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

When Lorin Maazel, the charismatic director of the New York Philharmonic, was mulling the possibility of writing his first opera, he went back to great 20th-century literature in search of a subject. "I reread [George's Orwell's] '1984' and felt it had all the ingredients for opera, and that it would stimulate my imagination as a composer," he says. The work premiered May 3 at London's Royal Opera House, with a dark, imaginative set by director Robert Lepage. Yet Maazel's "1984" remains one of only a handful of modern operas that have drawn on contemporary writing. "It's immensely powerful to know that the piece onstage really matters now in our own world," says Paul Bentley, who wrote the libretto for a recent Royal Danish Opera production based on Kafka's classic "The Trial."
— Read more at MSNBC.com

This month, when Lorin Maazel the experienced conductor became Lorin Maazel the neophyte opera composer with his "1984" at Covent Garden in London, a number of British critics unsheathed their knives and went a-slashing. They accused him of staging a vanity production after a report that he had invested his own money to make it happen. The music was called deadly, histrionic and vacuous, a "long, schlocky horror show" and a "derivative mÃ©lange." Perhaps a humbler man would not have elicited such a reaction. But Mr. Maazel has never been shy about his prodigious talents. He talked about those criticisms with Daniel J. Wakin last wee
— Read more at New York Times

IN the last years of the 16th century, a group of Italian composers, poets, intellectuals and aristocrats met periodically, mostly in Florence, with the goal of creating a contemporary version of classical Greek drama - that is, drama that was sung throughout. In other words, they were inventing opera.
Though the Florentine composers Giulio Caccini and Jacopo Peri were racing to be the first to present a complete work, they were beaten out by Emilio de' Cavalieri, a Roman nobleman, diplomat, choreographer and art collector as well as composer. Cavalieri had worked for Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence for some years. His sacred opera "Rappresentatione di Anima, et di Corpo" ("Drama of the Soul and the Body"), which had its premiere in Rome in February 1600, was arguably the first performed and published work to put into practice the new theories of musical drama.
— Read more at New York Times

Ca Ira, a new opera by rock star Roger Waters, will be released on CD by Sony BMG in September, the record company announced. The recording will feature baritone Bryn Terfel, tenor Paul Groves, and other singers from the opera world.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra still has a few more concerts in Symphony Center before decamping for the Ravinia Festival, where its 69th summer residency begins June 24. Downtown Chicago's summertime orchestra, the Grant Park Symphony, gets under way in its new home, the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park, on June 15. But otherwise, most of the dozens of chamber ensembles and choral groups, orchestras and opera companies that make Chicago's live music scene so vibrant have adjourned for summer vacation.
— Read more at suntimes.com

AS EXPECTED, last week's Scottish Opera press conference told us nothing new. It simply confirmed that, after this season's final production of Beethoven's Fidelio and a brief guest appearance in John Adams's controversial The Death of Klinghoffer at the Edinburgh Festival, full-scale activity from Scottish Opera goes into hibernation until a year from now, when a new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni will signal its return to the big stage.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

It's better than having your face painted on the wall of the Palm. Six patrons of the arts, plus a piano, will show up on a huge painting that will hang in the lobby of the new $90 million-plus Ellie Caulkins Opera House. Eighty-four Opera Colorado bigwigs went last week to a "select-a-seat" party for a first look at the new opera house. (I saw it too - and it's swank-a-rama!) In addition to a recital and Kevin Taylor dinner, the guests could bid on having their portrait painted on the canvas.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

When Opera Colorado subscribers opened their renewal packets for the 2005-06 season, they got a surprise, and for at least a few it was an unpleasant one. To receive "priority seating" in the top four seating categories, buyers are being asked to pair their ticket order with minimum donations of $100-$500, depending on the section.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

The works of modernist writer Getrude Stein will be explored through the production of an opera inspired by her works and a panel discussion.
On June 10th at 6:30 at the City University of New York's Martin E. Segal Theatre Center, A Gertrude Stein Salon will celebrate the premiere of Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On. This free educational program sponsored by Encompass New Opera Theatre will include a panel discussion with the collaborators of Gertrude Stein Invents A Jump Early On (poet Karren LaLonde Alenier, composer William Banfield, dramaturg/director Nancy Rhodes) and three authors who have written about Stein. Sarah Bay-Cheng, author of Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein's Avant-Garde Theater; Barbara Will, author of Gertrude Stein, Modernism and the Problem of "Genius"; and Brenda Wineapple, author of Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. Musical excerpts from the opera will illuminate the discussion.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

[Retirement years afford the 50-plus crowd an opportunity to volunteer their time for the young - from cuddling preemies to calming nervous patients to helping young parents cope]
She used to sing for the Montreal Opera Company, but these days Julie Angell-Nadeau contents herself with singing lullabies to babies.
— Read more at Montreal Gazette

It doesn't matter who sings what. At some point, someone's fist is up someone else's rectum. Some of us were not even sure this was anatomically possible until the nihilistic Catalan director Calixto Bieito took up opera. Now it's routine.

In this case, the head witch has her digits in Macbeth's nether orifice. He takes it with an abstracted air. The thrusts help him hit his high notes. Ritual humiliation is a Bieito favourite, along with gratuitous slaughter and the creative use of bodily fluids. This time the chamber-maid makes the doctor drink a glass of her urine. Last year in Berlin, it was Bassa Selim with Konstanza. Such consistency might even be endearing, were it not all so crass.
— Read more at FT.com

It is almost 15 years since Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras joined forces for a concert at the Roman Baths of Caracalla and, in so doing, dramatically transformed the business of classical music. Overnight, they became known as the "Three Tenors'' and their so-named album went on to sell about 15 million copies - an unheard-of number for the classical recording industry, where sales of 100,000 had hitherto been considered a smash.
— Read more at Weekend Standard

The Dallas Opera expects to finish the 2004-05 season with no accumulated deficit, having erased $800,000 in debt over the last two years, the company announced.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The sacred and the profane - Mozart and Wagner - kicked off the second weekend of the 2005 May Festival. "Kick" is definitely the word for Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde," whose Act II is perhaps the ultimate mating call in classical music. On hand to sing it were two of the world's pre-eminent Wagnerians, soprano Deborah Voigt and tenor Ben Heppner.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

One of the country's richest men -- who lavished millions on his Washington County alma mater -- is in jail on federal charges of stealing $5 million from a client and giving much of it to Washington & Jefferson College. News of Alberto Vilar's arrest stunned officials at the liberal arts college in Washington, where he is a trustee. Vilar, 64, whose estimated worth is just shy of $1 billion, is touted as one of the school's most successful alumni and has made the largest single pledge -- $18.1 million -- in the school's history.
— Read more at PittsburghLIVE.com

Alberto Vilar, who built a fortune after arriving in America as a refugee from the Cuban revolution, loved the opera more than anything. And he loved giving his money away almost as much. Mr. Vilar, a wealthy investor, became a legendary benefactor, donating hundreds of millions of dollars, much of it to opera houses and orchestras. His name was linked with those of Daniel Barenboim, Lorin Maazel and PlÃ¡cido Domingo. But in recent years, some of his pledges went unfulfilled and his reputation was tarnished.
— Read more at New York Times

Five weekly broadcasts of the San Diego Opera's 40th-anniversary-season productions begin at 7 p.m. Sunday on KPBS/FM 89.5. "Die Fledermaus" with Noemi Nadelmann, Siphiwe McKenzie, Peter Edelmann and Paul Armin Edelmann is this week's broadcast.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

Opera star DAME KIRI TE KANAWA has been left shaken after a spooky encounter with a suspected ghost, during a stage performance on Wednesday night (25MAY05). The 61-year-old singer was performing at Scotland's Usher Hall in Edinburgh when she heard haunting footsteps on the stage behind her.
— Read more at contactmusic.com

The New Jersey State Opera, conducted by Maestro Alfredo Silipigni, will present a fully staged production of Giuseppe Verde's "Il Trovatore" (The Troubadour), on Friday, June 10, at 8 p.m., and Sunday, June 12, at 3 p.m., at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. A student matinee performance will be held on Thursday, June 9. The opera is sung in Italian with English subtitles.
— Read more at Montclair Times

TIM Albery's production of Fidelio plays strongly on the passion of Beethoven's glorious operatic score. It's an opera that has a universal ideology - the striving for freedom against oppression; the triumph of goodness over evil. It's also a difficult opera, not least the logistical challenge it poses in creating a convincing sense of confinement and frustration, as well as the expansive emotion that colours the final outpouring of jubilation and freedom.
— Read more at Scotsman.com News

Opera Australia is back in the black after taking stringent measures to get its house in order. The opera yesterday reported an operating surplus of $38,000 for last year's season of mostly popular revivals. Although little more than a break-even result, it's a far cry from the 2003 deficit of $414,000 and the accumulated deficit of $6.5 million six years ago. The company last reported a surplus in 2001. The opera's chief executive, Adrian Collette, says the surplus is the result of "severe housekeeping" that involved shedding 11 full-time jobs and dropping three operas from the annual program - one in Sydney and two in Melbourne.
— Read more at smh.com.au

World-renowned opera singer Luciano Pavarotti is set to use his concert in Dublin today to promote an international commitment to free people from extreme poverty. During the concerts today and Saturday, the tenor â?? a UN Messenger of Peace - will screen public service announcements highlighting the United Nationsâ?? Millennium Development Goals.
— Read more at IOL

A GRAZIER with a passion for opera and Mozart has bequeathed $16million to the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney, in the largest donation received by an Australian performing arts company. George Henderson's love of music took him all over the world to festivals in Beyreuth and Salzburg, but he also had a great admiration for local musicians and singers.
— Read more at The Australian

The operative word for the final weekend of the 2005 May Festival is big.

Friday night's concert, at 8 p.m. at Music Hall, features two of the biggest stars in opera, soprano Deborah Voigt and tenor Ben Heppner, in act II of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde." May Festival music director James Conlon will conduct.

It gets even bigger at 8 p.m. Saturday at Music Hall, when guest conductor James Levine leads Berlioz' mammoth Requiem, a work calling for a huge orchestra, offstage brass ensembles and choruses totaling 224 voices, including the May Festival Chorus, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music Chamber Choir and the CCM Chorale. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra performs for all May Festival concerts.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Classical music isn't dead. It's just buried.

Once thought too entrenched in centuries-old traditions to reinvent itself, classical music has embraced this century's newest technology, going "underground" on the Internet. And online at least, classical music has become healthy enough to scoff at the pallbearers.

Two area classical music enthusiasts, organist Diana Akers of Boca Raton and Web designer Sharon DeWitt of Miami, use the long reach of the Net to keep music lovers in three South Florida counties posted on upcoming concerts on their Web sites, www.Organiste.net and www.Classical-Connections.com.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

WHAT happens to the ecstatically reunited Leonore and Florestan when the curtain falls on Fidelio's final scene of rejoicing? (We know, alas, what will happen to Scottish Opera.) Do they live on in triumphant marital bliss? Or do the marital standards - the bachelor Beethoven's marital standards - required of them become impossible to maintain?
— Read more at The Herald

Mounting a new production of Francesco Cavalli's "La Calisto'' can be a risk for an opera company. The Bavarian State Opera has a winning formula, though, in conductor Ivor Bolton and director David Alden. Houses sell out, even when audiences have never heard of the composer. Not that Cavalli is an unknown. The 17th-century Venetian is the missing link between Monteverdi and Vivaldi. His operas were written for commercial success, packed with catchy tunes and drama, fast-paced and witty. Rene Jacobs revived "La Calisto'' 12 years ago with director Herbert Wernicke. That production, austere and beautiful, was seen in Brussels, Berlin and Salzburg.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com: Germany

Bryn Terfel, the great Welsh baritone, has been impressing audiences at the Royal Opera House with his interpretation of Wotan in Wagner's Ring. Last night he was named male artist of the year at the Classical Brit awards at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Female artist of the year was Marin Alsop, the American chief conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The 29th Annual Spoleto Festival USA will open Friday and run through June 12, promising provocative opera, dance, and theater productions, ranging from premieres of new works to rediscovered treasures. Opera goers without tickets today probably have two of the three major choices left: the American premiere of Walter Braunfels' "Die Vogel," ("The Birds") and Ottorino Respighi's rarely performed "La bella dormente nel bosco" ("Sleeping Beauty in the Woods"). Every performance of "Don Giovanni," the most highly touted event for this festival, has predictably very limited ticket availability at this time, according to Marie L. Jacinto, director of public relations and marketing.
— Read more at The Times and Democrat

It was in Paris that the liquid revolution of "Tristan und Isolde" first entered the bloodstream of the world. Wagner conducted the Prelude to the opera at three concerts in 1860, baffling most of the audience with his art of endless melody, his chords of longing that never resolve. But the bohemians of Paris fell into a trance - at one of these concerts, Baudelaire experienced "love unbridled, immense, chaotic, raised to the level of a counter-religion, a Satanic religion"-and the phenomenon of Wagnerism began. Shock effects of the mass-market or avant-garde variety are now so routine that we no longer know what it's like to go slowly, majestically, and irreversibly over the edge. Leave it to the director Peter Sellars to make "Tristan" mind-bending once again. His production of the opera, created in collaboration with the video artist Bill Viola, was first seen last fall, in semi-staged form, at Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, and the definitive version opened last month at the Opera Bastille, in Paris. I saw the last performance of the Paris run, and came away in something like the state of dazed bliss that Baudelaire described.
— Read more at The New Yorker

Even at a cultural event with a reputation for opera, this season's Spoleto Festival USA could be considered the year of the opera. The 17-day festival, which begins Friday, features three new operatic productions. "These are more extravagant operas than we have done in the past," says Spoleto general director Nigel Redden. "We wanted to see if we could do three complicated operas."
— Read more at PittsburghLIVE.com

n "Say It Somehow," a ravishing love duet from "The Light in the Piazza," Fabrizio Naccarelli (Matthew Morrison), a 20-year-old Italian tie salesman who barely speaks English, and Clara Johnson (Kelli O'Hara), a beautiful 26-year-old American with the mind of a girl less than half her age, combine their voices in a rapturous serenade. "You are good," the lovers repeat to each other with mounting urgency. "I know the sound of touch me." Just as the yearning melody reaches a Pucciniesque breaking point, it diffuses into another plane as words fail the besotted couple, and they express themselves in cries of "ah." On one level, this duet, composed by Adam Guettel, reflects the practical frustration of sweethearts struggling through a language barrier. But in a more fundamental way, their loss of words evokes that transcendent, irrational state familiar to anyone who has fallen head over heels in love, where the ecstatic becomes the ineffable. There really are no words, only shared rushes of emotion to express such desire. We are in the magic but scary land of "Romeo and Juliet."
— Read more at The New York Times

This year's Polar Music Prize went to the Brazilian musician and cultural minister, Gilberto Gil, and to the German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This is the 14th year of the prize, which was awarded at Stockholm's Concert Hall in the presence of royalty, Swedish celebrities and a Brazilian samba group. This year's winners will each receive one million kronor and the prestige of joining the list of other well known musicians such as Sir Paul McCartney, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, B.B. King and Bruce Springsteen.
— Read more at The Local

The London Symphony Orchestra has appointed Valery Gergiev, one of the most charismatic figures in classical music, as its next principal conductor. The 52-year-old Russian will succeed Sir Colin Davis in January 2007. The appointment is a significant boost for London's music life. It is also a coup for the LSO, which competes with other orchestras for the services of an ever-shrinking pool of top-flight maestros.
— Read more at FT.com

Ever since Richard Shapp of Merion Station saw his first Gilbert & Sullivan operetta at age 14, he's been a devoted fan. "In fact, I'm a Gilbert & Sullivan fanatic!" he admits. That first production was presented by Philadelphia's own Savoy Company. The 105-year-old company is devoted solely to Gilbert & Sullivan and stages one operetta each year. This year, the company presents one of the favorites: The Gondoliers. The comic operetta is being staged at the Academy of Music tomorrow and Saturday evenings at the Academy of Music and then again on June 10 and 11 at Longwood Gardens. Proceeds from the two Academy of Music concerts will benefit Children's Aid Society of Pennsylvania and several other organizations.
— Read more at Main Line Times

When Cincinnati native James Levine officially took over in October last year as the new music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, his arrival was heralded from taxicab roofs to lampposts to newspaper columns. Levine, who was born and reared in Cincinnati, is arguably the best music director/conductor in the world. He has been able to mesh his Boston responsibilities with those at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where he holds the title of music director.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

The Glyndebourne season opened late last week with a pair of fables: "Cinderella," in Rossini's "Cenerentola," and "The Magic Flute," in Mozart's "Zauberflote." Both tell what is fundamentally the same story, of innate goodness emerging triumphant from under oppression, but they do so to very different effect.
— Read more at New York Times

With a microphone in her hand, Renee Fleming turned to the audience. "When I go back to the Met next year, Iâ??m requesting one of these," she said. "Then, I can croon my way through 'Manon.'" Temporarily putting aside her career as an opera singer, Fleming finally recorded the jazz CD she had been talking about for years. "Haunted Heart," 14 songs that range from the Beatles and Joni Mitchell to Jimmy Webb, was released May 10. There's even a Mahler song thrown in with a sparse guitar arrangement by Bill Frisell.
— Read more at Journal Gazette

[A century ago, the United States confidently predicted the arrival of its answer to Beethoven or Wagner. Now, abandoned to a brutal market place, American classical music is in crisis.]
With the re-election of George W Bush, many Americans found themselves asking questions about the future of American democracy: about the impact of money and of political machination, and about the power of both to sway an electorate already addicted to fast-food news and talk radio.
— Read more at New Statesman

Marin Alsop has led many of the world's great orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Tokyo Philharmonic and Berlin Symphony. She has made more than 30 recordings, with Naxos recently releasing the first volume in a set of Brahms symphonies with the London Philharmonic. Gramophone magazine named her its 2003 artist of the year and placed her on its cover - two of classical music's most prestigious honors.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

Many observers of today's music scene contend that the vocal recital is morphing into a musty cultural artifact, like Ike campaign buttons. Such skeptics could find more unsettling evidence with the sparse turnout for Lyubov Petrova's recital Thursday night at Gusman Concert Hall.
— Read more at sun-sentinel.com

Cantor Gerald Cohen had been wanting to write an opera since his early days as a composer, which says a lot. He wrote his first piece of music at the age of 7, three years after he started playing piano on his own. So it was a particularly significant Rosh Hashanah, more than a decade ago, when his wife, Caroline, had something of a revelation after the traditional Torah readings. The readings, over two days, tell some pretty famous stories: of Abraham and his wife, Sarah, who at first cannot conceive a child to start a new nation as God promised; of Hagar the concubine, who bears Abraham's son, Ishmael; of the birth of Isaac to Sarah; of the exile of Hagar and Ishmael; and of Abraham's near sacrifice of Isaac to prove his faith to God.
— Read more at thejournalnews.com

BEFORE he decided to become a composer, in the mid-1980's, Benedict Mason was building a career as an experimental filmmaker and visual artist. So it shouldn't be surprising that his musical concerns include not only traditional compositional building blocks like pitch, duration and dynamics but also more visual elements like location, distance and movement.
Some of his printed scores are as packed with drawings, photographs and diagrams as with staffs and notes. And like many visual postmodernists, he finds the humor of incongruity particularly delectable.
— Read more at New York Times

It is almost 15 years since Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras joined forces for a concert at the Roman Baths of Caracalla and, in so doing, dramatically transformed the business of classical music. Overnight, they became known as "the Three Tenors," and their album went on to sell about 15 million copies â?? an unheard-of number for the classical recording industry, where sales of 100,000 had hitherto been considered smashingly successful.
— Read more at Journal Gazette

IN the flood of opera DVD's on the market, opera films - as opposed to videos of staged performances - represent a special niche: seldom tried, even more seldom truly successful. So a striking new film version of Benjamin Britten's chamber opera "The Turn of the Screw," made for BBC Television and now available from Opus Arte, seems especially notable. Another film version of the opera, by the Czech director Petr Weigl, appeared more than 20 years ago, and the two are among the best items the opera-film discography has to offer. They also represent the yin and yang of "Turn of the Screw" interpretations.
— Read more at New York Times

It is a Cinderella story - and perhaps one more tale of how money talks. On Sunday afternoon, eight years after joining the New York City Opera as an unpaid intern, Atsushi Yamada, a one-time Sony salaryman without conservatory training or a single English-language review to his name, will conduct the company in Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" in Tokyo.
— Read more at New York Times

After she left the operatic stage, Marilyn Horne established a foundation to support emerging singers and promote the performance of art songs, a genre she credits as vital to her own professional growth. The final recital of her foundation's "On Wings of Song" season took place at St. Bartholomew's Church on Wednesday night, and suggested just how much this intimate form of vocal crosstraining has to offer a rising young singer.
— Read more at New York Times

When I first met Ava June I knew she was somebody. She had rung the newspaper to say her neighbour of many years was turning 100, and could the paper come and take a picture of him with his wife? Twice a week Ava June brings together an elderly couple, her long-time Mereway Road neighbours, Douglas and Hilda Barton, now that Douglas lives in a care home.
— Read more at Hounslow Guardian

When Renee Fleming met her idol Joni Mitchell for the first time not long ago, she was faced with two choices. "I could fall at her feet and grovel, sobbing hysterically, or I could say, 'How nice to meet you,' " she recalled from the stage of Joe's Pub on Thursday evening. She ended up making the demure choice.

But to hear her plunge fearlessly into the turbulent rapids of Ms. Mitchell's song "River" at the first of two shows on Thursday evening was the concert equivalent of observing a great classical singer worship abjectly at the feet of a pop composer. Refusing to put a safe distance between herself and the song (from Ms. Mitchell's album "Blue"), she held nothing back; her operatic intensity was matched by an emotional immodesty that was the furthest thing from demure. As she sobbed, "I made my baby cry," Ms. Fleming and the song became one.
— Read more at New York Times

Even at a cultural event with a reputation for opera, this season could be considered the year of the opera at the Spoleto Festival USA, which stages three new productions when it opens later this week. "These are more extravagant operas than we have done in the past," said Spoleto general director Nigel Redden. "We wanted to see if we could do three complicated operas." The 17-day festival opens Friday with the traditional round of speeches and continues through June 12 when it concludes with a fireworks display over Middleton Place Plantation following an orchestral concert of film music.
— Read more at Dateline Alabama

Today's Wall Street Journal features an article by Robert W. Wilson, "a retired money manager" who "was chairman of the New York City Opera in the 1980s," entitled "The Slow Death of Grand Opera." (The article is password-protected, so I can't offer a link.) It's your basic doom-and-gloom piece, centered on the premise: "Presenters should insist that composers write melodic operas." Uh-huh. The article would not be especially noteworthy but for an unusually high concentration of truisms and misstatements of fact. In no particular order: The article cites "young Stravinsky's atonal concert piece 'Rite of Spring.'" Last I checked, Rite of Spring was (1) a ballet score and (2) not atonal.
— Read more at vilaine fille

She's one of the country's best-loved opera stars and has a personality as big as her voice. As Lesley Garrett looks forward to some major appearances in Wales, she tells Mike Smith about her plans SPENDING an hour with Lesley Garrett is like having your own one-woman stand-up show. Loads of chat, buckets full of anecdotes, oodles of Northern wit and enough charm to fill Cardiff's St David's Hall. Which is exactly what our most successful cross-over opera singer plans to do tonight when she brings her gala concert to town.
— Read more at icnetwork.co.uk

THERE'LL be singing in the Valley on 28 May, as a full-scale opera comes to town. Avalon, penned by local playwright Ian Enters, is to open at St Matthias Church, Stocksbridge on 28 May. Depicting the story of King Arthur and his tumultuous marriage, the work is set to an original musical score and is to display a host of regional talent.
— Read more at looklocal.org.uk

For most Japanese, opera usually means Verdi's melodramatic La Traviata, Puccini's melodic Turandot or Wagner's philosophical Tristan Und Isolde. Every year well-known opera house companies from La Scala, Vienna, or New York's Metropolitan visit Japan and perform these traditional great works. Those who prefer these routine works may think that making an opera of Little Women does not make sense. Though many Japanese read the story as a child or saw the movie and cried at Beth's death, Louisa May Alcott's classic American novel is unknown as an opera. The New York City Opera (NYCO), which will be performing in Japan for the first time, is also new to Japanese.
— Read more at Daily Yomiuri On-Line

Tampa, Florida - While some students will spend this summer working a part-time job or lounging at the beach, some Hillsborough County high school seniors will spend a month far from home. About 400 people worldwide auditioned for the Operafestival di Roma. Only 55 made the cut, including Kaci Alfonso from Blake High School and Sarah Davis from Newsome High School; they'll head to Italy in June.
— Read more at tampabays10.com

The Boston Opera Project will conclude their first season with the New England premiere of Mark Adamo's first opera, Little Women. Louisa May Alcott's classic novel will be presented, through the eyes and ears of Adamo, at 8:00 p.m., June 10th and 18th at First and Second Unitarian Universalist Church, 66 Marlborough Street, Boston, MA, and June 11th and 17th at Fenn School in Concord, MA. All performances will be conducted by Michelle Alexander, who has worked with Boston Lyric Opera, Granite State Opera, Florida Grand Opera, and Glimmerglass Opera.
— Read more at expertclick.com

CCM professor Sandra Bernhard presents an enthusiastic and informative overview of the 2005 Cincinnati Opera season.
When: Friday, May 20, 12:00 p.m.
Where: Mercantile Library, 414 Walnut Street, Downtown
Admission: Free, though reservations are requested. Please call (513) 241-2742.
— Learn more at cincinnatiopera.org

The soprano is one of the leading singers of her generation, appearing in major opera houses and with major orchestras. She has taken various chances, some of which have been brilliant successes and some not so much.
— Read more at nwsource.com

"Panache" is the last word uttered by Cyrano de Bergerac in Edmond Rostand's play and Franco Alfano's opera. Usually understood as "verve" or "theatricality," it derives from terms denoting both a writer's quill and the plumes on a cavalier's hat, hinting at the self-referential sophistication of the tale of the long-nosed swordsman and poet. That meta-theatrical fancy ripples through the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Alfano's "Cyrano de Bergerac," billed as the North American premiere of this 1936 opera. Alfano is best known for completing Puccini's "Turandot," though Alfano's final scene is savagely cut in most performances.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Lyric Opera of Chicago's 2004-05 season was not simply a high-profile artistic success, with a star-studded 50th anniversary jubilee concert and three sold-out cycles of Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung'' in addition to the usual subscription season. The company also closed the longest season in its 50-year history with a $275,000 surplus.
— Read more at suntimes.com

A corrupt authority figure oozing fake piety in the afternoon and lechery at night, an artist given to anti-government sentiments, and some serious prisoner abuse -- nothing like a 105-year-old opera to help you escape all thoughts of the contemporary world. In some ways, Puccini's Tosca was always meant to be pure escapism. The composer wasn't nearly as interested in the politics or history of the plot, set in 1800 Rome, as he was in the volatile love story that propels it.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

When is an oratorio not an oratorio? Hardly ever - even when the ever-inventive director Katie Mitchell strives to turn it into opera-theatre, as she has done with Handel's late Jephtha (first for the Welsh National Opera, now for the ENO). He had finished with the stage years before, when his "Italian" operas ceased to draw their once-besotted London fans. Instead of virtuoso foreign soloists, puritan English audiences now preferred grand choral sanctimony in earnest, quasi-Biblical tales; Jephtha was Handel's last, beautiful essay in that odd genre.
— Read more at FT.com

This is it. The final race is on for the 12 contestants who will sing their hearts out in three gruelling concerts this week at the 2005 Concours Musical International de Montreal. Six finalists will become winners, though only one will walk away with the Grand Prize on Friday. The competition used to be a triumvirate of voice, violin and piano. But that's all changed. Voice is undoubtedly the star of the event at the Centre Pierre Peladeau, where music fans mingle with voice teachers and coaches, as well as aspiring singers from the Conservatoire, McGill and the Atelier lyrique of Opera de Montreal.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

With six Handel and two Monteverdi operas included in its repertoire next season, the Bavarian State Opera sets the pace of major opera houses for Baroque opera. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, it had never performed an opera by the 17th-century composer Francesco Cavalli until last week. Among Baroque opera composers, Cavalli attracted attention early on as a candidate for modern revivals. Seminal productions of his operas appeared at Glyndebourne in the late 1960s, and later in Santa Fe; these companies offered Cavalli even before turning to Handel.
— Read more at iht.com

New Yorkers have mostly heard the English mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly singing Handel and Bellini at the New York City Opera and, in recent weeks, Mozart at the Metropolitan Opera. With the Met's "Clemenza di Tito" freshly behind her - the run ended on Saturday - Ms. Connolly spent Monday evening showing what else she can do.
— Read more at New York Times

Joe's Pub at the Public Theater [New York City] proudly announces it's fourth annual Spring benefitto support its programming, Haunted Heart, an evening with Renee Fleming and Fred Hersch, with two shows onThursday,May 19, at 7 & 9:30pm. The 9:30pm gala show also includes a reception with the artists.Previous benefits for Joe's Pub have featured Kronos Quartet, Audra McDonald, and Todd Rundgren leading a concert performance of his 1989 Public Theater musical Up Against It, with special guest Joe Jackson.
— Learn more at joespub.com

Four New York music-theater and contemporary opera companies, who have formed a Consortium to produce new work, are presenting two showcase evenings entitled "On the Edge" at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater, Symphony Space, New York City Thursday evening, May 19th, both at 7:30 pm.

Excerpts from the following works and companies will be presented in workshop/showcase form:

"Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On", music by William Banfield, text by Karren LaLonde Alenier (Encompass New Opera Theatre with Word Works)

"Lost Childhood" by Janice Hamer (music) and Mary Azrael (text) based on conversations of Yehuda Nir with Gottfried Wagner (American Opera Projects)

"The True Last Words of Dutch Schultz" by Valeria Vasilevski (text) and Eric Salzman (music) with an excerpt from "The City Wears a Slouch Hat" by John Cage and Kenneth Patchen (Center for Contemporary Opera)

"Loving Family" by Derek Bemel (music) and Wendy S. Walters (text) (Music-Theatre Group)

For further information or to make reservations call the Symphony Space box office at 212 864-5400. Symphony Space is located at2537 Broadway at the corner of 95th Street (the Thalia can be entered either through the main Symphony Space entrance or directly from 95th Street).

Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner constitutes community outreach on an operatic scale. For the first world premiere in its impeccably restored theatre - a former vaudeville house from the 1920s - the Michigan Opera Theatre has given its predominantly black city an opera about the African-American experience. It chose an apt subject in Margaret Garner, the fugitive slave who murdered her two children to spare them a life of servitude. Toni Morrison adapted the episode for her novel Beloved and, in her debut as a librettist, has reworked it into a compelling text that is theatrically assured and poetically inspired.
— Read more at FT.com

For two centuries, directors have sought to create ever more fanciful settings for Mozart and Schikaneder's moral fairy-tale; but "Mozart in the mode of Magritte" is surely unique. That is what Dominic Cooke and his designers Julian Crouch and Kevin Pollard have done for the WNO, literally, simply and disarmingly. The curtain rises on a hollow Magritte box, walls painted with blue sky and fluffy clouds, and installed with nine green doors; the chorus consists of Magritte men, all in Buddhist orange from their bowler hats to their boots, at times singing with only their heads protruding through the floor. It is a nice deadpan joke, capturing the air of a surreal world without demur. Little changes, but we don't miss temples and dungeons. The serpent that threatens Tamino at the start is a giant lobster - and why not?
— Read more at FT.com

The jazz pianist Brad Mehldau and the soprano Renee Fleming have been bending toward each other's worlds: Mr. Mehldau with a classically inspired solo-piano record some years back ("Elegiac Cycle") and plenty of written pronouncements about Brahms, Beethoven and Schumann; Ms. Fleming with an interest in jazz that she recently developed into "Haunted Heart," an album of mostly popular music and standards with Bill Frisell and Fred Hersch.
— Read more at New York Times

Break out the lightsabers -- the gallant theme is back. This time, however, the brassy fanfare leads us down the abyss. Like many aspects of the epic Star Wars saga, the music John Williams made for the films has become an icon -- one of many he has created for more than 100 movies, including Jaws, E.T., Superman and Schindler's List. Williams' latest sonic-action-packed soundtrack, released this month by Sony Classical, includes a DVD with a 70-minute video and music from all six Star Wars movies. It debuted this week on Billboard's top 200 album chart as No. 6.
— Read more at Florida Sun-Sentinel

Veneration of one's elders is not a concept that holds much water these days, although grand opera may be an exception. Broken voices with glorious pasts regularly enjoy the whoops and yells of opera fanatics celebrating some milestone or tribute. Yet in the case of Mirella Freni on Sunday afternoon they were confronting a working singer, not just a legend in bodily form.
— Read more at New York Times

A WEALTHY dilettante pays a publishing house to issue the novel he has written: a classic example of a vanity project. But suppose a wealthy man who happens to be a gifted writer subsidizes the publication of his book. Is this project any less vain because the novel is worthy? Consider this case. Was Michael R. Bloomberg's successful bid to become mayor of New York in 2001 any less valid because he financed it himself, to the tune of almost $70 million? You have to wonder whether the Republican Party would have embraced this former Democrat if he had not pledged to pick up the tab for his campaign.
— Read more at New York Times

It had the sound of one of those embarrassing vanity projects: An aging star persuades his favorite company to stage an obscure work as a vehicle tailored to his declining powers. Instead, the Metropolitan Opera's first-ever performance of Franco Alfano's "Cyrano de Bergerac" Friday night turned into an unexpected highlight of the season -- for two reasons. It resurrected a neglected work of considerable merit, and it provided yet another triumph for tenor Placido Domingo in the autumn of his great career.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Forget all that "battle of the sexes" business. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte's "Cos" fan tutte" is not so much about how women are (as the title loosely translates), or how men are, as it is about human nature. And that humanity shines through in Utah Opera's insightful, well-sung production, which opened Saturday in Salt Lake City's Capitol Theatre.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

You know the old refrain. "Whatever Placi wants, Placi gets . . ." Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera, Placido Domingo got to rhapsodise through an inflated proboscis, pine for an elusive love, swagger, stagger and die always beautifully on behalf of good old, self-sacrificing Cyrano de Bergerac. The esoteric vehicle, completed by Franco Alfano in 1936 and, it is claimed, never before performed in North America, was exhumed for the overachieving tenorissimo at the twilight of his singing career. Now 64 (iconoclasts still debate the official statistic), he will no doubt flourish as impresario, conductor and badness knows what else long after his vocal cords have rusted.
— Read more at FT.com

Headlines such as Time magazine's "Why the fat lady doesn't sing" screamed the news 'round the world last year: Opera diva Deborah Voigt was denied her signature role of Ariadne in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" at London's Covent Garden because she couldn't squeeze into the little black dress that the director demanded. Now she can - thanks to gastric bypass surgery last June. The opera star has shed 120 pounds so far. But Voigt's decision to undergo such drastic measures had nothing to do with the affair of the little black dress, she says.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

What the stars are up to, onstage and off. Superstar mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli says her next album, due out this fall, will focus on Baroque works that have a connection to Rome, her beloved hometown. The disc, which was recorded with conductor Marc Minkowski and the Musiciens du Louvre, includes music by Handel, Caldara, and Scarlatti that was written during a tumultuous but artistically fertile period in Romeï¿½s history. Bartoli will be hoping for a repeat of the enormous critical and commercial success she scored with her last album, which was devoted to music by Salieri. The Salieri disc was a revelation to music-lovers who only knew the composer as Mozartï¿½s nemesis in the play and movie Amadeus, and it garnered prestigious awards in Belgium, Japan, Germany, and the U.K.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

There's a line in Act 2 of Franco Alfano's rarely heard opera "Cyrano de Bergerac" that marks a critical turning point in the sad story of a poet's unrequited love: "The Tiger's awakening." It's said to Cyrano, the artist with a short temper, a fast sword and an excruciatingly big nose. But it might well stand for the effect tenor Placido Domingo had on audiences Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera when he sang the title role, a new role and the 121st of his exceptionally long and productive career.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

My advice to you, if you ever get invited to play the part of a corpse in an opera, is: Ask questions. Here are some that I would suggest: Does the plot of this opera call for the corpse to get shoved halfway off a bed head first by people shrieking in Italian? If so, is this corpse wearing a nightgown-style garment that could easily get bunched up around the corpse's head if the corpse finds itself in an inverted position with its legs sticking up in the air on a brightly lit stage in front of hundreds of people whom the corpse does not personally know? If so, what, if any, provisions will be made to prevent a public viewing of the corpse's butt? Fool that I am, I failed to ask these questions when I was invited to be a deceased person in an opera. This invitation resulted from a column I wrote concerning an animal in a Denmark zoo that died from stress brought on by hearing opera singers rehearse. I concluded that opera is probably fatal and should be banned as a public-health menace, just like heroin, or aspirin bottles with lids that can actually be opened.
— Read more at New York Daily News

One generation is generally reckoned at 30 years, and with its 2005 season, Opera Theatre of St. Louis reaches the three-decade mark. The company has always been unusually mature for its years, consistently balancing both the operas it offers and its bottom line, but this year it has taken a real grown-up step: Opera Theatre recently broke ground on the Sally S. Levy Opera Center, which will - at last - put the company's offices and rehearsal space under one roof and give it more opportunities for community outreach. In this 30th season, May 21 to June 26, the company will, as usual, present a carefully balanced combination of one warhorse (Verdi's "Rigoletto"), a worthwhile but neglected work (Gretry's "Zemire and Azor," doing business as "Beauty and the Beast") and a relatively modern work (Britten's "Gloriana"), featuring the return of a favorite St. Louis artist, soprano Christine Brewer. The normal comedic component is absent; in its place, we get Gounod's lovely, romantic "Romeo and Juliet." And, this season, Opera Theatre will use projected titles for the first time.
— Read more at STLtoday

It's significant that the sets for Margaret Garner, the new opera by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and composer Richard Danielpour, are framed by walls of painted quilt work. The story tells of the patchwork quality of American life. Margaret Garnerâ??s America is no melting pot, but a ragged and uncomfortable juxtaposition of cultures white and black, of freedom and bondage, of prejudice and understanding, of hatred and love.
— Read more at toledoblade.com

A favorite pastime among musically inclined digerati is the creation of "mash-ups," hybrid pop tracks in which, say, the voice of Madonna is digitally spliced into a song by the Sex Pistols. Tom Dean and Lori Zook's one-act opera "White Darkness," which had its world premiere Thursday night at the Oakland Opera Theater, is a sort of live- action mash-up, a bewildering but fascinating melange of disparate parts. It combines music and plot elements from Prokofiev's opera "The Fiery Angel," figures from voodoo religion, Haitian rhythms and the horrific events of San Francisco in 1978 (Dan White, Jim Jones) into a strangely compelling amalgam.
sfgate.com

Seattle Opera's current production of "The Tales of Hoffmann" will surely rank among its finest productions. This opera works on every level - musically, dramatically and visually - a seamless production that is pure pleasure on every count. It's a major achievement given the many variables possible in any production of "Hoffmann:" Composer Jacques Offenbach died before he finished the work, and in more than a century of productions the opera has been subject to much tinkering.
— Read more at HeraldNet

When Carl Tanner performs the role of the hair-powered biblical hero in Washington National Opera's Samson et Dalila tonight at the Kennedy Center, the easiest part for him should be pulling down the walls of the Philistine temple in the last scene. No big deal for a guy who used to make a living kicking in doors. That was some years back, when the burly Tanner worked as a bounty hunter - although, as he is quick to point out, "I didn't break down a door unless I had to."
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

For many Americans who do not identify as opera buffs, which is undoubtedly a significant majority, Grand Opera can conjure up images of long, unintelligible singing in a foreign language about a confusing story that has no relevance to our daily lives. But opera is, in fact, the most politically inspired musical genre. Many were written not for the rich patron class, but for the general public to hear and respond to hot political topics of the day.
Michigan Opera Theatre's premier of "Margaret Garner," a new opera commissioned by MOT, follows in that tradition of opera as a political act. "Margaret Garner" tells the story of a deeply American tragedy, inspired by the true story of an enslaved woman's quest for freedom. In 1856, when Garner was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky, she escaped with her husband and four children and headed north towards freedom. But when the family was soon recaptured in southern Ohio, Garner made the horrific decision to sacrifice her children rather than see them returned to the bonds of slavery. Garner's desperate act and her subsequent trial became one of the most significant and controversial fugitive slave stories in pre-Civil War America.
— Read more at pridesource.com

There are A half-dozen operas, perhaps, which occupy the high peak of great success â?? six operas which are continually popular, continually in demand. Of those, Verdi's tragedy, "La Traviata," holds a special place. It has been popular since it first was performed in Venice in 1853. Based on the novel "Les Dame aux Camellias' by Dumas, the opera's story of a rich courtesan who sacrifices her riches and life for the family of her lover was a bit scandalous in the middle of the 19th century. (Today it appears without any hint of its original scandal.)
— Read more at U-San Bernardino

London's Royal Opera House and conductor Sir Charles Mackerras have taken the top prizes at the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) awards. Sir Charles received the RPS Gold Medal and BBC Radio 3 Listeners Award at the event honouring live classical music. The opera house won the conductor award for music director Antonio Pappano and the singer award for Ben Heppner.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

During the 1970s, American opera fell into an ice age. The number of annual premieres by native composers froze in the single digits, and there was no more effective way to kill a work at the box office than to market it as a new opera. "I always used to think it was ironic that when a musical opened on Broadway it was always sold as a 'new musical by so-and-so,' " says David Gockley, the progressive general director of the Houston Grand Opera. "That was an anathema in opera." How times have changed.
— Read more at freep.com

Canadian tenor John Mac Master got booed at the curtain call of the new American opera Margaret Garner, and for good reason. He played the vile, white overseer Casey, and did his job almost too well. Another Canadian tenor, Roger Honeywell, also performed unsympathetic characters -- an auctioneer and a judge. The two men joined the stalwart singers of the Michigan Opera Theatre to launch an ambitious world premiere at the Detroit Opera House. If Margaret Garner has attracted more than the usual new-opera hoopla, it is because its creators are the 1993 Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison, who wrote the libretto, and Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

EMI CLASSICS has just recorded Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" with Placido Domingo, Nina Stemme and conductor Antonio Pappano. It is widely believed to be the last-ever studio CD from EMI, because DVDs are taking over the market. EMI's ex-president, Peter Alward, whose project this is, says that "The public today listens with its eyes," but also that economics play a large part. "Tristan" will cost more than $1 million to produce; the average filmed opera on DVD runs about $200,000.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Placido Domingo was in his dressing room at the Metropolitan Opera, preparing his 121st new role. Some of those roles he has done hundreds of times: "Tosca," 225; "Otello," 210; "Carmen," around 200. He reeled off the figures, a statistician of his own career. Then there are rarer parts: "Stiffelio," "Oberon." Joining the list tomorrow will be an opera that the Met hasn't done before, either: Franco Alfano's "Cyrano de Bergerac."
— Read more at New York Times

Long before the curtain went up on the hotly anticipated Toni Morrison/Richard Danielpour opera Margaret Garner, the Michigan Opera Theatre premiere on Saturday was a public-relations triumph. The prospect of star mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves singing the words of Nobel Prize laureate Morrison prompted Rigoletto-size ticket sales. As an outreach effort, this opera about the 1856 trial of an escaped Kentucky slave indeed reached Motor City African Americans, who account for a gratifying 70 percent of the company's new subscribers. Adding a bit of glamour, seldom-seen opera icon Kathleen Battle unexpectedly materialized to attend the premiere.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Deborah Sandler announced yesterday that she would resign as Kentucky Opera's general director when her contract expires at the end of August. She said she has no specific plans other than to step back and consider "the next chapter of my life." Sandler, who came here seven years ago when she was 45, has substantially improved the company's artistic level while contending with a series of difficult fiscal challenges.
— Read more at courier-journal.com [thanks to Alan Brandt WUOL-FM]

Saying San Diego Opera's "La Boheme" is terrific is a little like putting cheesecake in front of a struggling dieter. It's an unfair temptation to describe the high caliber of the singing and acting, the strength of the direction and the quality of the production when there probably aren't any tickets left to the final three performances.
— Read more at North County Times

When Valerie Pineda created the Little Opera Company of New Jersey, featuring professional singers and children, people told her she could never teach kids to perform a full opera. Five years later, Pineda has to turn kids away from the opera company, which features two performances a year with several professional singers and 50 children. The latest show, Gaetano Donizetti's "L'Elisir d'amore," features children singing solos, narrating the show and even choreographing a few dances. It will be performed on Saturday in Cranford.
— Read more at nj.com

For years, Broadway has been held hostage by Disney kiddie toons, glibly ironic spoofs, revivals and "jukebox" shows regurgitating musty pop hits. Now at last, the American musical has recovered its voice. Though Broadway mostly slumbered last fall, the spring semester has produced a startling half-dozen new shows boasting actual new music.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

"The Light in the Piazza," a complex, lushly romantic tale of love at first sight that had its premiere at Seattle's Intiman Theatre, was nominated for 11 Tony Awards yesterday including best musical. Among its nominees are Craig Lucas, Intiman's associate artistic director, for book of a musical, and Bartlett Sher, the company's artistic director, for director of a musical. Other nominations went to Adam Guettel for original score and to Victoria Clark, who starred in the production at Intiman, for leading actress in a musical.
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

Grand opera is happiest when the issues are big and little neutral ground stands between good and evil. What better topic than American slavery and its aftermath? The Michigan Opera Theater's premiere performance of "Margaret Garner" on Saturday night had heated the passions, stirred guilt and broken a lot of hearts before a word or a note was written.
— Read more at New York Times

About midway through the first act of "Margaret Garner," the music relaxes into a hushed murmur and the slave Margaret coos a lullaby to her swaddled infant inside the cabin she shares with her husband and mother-in-law.
— Read more at freep.com

In January 1856, Margaret Garner and her husband fled the Kentucky farm where they were slaves. They were captured, and Margaret Garner killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife rather than let her return to slavery. The story was the basis for Toni Morrison's novel Beloved. As Detroit Public Radio's Celeste Headlee reports, it debuts Saturday night as an opera, Margaret Garner, with mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role. Morrison wrote the libretto, collaborating with Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour.
— Read more at NPR

Klaus Bachler will take the helm of the Bavarian State Opera when Peter Jonas steps down, the company announced. Bachler, who was born in Austria, will become the companyï¿½s Intendant. or general manager, after his current contract with Viennaï¿½s Burgtheater expires in 2008.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

It's always a revelation to see how different an opera production looks and sounds when new leading singers step in. Saturday's opening performance of "The Tales of Hoffmann," the exciting new production at Seattle Opera, featured such a terrific ensemble cast that Sunday's alternate cast (introducing five new singers) had very big shoes to fill. But Sunday afternoon's first performance, a completely new show, generally worked well on its own terms.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Lorin Maazel's critically condemned opera version of George Orwell's "1984" reaches its third performance at the Royal Opera House on Wednesday, with the house nearly sold out for the third straight time. The crowds are coming despite savage reviews following the May 3 premiere. In the doublespeak of the novel, schlock is gold, flop is hit, and savage criticism is boffo.
— Read more at ABC News

People in the opera world often ask: Where are all the good, healthy young voices? Here's an answer: at the Mannes College of Music. There is, certainly, one major criticism to be made of the "Zauberflote" ("Magic Flute") that the Mannes Opera put on at the Kaye Playhouse on Saturday night and (with a different cast) on Sunday afternoon. That is: It's over. It's a shame more people can't hear it.
— Read more at New York Times

It is an image that so imprints itself on the mind -- make that so sears the mind -- that it lingers and festers and flashes back over and over again. Margaret Garner, an 1856 runaway slave who has killed two of her children rather than subject them to a return to slavery, has hung herself on the gallows despite a last-minute clemency ruling. And as portrayed by mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the world premiere Saturday night of "Margaret Garner" at the Detroit Opera House, the scene is mesmerizing.
— Read more at mlive.com

A great new American opera came to life Saturday night at the Detroit Opera House with the world premiere of "Margaret Garner," an eloquent and touching story about love and family in the face of horrific adversity. Although "Margaret Garner" is the first opera for both Richard Danielpour, one of America's most prominent composers, and Toni Morrison, who fashioned the libretto from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved," the new work is a hand-in-glove masterpiece of words fitted to music.
— Read more at detnews.com

In the hours after the final curtain came down on the international premiere of "Margaret Garner" Saturday night, fans from Detroit and around the world clinked champagne glasses, nibbled fine European pastries and celebrated what they called a twofold success story: staging this kind of an opera and hosting it in the city of Detroit.
— Read more at freep.com

"Ohio. It means 'Beautiful'"
"Is it? Is it beautiful?"
"So I hear. A beautiful place for a future."
Those were Toni Morrison's words, sung by fugitive slaves Margaret Garner and her husband, Robert, as they fled to freedom in Ohio, in the deeply emotional new opera "Margaret Garner." It was one of many spectacular moments Saturday night at Michigan Opera Theatre that beautifully captured the two themes running through this opera like a strong river: love of family and hope. Hope for a better life, a better future, a better time.
— Read more at news.cincinnati.com

Richard Wagner set his fantastical world of Valkyries, gnomes and giants along the Rhine, not the Amazon. But this is a city with a long history of thinking large and even outlandishly, which is how the Amazonas Opera Festival here has ended up staging Wagner's sprawling four-part "Ring of the Nibelungen" cycle in the heart of the world's biggest rain forest.
— Read more at New York Times

[Seldom has the Royal Opera House been home to such a witless production as 1984. Real music lovers should, instead, head for Birmingham ] Some composers are more equal than others. If you're a celebrated conductor who fancies writing an opera, and can spare Â£416,000 to pay for the production yourself, the Royal Opera will spend Â£500,000 of public money putting it on for you. That's the story behind Lorin Maazel's 1984.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Ten ways to gear up for the premiere of "Margaret Garner" by Cincinnati Opera, opening July 14:
1 -- Host a "Beloved" or "Uncle Tom's Cabin" book discussion group. "Beloved," Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was inspired by the Margaret Garner story.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Bizet's "Carmen" lasts only a few hours. But by the time it reaches San Diego Opera next season, it will have taken five years of preparation. That's typical of the opera world, where the complex, labor-intensive undertakings often take longer than the planning for symphonies, chamber music and recitals.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

Singing heroic tenor parts in opera houses across Europe is a far cry from detasseling corn or moving brick at Adel's brickyard, and 29-year-old Eric Cutler knows it. Cutler, who grew up in Adel and graduated from Luther College, is rising rapidly in the opera world. Last year he sang at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City. Last month he won the prestigious Richard Tucker Award - one of only five tenors who have been chosen in the award's history.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

The ad campaign for the L.A. Opera's upcoming Der Rosenkavalier has generated a lot of talk. Downtown artist Gottfried Helnwein, who is designing the production's costumes and sets, also came up with the poster - using two models, a little makeup, and the power of suggestion. In Richard Strauss' opera, aging aristocrat Marschallin beds the young Octavian. But Octavian's a mezzo-soprano, played by a lady in what opera calls a "trouser role." Helnwein just took the trousers out. In the ad, the women's expressions are tender and their lips mere millimeters apart.
— Read more at LA Downtown News Online

Richard Nixon never saw the opera "Nixon in China." The former president didn't even like seeing himself on television, let alone portrayed on the stage. In any case, he hated opera. This seems at least in part contradictory: Nixon staged his historic 1972 visit to China as a media event to be watched live on television the world over. We were intended to see the leader of the free world's face close up, with its famous five o'clock shadow, as he smiled and shook hands with Chinese Communist leaders Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
— Read more at startribune.com

At first, opera and elementary school may seem an unlikely pairing. After all, most 5- to 10-year-old children would pick a tightly choreographed Britney Spears routine to a resounding Wagnerian aria any day. But Wednesday afternoon at Riverside Elementary School, a packed auditorium of students showed nothing but smiles as they watched and performed in Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
— Read more at PACKETONLINE

OPERA lovers don't have to travel to San Francisco or San Jose to get their fix this week. Performances ranging from the traditional to nouveau are on, shall we say, cozy stages in Berkeley and Oakland. Better yet, they're being presented by two critically acclaimed groups. Berkeley Opera continues its 26th season with Giuseppe Verdi's "Macbeth," directed by Jonathan Khuner and featuring the UC Alumni Chorus. Verdi condenses his version of Shakespeare's famous story, keeping focus on the two main characters and the witches. Though "Macbeth" came early in Verdi's career â?? before his successes with "Rigoletto" and "La Traviata" - it remained one of the composer's favorites.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Old is New! Blindness is Vision! Safety is Strength! Welcome to Covent Garden, where George Orwell's doublethink this week became politically acceptable. Onstage, while the Royal Opera was giving the premiere of Lorin Maazel's 1984, Orwellian mottoes flashed up on screens. War is peace, they said. Freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength. For anyone who had never read the novel, here was the storyline in sweet, bite-size chunks.
— Read more at FT.com

CHILDREN'S operas rarely enjoy much success, Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" being the great exception. More typical is Tobias Picker's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," inspired by a Roald Dahl story and unperformed since its 1998 premiere. Yet a recent adaptation of "The Little Prince," Antoine de Saint-ExupÃ©ry's children's classic, may be able to hold its own.
— Read more at New York Times

"Hold me." "Hold on." "Stay sweet." "Stay strong." "...You are the sign that love is the only master the heart obeys; Love is the only master that my heart obeys." Nobel laureate Toni Morrison concluded her keynote address to OPERA America's national conference, "Diverse Voices," Thursday with a deeply moving reading of words she wrote to "Margaret Garner," her first opera with composer Richard Danielpour, which received its world premiere at Michigan Opera Theatre in Detroit Saturday night.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

The original cast recording of the Broadway production of The Light in the Piazza, composer Adam Guettel and librettist Craig Lucas' new musical, will be released on May 24. The release is no doubt timed to get the CDs in the hands of Tony voters before they file their ballots; Piazza is expected to receive multiple Tony nominations, including one for Best Score.
— Read more at Playbill News

When the grandson of a great Broadway musical composer writes an outstanding Broadway musical, it's of interest to geneticists as well as theater-goers. Adam Guettel, grandson of Richard Rodgers, is the composer of "The Light in the Piazza" at Lincoln Center's Beaumont Theater, a lushly lyrical romantic work that seems almost operatic in contrast to the rock and pop musicals that hold sway on Broadway today. It marks Guettel as a formidable talent who has gone his granddad even one better, since he also wrote the lyrics for the show, something Rodgers never did.
— Read more at washingtontimes.com

Toni Morrison adapts story of 'Beloved' for new tragic opera 'Margaret Garner'.
It may center on a dreadful chapter of American history, but "Margaret Garner," which receives its world premiere Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, is not an opera merely about the awfulness of slavery, says librettist Toni Morrison. It's just as much about the treasured institution of family and the desperate attempt by two fugitive slaves to keep theirs together -- in an environment that accorded them no personal rights, privacy or dignity whatsoever.
— Read more at detnews.com

When the final curtain falls Saturday night on the world premiere of "Margaret Garner" at the Detroit Opera House, applause and roses will rain down on the cast and the creative team. But the professional opera world knows where the ultimate credit belongs. And perhaps the spotlight will indeed stop for a moment on David DiChiera, the founding general director of Michigan Opera Theatre (MOT).
— Read more at detnews.com

If Lorin Maazel's opera "1984" were a brilliant work with a real shot at a future, few people would care that he put a great deal of his own money into the production that opened on Tuesday night at the Royal Opera, Covent Garden.
Unfortunately, though there are some compelling elements to "1984" and the creators received a fairly rousing ovation by the expectant audience, the opera is hampered by Mr. Maazel's undistinguished score. The music is never less than thoroughly professional. But Mr. Maazel lacks a personal voice as a composer. What constitutes a compositional voice is hard to define. But you know it when you hear it.
— Read more at New York Times

Interviewed about his new opera, Lorin Maazel looked forward to "shock and outrage" from the audience for 1984. Shock and outrage there certainly should be after the premiere, though not because of the work's dramatic impact or its emotional power. It is both shocking and outrageous that the Royal Opera, a company of supposed international standards and standing, should be putting on a new opera of such wretchedness and lack of musical worth.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

UK newspaper critics give their verdict on New York's Philharmonic orchestra conductor Lorin Maazel's opera adaptation of George Orwell's 1984, which received its world premiere at the Royal Opera House in London on Tuesday.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

New Jersey Opera Theater (NJOT) will present its first professional opera performance, Verdi's masterpiece Il Trovatore, sung in concert. This thrilling tale of love, hate and revenge will be brought to life by a cast of internationally acclaimed singers and professional musicians, under the baton of Maestro Michael Recchiuti.
Friday, May 6, 2005 at 7:30pm
Richardson Auditorium, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
— Read more at NJOT

The Royal Opera at Covent Garden has been understandably preoccupied in recent weeks with rehearsals and preparations for Tuesday night's premiere of Lorin Maazel's ambitious opera "1984." But judging by three other performances over the last three days, the company is thriving under the dynamic leadership of the conductor Antonio Pappano, who has been music director since 2002.
— Read more at The New York Times

World premiere of 'Margaret Garner' tells the tragedy of the Kentucky slave Composer Richard Danielpour, a descendant of Persian-Jewish stock, recalls growing up in New York under the spell of Aretha Franklin's "call-and-response" songs, pop tunes with ancient roots in African-American field music and gospel. Now, at age 49 and recognized as one of America's leading musical figures, Danielpour has come to Detroit to play out the crowning achievement of his life, the world premiere of his first opera, "Margaret Garner." And the music of this tragic tale of love and family, set against the grim backdrop of slavery, draws on the same richly spun fabric of African-American sounds that once touched Danielpour through the diva of Motown. "Margaret Garner," with a libretto by Pulitzer and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, enters the world May 7 at the Detroit Opera House. Musically, culturally, socially, the opera's premiere is a Detroit event with a capital E.
— Read more at detnews.com

"Margaret Garner" will come alive Saturday on the stage of the Detroit Opera House, a century and a half after the escaped slave tried to kill her children rather than see them live in bondage. The highly anticipated production is the first foray into the world of opera for Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour, who created the music, and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison, who wrote the libretto and whose 1987 novel "Beloved" was inspired by the Garner story.
— Read more at ABC News

The high jinks and hilarity of opera's comic barber come to life in a discussion by Italian opera expert Phillip Gossett and performance excerpts by opera students from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.
When: Tuesday, May 10, 7:00 p.m.
Where: University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Werner Recital Hall
Admission: Free, though reservations are requested. Please call (513) 241-2742.
— Learn more at cincinnatiopera.org

American Opera Projects does the useful task of presenting workshop performances of new scores, often before the ink has dried. Last year, the company began offering glimpses of Jorge MartÃn's "Before Night Falls," an opera about the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, and on Monday evening at the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center it presented scenes from the work's first act.
— Read more at The New York Times

It's the Des Moines Metro Opera in Indianola. Celebrating its 33rd season, Metro Opera once again offers audiences a variety of repertory. The three operas chosen for presentation this year are Offenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann," Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" and Benjamin Britten's "Gloriana."
— Read more at Ames Tribune

Scepticism has been expressed in some quarters as to the wisdom of the Royal Opera buying in a package containing Lorin Maazel's new opera 1984, unseen and unheard.
— Read more at Telegraph

Margaret Garner will come alive on the stage of the Detroit Opera House this weekend, a century and a half after the escaped slave tried to kill her children rather than see them live in bondage, an act that sent shock waves through pre-Civil War America.
The highly anticipated opera -- the brainchild of Grammy Award-winning composer Richard Danielpour and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison -- is based on the Garner story, one of the most significant
— Read more at freep.com

Lorin Maazel, the conductor of New York's Philharmonic orchestra, has held the premiere of his first opera - an adaptation of George Orwell's novel 1984. The opera received its world premiere in London's Royal Opera on Tuesday 3 May. Maazel, who turned 75 this year, told BBC World Service's The Interview programme that he believed the book was the "true stuff" of opera. "I suppose I had always wanted to write an opera, but didn't know it," he said. "I found that once I got into the material I was very inspired, very motivated, by the breadth of the story, by the challenge of making this extraordinary novel come alive in a different frame and context."
— Read more at BBC NEWS

During a break in the first cast meeting of "Le Nozze Di Figaro" in San Francisco in 1995, Anita Johnson dashed to a phone to give her grandmother "the count." The African-American opera singer habitually counted the other black people in leading roles. Often, she was the only one. Sometimes, she counted two. But this time there were a whopping four.
— Read more at detnews.com

The orchestra of Milan's famed La Scala opera house - left without a conductor after the resignation of Riccardo Muti - said Friday it had cancelled a British tour planned for the end of May. The orchestra was unable to secure the services of Azerbaijan-born conductor Mstislav Rostropovic, whom it had hoped to employ for concerts on May 26, 27, and 28 in Glasgow, London and Birmingham, said orchestra spokesman Paolo Besana.
— Read more at National Post

A plenitude of sweet music was in the air Saturday night at the Civic Opera House. It arrived long before Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Serenade to Music," its Shakespearean text a paean to "sweet music," that closed the concert by members of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
— Read more at suntimes.com

"Women are like that." A colloquialism today and when W. A. Mozart -- along with librettist Lorenza da Ponte -- first wrote the opera Cosi fan tutte (literally, 'Thus do all women'). An abridged English version of the show is being presented this week by the OSU Department of Music and the Opera Theater Corvallis. "A lot of music historians think of Cosi fan tutte as Mozart's musically most accomplished opera," said Richard Poppino, director of vocal studies.
— Read more at Oregon State Daily Barometer Online

Music lovers with long memories will remember a particular flowering of talent at Cornish College of the Arts, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when an imposing infusion of talent arrived on the faculty. Tenor John Duykers, and composers Paul Dresher and Janice Giteck, were among the leading lights, along with flutist and new-music impresario Paul Taub.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Music was a preoccupation for Thomas Mann, in his life as in his fiction, so it is with some cosmic justice that the composer Francis Thorne has converted one of Mann's short stories, "Mario and the Magician," into an opera. Mr. Thorne completed his work in 1993, and this weekend, two performances at the Kaye Playhouse by the Center for Contemporary Opera were billed as its professional premiere.
— Read more at The New York Times

Operas like "Don Giovanni" or "Die Zauberflote" today look like repudiations of the formal, almost motionless style that ruled Europe's musical theater for most of the 18th century. Yet Mozart was surrounded all his life by opera seria, and he wrote four of them, including the early "Idomeneo" and the late "Clemenza di Tito," which was heard Friday night at the Metropolitan Opera.
— Read more at The New York Times

The creators of a new opera based on the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" did not have to work hard to make George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a loveless and brutal world resonate with audiences today. Technology used for surveillance and control, the denial of personal freedom, Doublethink, Newspeak and a seemingly endless war place a work written in 1948 firmly in the 21st Century. Lorin Maazel, the American conductor and composer who began working on the opera in 2000, insisted he did not set out to create political theatre.
— Read more at Reuters.co.uk