A documentary about opera sets designed by artist David Hockney opens today at New Yorkï¿½s Film Forum. David Hockney: The Colors of Music, directed by Maryte Kavaliauskas and Seth Schneidman, shows the artist at work in his studio and in some of the worldï¿½s great opera houses; it takes him from listening to and researching the opera to the sketches, models, and final stage production of the design.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

It's over. The not-at-all-fat lady sang. There was also an opera to go along with the excitement: Verdi's "Ballo in Maschera" in its first outing of the season at the Metropolitan Opera. The news item from Monday night's performance was Deborah Voigt as Amelia, reduced to a relatively waiflike state by surgical intervention. Weight loss is becoming something of a crusade in this country, and it was nice to see that grand opera is doing its part.
— Read more at The New York Times

It isn't over, apparently, until the fat lady has gastric-bypass surgery. And tells the world about it. Earlier this season, the soprano Andrea Gruber garnered a lot of attention by declaring that she had undergone an abdominal-stapling procedure in time to sing Turandot at the Met and Covent Garden. Now Deborah Voigt, the diva famously fired by the Royal Opera for not fitting into Ariadne's little black dress, has followed suit.
— Read more at FT.com

The secret has been out for some time. Savvy opera fans already know that Seattle Opera's Young Artists productions are no mere junior-level shows, but highly polished operas that would be right at home on the mainstage of many of this country's top regional companies. Add to this the fact that they take place in the cozy environs of the Meydenbauer Center Theater, where you're never more than a baton's throw from the stage, and you have an exciting prospect indeed.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

California miners and barflies singing their hearts out in Italian, hollering "Hallo!"? The picture inevitably provokes titters, even in New York City Opera's excellent production of Puccini's 1910 music-drama "La Fanciulla del West." Still, pity the operagoer tripped up by these wrinkles, who fails to engage with the substance of "The Girl of the Golden West." Lillian Groag's staging and John Conklin's sets offer important clues: a backdrop of a vast, awesome landscape that emphasizes the smallness and rot of human society.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilainefille]

The escalating artistic arms race between London's two rival opera houses, Covent Garden and the Coliseum, reached a new level of threat this weekend. Both venues are in the middle of staging block-busting versions of Richard Wagner's epic and expensive Ring cycle, but audiences at the Coliseum last night were left reeling from more than the music after the English National Opera mounted a violent coup de thetre.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

"This is the Rill Speaking" is a chamber opera from the play by Lanford Wilson. It is based on small-town rural life in the 1950s. The "Rill" is a small stream or brook, and the play visits and revisits different moments in different lives as it flows and babbles along. "The Telephone" is a comic opera about a young man whose attempts at proposing to his beloved are constantly interrupted. It features soprano Kelly Ann Law and baritone Ryan Bowie.
— Read more at i-Newswire.com

It's the cry of a "wolf's son," Siegmund, in Act 1 of Wagner's "Die Walkure," as he pleads, "Volsa, Volsa! Where is thy sword, that mighty sword I can wield in battle?" The incredible range of emotion compressed into these few lines, as sung by tenor Placido Domingo, sears the mind like a bolt from another mythic figure, Loge, the "Ring" god of fire. As Siegmund rails against his fate, imploring his father to protect him against harm, these words ring out like the ultimate war cry.
— Read more at suntimes.com

After weeks of vitriolic public wrangling, the renowned Italian conductor Riccardo Muti, who had been music director of the famous opera house Teatro Alla Scala for 19 years, gave in to the demands of the house's orchestra and workers, and announced his resignation. Though simmering tensions rose to a boil only in mid-February, Mr. Muti's departure had come to seem inevitable. The only real questions were the timing and whether Mr. Muti or the Scala orchestra would finally force the issue.
— Read more at The New York Times

Opera singer Korliss Uecker says her performance here next weekend will be special. The Hettinger native will sing the title role in Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah" with the Fargo-Moorhead Opera. It will be her first appearance with the opera here. She was to appear locally last year in "The Elixir of Love," but illness forced her to cancel that performance.
— Read more at grandforks.com

Schumann, like Debussy, planned many operas but completed only one. But while Debussy's "Pelleas et Melisande" occupies a connoisseur's corner in the operatic repertory, Schumann's "Genoveva" remains obscure, despite the passion some of the composer's admirers feel for it.
— Read more at Boston.com

Soprano Jessye Norman withdrew from the world premiere of Margaret Garner because of "concerns over rehearsal scheduling," the Associated Press reports. Norman's representative issued a statement on Saturday, April 2, expressing her sadness about missing the premiere and giving that brief explanation.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Site visitor Madeleine Begun Kane dropped us a note recently letting us know about her "Guide For The Opera Impaired".
— Read more at MadKane.com

The musical director of La Scala resigned Saturday, saying he was forced into the decision by what he called the vulgar hostility of colleagues involved in labor strife at the famed Milan opera house.
— Read more at The New York Times

Bleak but uproarious, bawdy but singed with hellfire, Mozart's opera "Don Giovanni" is just as elusive as its title character. Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard identified Don Giovanni with music and desire: "a force, a wind, impatience, passion," forever ungraspable. "Don Giovanni" remains ungraspable in the Metropolitan Opera's revival of last season's new production, but utterly enthralling for that. Marthe Keller's staging, deftly revised by Gina Lapinski, sets the action in back-alley Seville, a labyrinth as dark and disorderly as the passions that animate the drama.
— Read more at Newsday.com [thanks vilaine fille]

Concerns about rehearsal scheduling led opera star Jessye Norman to drop out of next month's performances of "Margaret Garner," the collaboration of composer Richard Danielpour and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. A statement Saturday on Norman's behalf said the 59-year-old soprano was sad to withdraw from the role of Cilla -- a sympathetic mother-in-law to Margaret Garner -- during the May 7-22 world-premiere performances at the Detroit Opera House.
— Read more at freep.com

The Christian Institute is seeking judicial review of "Jerry Springer: The Opera," which only recently was cleared of charges of irreverence. A BBC spokesman said there would be no comment on the Christian Institute's action because "this is a legal matter and is so far the only legal action ongoing, and because it is ongoing we can't comment further."
— Read more at washingtontimes.com

It was an agonizing decision for a Tea Sipper to consider interviewing an Aggie. True, it's been a long time since the days at the University of Texas and, being a music critic, the jokes about students at Texas A&M University have mutated into jokes about violists. But the burnt-orange reflexes were still working when Houston Grand Opera called about the star of its current world premiere, Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, which is based on an ancient Greek play about the war of the sexes.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com