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

It was music to Michael Chadwick's ears when Ann Eisemann told him she wasn't afraid of opera anymore. The two had just bumped into each other during the intermission for Don Giovanni, the first show produced by Mr. Chadwick's new company, The Living Opera.
— Read more at DallasNews.com

Glimmerglass Opera has named Michael MacLeod, currently the executive director of the Connecticut's New Haven Symphony, as general director. McLeod will replace Joanna Cossa, who resigned in September 2004 because of illness in her family. He begins his tenure in September.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

Whether you hanker for a relaxing picnic with the family or a grand summer holiday, New York State's summer music festivals allow you to get away from it all in the company of music's brightest stars. Aaron Copland, whose boldness and generosity of spirit made him the quintessential New Yorker and American, is the focus of this year's Bard Music Festival. Highlights include the opera "The Tender Land" (Aug. 4-12); the Martha Graham Dance Company in "Appalachian Spring" (July 8-10); William Wyler films with scores by Copland and others (July 10-Aug. 14); and dozens of concerts, lectures and multimedia presentations exploring Copland and his legacy by music festival artistic director Leon Botstein and others (Aug. 12-21).
— Read more at Newsday.com [viliane fille]

About 15 years ago, when the New Israeli Opera was founded, one of the justifications for its creation was the establishment of contemporary opera. No more bombastic productions with heavy set men and women, whose throats emit heavenly music, but rather contemporary works that breathe life into wonderful theatrical vocal music written over many generations.
— Read more at Haaretz.com

[Westpac St James Theatre, Wellington. Wednesday and Friday 7.30pm, Sunday 2pm.]
One of Mozart's most popular operas, Don Giovanni opened to deserved rapturous acclaim on Saturday night. Following the modern trend to play this tale of the great philanderer as a comedy, the way that Mozart had originally intended, the audience are treated to one of Mozart's finest scores, brimming with effervescent melody all skilfully tinged with the ominous overtones which hint at the Don's final downfall.
— Read more at MANAWATU STANDARD

Imagine: opera, the Reader's Digest condensed version.
Well, not exactly. The Metropolitan Opera, as part of the labor agreement with its chorus and orchestra announced Monday, said it would stage a limited run of its new production of "The Magic Flute" reduced to about 90 minutes.
The short version (the full version runs more than three hours with intermission) is a test of what could become a new way of attracting audiences, said Joseph Volpe, the opera house's general manager. The performances, to take place in the winter holidays of the 2006-7 season, will be aimed at both children and adults.
— Read more at New York Times

[Troupe's production of 'Die Fledermaus' is visually stunning and vocally pleasing]
The Ohio Light Opera bubbled over with vocal charm at last Tuesday's opening performance of Johann Strauss II's frothy operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat). The production, a directing debut by veteran OLO singer Ted Christopher, is loads of fun.
— Read more at Beacon Journal

Belfast opera buffs will be watching the skies this week as they prepare for a helping of outdoor virtual opera. Botanic Gardens is hosting a live broadcast of La Boheme on Thursday night, from London's Royal Opera House. The tragic tale of the love of a consumptive seamstress for a poet in 18th century Paris is the third time Opera in the Park has come to the city.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

[The 'fat lady' doesn't sing at the opera anymore -- not judging by the Florida Grand Opera's marketing campaign anyway.]
The venerable Florida Grand Opera doesn't feel so stuffy anymore. The seventh-oldest opera company in North America has recast its image with a 2-year-old marketing campaign aimed at those who stereotype the art, mostly because they've never experienced it themselves. The opera's new marketing strategy has proven successful: Since 2003, ticket sales have increased by 14 percent and records have been set with the three highest-grossing productions in the FGO's 65-year history.
— Read more at Herald.com

[An opera set in ancient Jerusalem has been updated with a modern political villain, writes Clare Morgan.]
It is 587BC and the Assyrian invasion of Jerusalem is in full swing. The terrified Jews are taking shelter in the Temple of Solomon as the armies of King Nebuchadnezzar advance. But their prayers are to no avail - the wall tumbles down, the temple is overrun and in strides, um, Saddam Hussein. Featuring the rifle-toting former Iraqi dictator in an opera set in ancient Jerusalem, but with its roots in the politics of 1840s Italian nationalism, might seem a bit of a stretch. But for David Freeman, who is directing Nabucco, which opens Opera Australia's winter season, it's about giving Verdi's opera context, and acknowledging the long line of oppressive regimes in the Middle East.
— Read more at smh.com.au

Opera addicts and devotees of talent-spotting shows will remember Denise Leigh, a blind mother of three, and Jane Gilchrist, who worked on a supermarket checkout. The pair were joint winners of Operatunity, which saw Channel 4 teaming up with English National Opera to search for new talent.
— Read more at woodandvale.london24.net

Soprano Nicole Cabell, 27, has been named "Singer of the World" in the biennial competition for the title held in Cardiff, Wales. The triumph brought her a prize of 10,000 pounds (about $18,000), a shimmering trophy donated by Welsh Royal Crystal and engagements with the Welsh National Opera and the British Broadcasting Corp.
— Read more at JS Online

Listening to a soprano's voice is a sonic experience like no other. Unearthly, ethereal and at times slightly scary, it is, for many, a rare treat to hear such angelic notes in person. Here in the Wood River Valley, however, thanks to Floyd McCracken, Marsha Ingham and Frank Meyer, co-founders of the Sun Valley Opera, we have ample opportunity to delight in such sonorous experiences.
— Read more at Idaho Mountain Express

Among the world's most disturbing spectacles, that of the aging but clueless opera singer ranks right up there with the Michael Jackson trial. In Opera Land, decades of extravagant adulation - not to mention that deafening buzz of high Cs in their sinuses - can leave the greatest singers in denial about their current vocal state, overly optimistic about rising to the occasion, or too confident about what they can get away with.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Joseph Horowitz is a force in classical music today, a prophet and an agitator. He's written books and essays arguing that classical music has been "sacralized" in America - treated as if it were something dead and sacred from the European past. He pines for what he thinks was a brighter time, the 1890's, when the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak came to America, became inspired by black and American Indian music and wrote his "New World" Symphony, which became the talk of New York.
— Read more at New York Times

TodiMusicFest is branching out. The annual July performing arts festival headquartered in downtown Portsmouth will present concerts in Hampton, Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Chesapeake this year. Singer-actor John Easterlin comes to Hampton for "What a Character!" - a musical comedy evening that pokes fun at stuffy opera singers. He'll be onstage at 8 p.m. July 26 in St. John's Episcopal Church in downtown Hampton. Tickets are $15.
— Read more at dailypress.com

Less than a month before opening night, the costume shop at the Santa Fe Opera was buzzing. Stitchers sat hunched over sewing machines, "first hands" cut out patterns, and apprentices ironed bolts of fabric. Amid the hum of activity, designer Willa Kim and costume-shop head David Burke circled a mannequin resembling the torso of Kevin Langan, who will be playing the part of Timur, the exiled king of Tartary, in the opera's production of Puccini's Turandot.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

New Zealand Opera has appointed of distinguished international conductor and musician, Wyn Davies, to the newly-created position of director of music. Mr Davies takes up his new role immediately and will conduct the winter season of Don Giovanni. He will continue to be based in the UK but will be in New Zealand as required on a regular basis, to fulfil his duties, New Zealand Opera said in a statement.
— Read more at STUFF

The marketing campaign for San Francisco Opera's summer season invites audiences to enjoy "The Gamble of Love." Artistically, the company has taken a bit of a gamble, too -- and it mostly pays off.
The monthlong season, which runs through July 10, offers three works in rotation which, despite the advertising slogan, have little in common, except that none of them is a surefire box-office favorite -- Tchaikovsky's "The Queen of Spades," Mozart's "Cosi fan tutte" and Bizet's "The Pearl Fishers." This past weekend, they were performed on three consecutive nights, and though the house was never full, the audiences were enthusiastic.
— Read more at Metromix

[Adam Guettel's breakthrough musical captures sights, passions too beautiful for words]
From the harp arpeggio that open its Overture like a gentle breeze, Nonesuch's superb original-cast recording of The Light in the Piazza radiates enchantment. Piazza, which won six Tonys earlier this month, has been greeted by many as the most distinguished new musical in years. At Lincoln Center'sVivian Beaumont Theatre, it's not always easy to separate the impact of composer/lyricist Adam Guettel's ambitious score from the show's other components: the uniformly brilliant performances, stunning production design, Bartlett Sher's sensitive direction and Craig Lucas' subtly incisive (and strangely underrated) book.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

IN mid-May, a Federal Express package containing three copies of a 226-page musical manuscript thumped on the desk of Sarah Billinghurst, the assistant manager for artistic affairs at the Metropolitan Opera. It was sent by Tan Dun, the Chinese-born avant-garde composer whom the Met had commissioned eight years ago to write an opera. Seeing the half score, Ms. Billinghurst said she felt "ecstatically happy."
"Relieved" might have been appropriate, too. The project was controversial from the beginning, with the selection of a composer identified with the downtown New York art scene, who also makes videos and art installations and designs some of his own instruments. Mr. Tan is also a globe-trotting conductor, and his friends and associates had been wondering if, with all his other commitments, he had actually written a single note of the work. But now there was concrete evidence of progress. It was on track.
— Read more at New York Times

A highlight of this year's Banff Summer Arts Festival is a remounting of the opera Filumena, from Aug. 3 to 6, by Canadian composer John Estacio. The opera, commissioned by the Banff Centre and Calgary Opera, premiered in 2003. More recently, the Banff Centre's production was staged this past April at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
— Read more at canada.com

The story of a 19th-century woman who killed her daughter and tried to take the lives of her other children offers a microcosmic look at one of the great, and enduringly painful, tragedies of the American experience: slavery. Contemporary audiences might not be familiar with the Margaret Garner saga, but in 1856 it was a front-page story that bitterly divided the nation. Garner, enslaved on a Kentucky plantation, attempted to flee to free Ohio with seven members of her family. Facing recapture, Garner tried to kill her brood -- and herself -- rather than return to slavery. Before being caught, she killed her 2 1/2-year-old daughter. Garner's heart-wrenching story already has been told through Toni Morrison's best-selling novel "Beloved," which earned a Pulitzer Prize for literature and was brought to the screen by Oprah Winfrey, with Jonathan Demme directing. As any aficionado of the form will say, however, the opera stage casts a particular spell of its own, especially when a riveting plot is married to fine music.
— Read more at Reuters.com

Every evening, you are nervous before going on the stage. It's that kind of nervosity because of the responsibility. You know, right now, everybody that goes to the theater, they are coming because you are singing, you know, more or less. And you have the responsibility to make things well, to make things happening right. And there is so much preparation before on my part. And there's so much anxiety on their part also. They get the tickets. They know, "Well, that day, we will have to go, so we have to get ready, we have to . . ." You know? It's a lot of anticipation before a performance. So when the lights go down, the opera starts, and you come out, this magic has to happen. It is essential that you are fine.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

It has been an interesting year for Lorin Maazel. In March the controversial music director celebrated his 75th birthday with a concert of his own compositions. The result might be described as a trivial pursuit. In May he got into trouble with the premiere of his opera 1984 at Covent Garden, with vanity rearing its nasty head because he had personally subsidised the project.
— Read more at FT.com

[A successfully earthy departure for Renee Fleming; Montserrat Caballe's life and work on DVD] In a virtuoso transformation of vocal transformation, opera diva Renee Fleming has unveiled a captivatingly earthy delivery of jazz songs that sounds nothing like her operatic work. Her voice pitched an octave lower than in her opera and recital, Fleming's CD "Haunted Heart" reflects the singer's Sunday-night student gigs while studying at the Crane School of Music. Her cabaret singing was so good, tenor saxophonist Jean-Baptiste "Illinois" Jacquet invited her tour with him.
— Read more at gaycitynews.com

[What happens when a singer goes out on stage - only to find he can't produce a note? Top tenor Ben Heppner tells Martin Kettle how he overcame the worst crisis of his career ]
It is disconcerting - and very refreshing - to meet an opera singer who is as frank about his frailties as Ben Heppner. As we settle down to discuss the Canadian's latest visit to London in an interview room at Covent Garden - where he is rehearsing Verdi's Otello - I mention that I last heard him in 2000 in Vienna, in the role of the emperor in Richard Strauss's Die Frau Ohne Schatten.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

In the two weeks since it picked up six Tonys, musical The Light in the Piazza has seen box office jump 28.1% per show compared with the month before, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data compiled by the League of American Theatres and Producers. Piazza, the Broadway debut from composer/lyricist Adam Guettel, certainly had room to grow. Initial critical reception had been mixed (though supporters were effusive), and up until the Tonys, Piazza filled 74% of seats on average, data show. In the two weeks since the Tonys, that's grown to 93%.
— Read more at USATODAY.com

When James Conlon steps on to the podium Friday night to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, it will mark his emergence as a major player on the American classical music scene. After spending nearly two decades in Europe, Mr. Conlon is assuming a new role as the music director of the Ravinia Festival, the orchestra's summer home.
"I had never planned to stay that long. It just worked out that way. I kept going - from Rotterdam, to Cologne, to Paris." He adds, "I had ignored America for 20 years. And you can't do that. It's just too important."
— Read more at csmonitor.com

This season at La Fenice is the first full season since the opera house was burnt down in 1996. Everything except the facade of the building was destroyed and since then hundreds of craftsmen and artists have rebuilt the building including the furniture, gilding and painting to return it to how it would have looked when it opened.
— Read more at nbr.co.nz

"What's up, Doc" isn't heard in Rossini's opera "The Barber of Seville," but it could have been. Like "The Rabbit of Seville," the classic 1950 cartoon starring Bugs Bunny and his slow-witted nemesis Elmer Fudd, "The Barber of Seville" is full of slapstick, with characters in disguise, onstage melees and, of course, that famous shave with its equally famous aria "Largo al factotum" ("Figaro, Figaro").
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

RAP in an opera? Why not? And while we're at it, let's throw in some country, jazz, Broadway show tunes, rock, blues, tango and reggae. That's what you'll get in "The Busker's Opera," a new adaptation of John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera" by Canadian theater whiz Robert Lepage. With the help of his company, called Ex Machina, and a DJ, Lepage has some fun with the same source material that inspired the Brecht-Weill classic "The Three Penny Opera" and spawned the song "Mack the Knife."
— Read more at insidebayarea.com

With support from the National Endowment for the Arts, this intensive workshop brings twenty-five arts writers, critics and editors to New York City for a deep immersion in classical music and opera. In October 2004, the first two-week Institute was organized at Columbia University for writers who live outside the nation's ten largest cities. Journalists from twenty states attended classroom sessions on classical music, heard concerts, and took part in writing workshops led by top critics.
— Read more at aan.org

She's been called the Queen of High E's. Ruth Ann Swenson has the kind of dazzling, high-flying voice that makes singing roles like Rosina in Cincinnati Opera's "The Barber of Seville" seem like second nature. "I'm still singing E-flats above High C," says the Long Island native, who makes her Cincinnati debut tonight in the comic opera. "I sing a lot of bel canto. I've made it an important part of my repertoire."
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Why take to the hills when all summer long, New York City is alive with the sound of music? For genius and glamour, the city's summer music festivals can't be beat, and many offer free or bargain-priced events.
This multigenre celebration offers an invigorating mix of cutting-edge theater, dance and music, all with an international flair.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilaine fille]

The Vermont International Opera Festival closed its fifth season in the Mad River Valley with a condensed but riveting and powerful performance of "Lucia di Lamermoor" on Sunday, and the spectacular sounds of "A Verdi Gala" on Monday, both at the Joslyn Round Barn.
— Read more at Times Argus

The Minnesota Opera has every reason to be pleased as the fiscal year comes to a close. Not only did it boost revenues by 11 percent over the previous year, sell 92 percent of its seats and report an overall contributions increase of more than 15 percent, but it has raised $10.6 million of a $20 million endowment initiative called Opera at the Ordway. The fundraising effort is aimed at offsetting the cost of performing at the relatively small Ordway, said president Kevin Smith, who explained his "virtual seating" theory: "The Ordway has 1,754 seats, 25 percent fewer than the average 2,500-seat opera house. The additional endowment funds will increase the revenue stream as if there were 750 more seats to sell."
— Read more at startribune.com

[Nicole Cabell fought her way through 700 singers to reach the final.]
27-year-old Californian-born soprano Nicole Cabell has won the title of Cardiff Singer of the World 2005. The young singer is a third-year member of Chicago's Lyric Opera Center for American Artists. Cabell was one of five finalists to compete for the prestigious title, the Welsh Royal Crystal trophy and a cheque for Â£10,000.
— Read more at soundgenerator.com

After more than three weeks in federal jail, opera patron and venture capitalist Alberto Vilar has been freed after being arrested last month on charges he defrauded an investor out of $5 million, a government Web site said. Vilar, 64, co-founder of Amerindo Investment Advisors, Inc. has been held in federal custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan since his arrest on May 27 on fraud charges
— Read more at nynewsday.com

Members of the troubled Scottish Opera have held a mass demonstration outside the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, urging audiences to contact first minister Jack McConnell about the companyâ??s plight.
— Read more at The Stage Online

THE Royal Opera House has stripped the name of its most high-profile benefactor from its young artists' programme after the multimillionaire philanthropist failed to deliver on pledges. The board of the opera house gave up hope that Alberto Vilar would make good on promises of funds after he was charged last month with stealing millions of dollars from a participant in his investment fund.
— Read more at Times Online

No matter how you slice it - so to speak - Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd ranks among the greatest American operas. Yes, operas.
Call it a bona-fide Broadway musical, too, if you want, but you can't miss the operatic way the work's music and drama aim so potently and perfectly for the jugular. No wonder many opera companies and artists have been drawn to Sweeney Todd since its premiere in 1979.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

In more than 50 years on the British throne Queen Elizabeth II has shown scant interest in opera. So it is paradoxical that one of the major events of her coronation ceremonies was the 1953 premiere by the Royal Opera at Covent Garden of Benjamin Britten's "Gloriana," an elaborate three-act work about the first Queen Elizabeth, with a libretto by William Plomer based on Lytton Strachey's book "Elizabeth and Essex."
— Read more at New York Times

Cincinnati-trained opera singer Mark T. Panuccio will step in to sing the role of Casey for an ailing John Mac Master in the local premiere of "Margaret Garner," the new opera by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison, opening July 14 in Music Hall. Mac Master, who sang the world-premiere performances in Detroit in May, has a knee injury, Cincinnati Opera said.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

The Viennese composer H.K. Gruber, generally known as "Nali" (a childhood nickname, perhaps), has just had a resounding success in Zurich with his new opera, Der Herr Nordwind. He is also known as a maverick: an aficionado of Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, of pop son gs and Weimar Republic dance-band music, but also a devotee of Schoenberg's 12-note school. He found international fame with Frankenstein!!!, a comic-sinister cycle for a chansonnier - usually Nali himself, an extravagant performer - and a jokey orchestra with toy instruments and blown-up paper bags. He has performed it, often conducting simultaneously, around the world.
— Read more at FT.com

Students Taste First-Hand Opera Experience Local college students from around Wellington will have a first-hand operatic experience this week as they create their own piece of musical theatre which they get to perform on the set of Don Giovanni at the Westpac St James Theatre on Sunday (26 June).
— Read more at scoop.co.nz

Meet the Des Moines Opera principals: On stage, they're a couple, but in real life, they don't even live in the same town. Janara Kellerman and Theodore Green are two up-and-coming opera singers, originally from Iowa, now in principal roles as part of the Metro Opera season. Both are in "Gloriana," and Kellerman also sings in "The Tales of Hoffmann."
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

[Mariachi meets Mahler: "Sunset With Pink Pastoral" is driven by a kaleidoscope of musical and artistic influences]
Talk about your unusual traveling companions. Mariachi, Mahler and Maynard Dixon are among the elements converging in "Sunset With Pink Pastoral," a new multimedia chamber opera being performed Friday and Saturday in Salt Lake City. The opera concerns a road trip taken by a hipster couple, Karen and Milk, through northern Arizona and southern Utah. It was inspired partly by librettist Lara Candland's childhood memories of trips between Mesa, Ariz., and Provo, said composer Christian Asplund, her husband. The Canadian-born composer, who founded Seattle Experimental Opera and has been on the faculty at Brigham Young University the past three years, said he also was inspired by an exhibition of works by painter Maynard Dixon and photographer Dorothea Lange at BYU a couple of years back. Dixon, Lange and some of their artistic subjects are among the people Karen and Milk encounter on their journey - along with British nun and art commentator Sister Wendy.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

A technique that confuses clothes moths about their sexuality has made a dramatic difference to the storage of ballet and opera costumes at Covent Garden. Rather than killing the moths, the new technique prevents the moths from breeding, thereby stopping damage done by the moths' larval stage.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Some of the most compelling film music of the past year appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael Giacchino's score for the TV show "Lost"--the tale of several dozen plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural, "Tempest"-like islandâ??has unsettled millions of American viewers with an eerie array of orchestral sounds: fluttery four-note figures, shivery tones produced by bowing strings near the bridge, nasty glissandos on the trombone, and, at moments of maximum tension, a low plucked note on the harp. According to convention, harps are called upon to herald angels or other vessels of goodness. Giacchino makes the instrument gaunt and deathly, much as Mahler did in the last song of "Das Lied von der Erde." In general, Giacchino has done such a bang-up job of generating menace that the scriptwriters may have a hard time satisfying the expectations that he has created. Something mighty grim will have to crawl out of that lush jungle in order to justify those twangs of terror.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

A gorgeous evening greeted patrons and performers at Wichita Grand Opera's "Opera on the Lake" concert Saturday evening at Bradley Fair. The skies were clear blue, the breeze was cool, and a setting golden sun bathed buildings and trees to create a setting reminiscent of a European postcard. Hundreds of people, most sitting in lawn chairs, crowded walkways, retaining walls -- even the flower beds -- around the fountain in Bradley Fair's central plaza to hear singers present arias and scenes from five well-known operas.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

[Budget cuts may force HGO to drop some freebies, extras]
The frills are going, going ... maybe gone.
Unless Houston Grand Opera can find funding, many audience-friendly activities will be missing from HGO's 2005-06 season. They include:
* The annual Plazacast, the free simulcast in the Wortham Theater Center's Fish Plaza of a live performance inside the theater.
* OperaVision, the system for showing close-ups during performances for patrons in the Grand Tier and Balcony of the Brown Theater.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

This is supposed to be a review of the 2005 Cincinnati May Festival, but it's really all about sound. The sound I'm talking about is what results when a large, superbly disciplined orchestra plays in an acoustically exceptional space, presenting repertoire that is -- in the best sense -- distinctive.
— Read more at courier-journal.com

[Wichita Grand Opera's free open-air concert at Bradley Fair entertained fans and fowl alike.]
A gorgeous evening greeted patrons and performers at Wichita Grand Opera's "Opera on the Lake" concert Saturday evening at Bradley Fair. The skies were clear blue, the breeze was cool, and a setting golden sun bathed buildings and trees to create a setting reminiscent of a European postcard.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

Nicole Cabell, a 27-year-old soprano from Panorama City, has won the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in Wales. On Sunday, Cabell â?? a recent graduate of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the Lyric Opera of Chicago's training program â?? was presented with a trophy and a check for 10,000 pounds (about $18,000) by opera veteran Joan Sutherland, the competition's patron. Previous winners have included soprano Karita Mattila and baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. Cabell will sing at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago on July 21 and Aug. 21.
— Read more at latimes.com

Soprano Nicole Cabell, a recent graduate of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, won first prize Sunday in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in Wales.
— Read more at Chicago Tribune

Grand opera needn't be grand to be good.
Perhaps that was the working theory in the mind of artistic director Barbara Giancola when she opted to stage "Aida," Verdi's larger-than-life masterpiece, in a converted potato barn at the Castello di Borghese Winery in Cutchogue Saturday.
— Read more at Newsday.com: OPERA REVIEW

Dayton Opera expects to finish its 2004-05 fiscal year in the black, officials said at the company's annual meeting on June 16. The company has balanced its budget for seven straight years.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Thursday night's "La Boheme" at Music Hall was lovely to look at, delightful to hear and heaven at the box office. Apologies to Jerome Kern, the opening production of Cincinnati Opera's 2005 summer festival combined enchanting visuals, gorgeous singing and a house full of happy customers. Puccini's poignant tale of the poet Rodolfo and the seamstress Mimi drew 2,878 listeners (Music Hall seats 3,516, but 400-500 are obstructed views) and they were on their feet quickly with bravos as the performers took their bows,
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

For fans and performers of early music, this city is paradise for a week every other June, when the Boston Early Music Festival sets up its combination concert marathon and trade show. The festival offers performances every night between 5 and midnight. The centerpiece is always a lavishly produced Baroque opera - this year's is Johann Mattheson's long-lost "Boris Goudenow" - but concerts by imported ensembles and soloists, and by the festival's period instrument orchestra, are also a strong draw.
— Read more at New York Times

The Cincinnati Opera is celebrating its 85th season with a festival for the history books. Margaret Garner, a new opera from composer Richard Danielpour and author and librettist Toni Morrison based on the harrowing tale of a Kentucky slave, is the obvious centerpiece of the festival. But the entire four-opera season is populated with noteworthy singers and directors, Cincinnati Opera managing director Patricia Beggs says. "We have amazing casts this summer with nine Metropolitan Opera singers -- singers who sing regularly at the Met -- on our stage," Beggs says, enumerating stars such as Denyce Graves and Angela Brown, who will be in Garner.
— Read more at Lexington Herald-Leader

Clive Gillinson transformed himself from musician into manager at a moment of crisis. In 1984, the London Symphony Orchestra was more than $600,000 in debt and sinking. The orchestra moved two years earlier into the Barbican Center, a mazelike modern-arts complex located in the City, the financial district, which in those days shut down after dark. In that confusing and out-of-the-way destination, the orchestra administration programmed unorthodox concerts (a festival of Berlioz and Michael Tippett, for example) in tightly clustered stretches. Each Barbican concert lost an average of $3,000. An orchestra that is governed by its players, the L.S.O. reacted to this desperate plight with an act of desperation. It forced out its managing director and, looking within the ranks, recruited Gillinson, a young cellist whose chief business credential was running an antiques shop with his wife in his spare time. Before accepting, the prudent cellist insisted that his chair in the orchestra be kept open for a year in case the new job didn't work out. Just as characteristically, however, he never looked back.
— Read more at New York Times

YOU might not expect this city to offer much in the way of advanced training for opera singers, and for 11 months of the year, you would be right. But not in June, when the Renata Scotto Opera Academy takes up residence here at the Music Conservatory of Westchester, inside the shell of a renovated building the locals remember as the Department of Motor Vehicles. he faculty includes top musical staff from the Metropolitan and the New York City operas, as well as guest lecturers on bel canto, acting and the physiology of the voice, whose knowledge complements and reinforces Ms. Scotto's own.
— Read more at New York Times

The American composer David Diamond died of congestive heart failure on Monday in his birthplace, Rochester, N.Y. He was 89. Mr. Diamond was one of the most gifted, colorful, and cantankerous creative figures in the world of music. He always went his own way, composing in a highly personal, lyrical, intense, and driven style that had nothing to do with the winds of fashion. Consequently, his music repeatedly went through cycles of neglect and rediscovery.
— Read more at Boston.com

Most of the 13 Boston Early Music Festivals to date have featured a centerpiece operatic production. But only recently has the festival achieved a long-range goal: to record one of the operas for commercial release. n 2003, the BEMF presented Johann Georg Conradi's ''Ariadne" in the first performances of the work since the 18th century. Last summer, many of the participants reassembled in the studios of Radio Bremen in Germany to record the work. The official international release date for the three-disc recording on the cpo label is next month, but advance copies are on sale at all BEMF events this week.
— Read more at Boston.com

Hear about opera from Cilla and friends, then take the plunge yourself as Cincinnati Opera rolls out the carpet on its 2005 summer festival. Cilla is soprano Angela Brown, who will sing wise, warm-hearted Cilla in July in Cincinnati Opera's "Margaret Garner" by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Ominous weather and a controversial theater piece couldn't dampen Spoleto Festival 2005's revenue spirits. Box-office receipts for the festival came in at a record, about $2,000 more than last year's figure of $2.53 million. This is the third year in a row the festival has set a sales record.
— Read more at postandcourier.com

Georges Bizet wrote his first important opera, "The Pearl Fishers," in 1863, 12 years before his immortal masterpiece "Carmen." Critics have been sneering at it ever since, calling it "derivative" and "weak Ceylon tea."
"Pearl Fishers" hadn't been heard in San Francisco in 30 years, and then only in a pale, undersung production by Spring Opera. San Francisco Opera's premiere of the work took place Tuesday night at the War Memorial Opera House and guess what?
— Read more at San Francisco Examiner

Ohio Light Opera, known nationally for its high-quality productions of 19th-century operettas, is stepping into the present. The season features the world premiere of A Friend of Napoleon, an operetta written by recently deceased company founder James Stuart and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Robert Ward.
— Read more at toledoblade.com

A bid to bring judicial review proceedings against the BBC for its broadcast of Jerry Springer - The Opera has been rejected. The Christian Institute said the BBC discriminated against Christians and breached its Royal Charter by screening the opera on BBC Two in January.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Carlo Maria Giulini, who as conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from the late 1970s to the early '80s brought an intense yet subtle passion to the concert hall with his poetic style of music making, has died. He was 91. Giulini died Tuesday in Brescia in northern Italy, his son, Alberto Maria Giulini, told Associated Press. In recent years the musician had resided in Milan, Italy. The cause of death was not reported. The conductor arrived in Los Angeles with the seasoned qualities of a master, and he used them to inspire his musicians to new heights.
— Read more at latimes.com

Timaru-born mezzo-soprano Dawn Thompson has been named as a finalist in the 12th BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. Thompson, 29, is the seventh New Zealander to take part in the competition. One of her predecessors, Paul Whelan, won the Lieder Prize in the 1993 contest, and another Canterbury singer, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, of Banks Peninsula, competed in 1999.
— Read more at STUFF

[ The Midnight Court Opera takes a satiric look at women's sexual woes]
Think feminist concerns about sexuality only go as far back as 60s books like Our Bodies, Our Selves? Check out the premiere of The Midnight Court Opera , adapted from Brian Merriman's 1780 Gaelic poem about a woman's right to sex and marriage. Drawing on Frank O'Connor's English translation of Merriman, composer Ana Sokolovic and librettist Paul Bentley's one-act chamber opera plays up the poem's erotic and scabrous qualities. Merryman, an unmarried country teacher, falls asleep in the woods and, in a dream, is dragged to the fairy queen's court to stand trial for bachelorhood â?? that is, contributing to the sorrowful frustration of unwed women.
— Read more at NOW Magazine - The Arts in Toronto, JUNE 16 - 22, 2005

What's 300 years old and brand-new at the same time? Boston Early Music Festival's production of Johann Mattheson's "Boris Goudenow,'' which got its world premiere Tuesday evening at the Cutler Majestic Theatre.
No it's not that "Boris,'' the Mussorgsky opera that flirts with the edges of the standard repertory. This opera was written in 1710, much closer to the era of the historical Boris, who was Russia's first people's champion in the early 17th century.
Mattheson was part of the sophisticated Hamburg baroque scene, along with Handel and Telemann. His own contributions were ignored until just before World War II, when interest in his works began to grow. But then the war came, Hamburg was bombed and his compositions were lost.
— Read more at BostonHerald.com

You are allowed to laugh. And you will. With its new world premiere, Zurich's opera house has a hit. H.K. Gruber's "Der Herr Nordwind" ("Mr. North Wind"), written with Viennese poet H.C. Artmann, is wildly entertaining. It's also complex, original and satisfying.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Star soprano Karita Mattila will not now be taking part in the production of a new opera by contemporary Finnish composer Mikko Heinio.
— Read more at Helsingin Sanomat [Related news items]

Houston Grand Opera has rejected the Houston Symphony's proposal to resume playing for the opera and, instead, signed a new six-year contract with its orchestra.
"We'd lose control of our own destiny," HGO President John S. Arnoldy told the annual meeting of the Houston Grand Opera Association on Tuesday. "We're well on the way to building a world-class orchestra."
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, one of the most distinguished musicians of the 20th century, has died at the age of 91 in Brescia, Italy. Giulini started out as a viola player, playing under such legendary conductors as Wilhelm Furtwangler, Otto Klemperer and German composer Richard Strauss.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

In Giacomo Puccini's "Tosca," the singer Floria Tosca is driven by love and music, but she can't escape life's tricky turns. The Wildwood Festival of Music and the Arts brings "Tosca" to its stage for two performances this weekend.
Ann Chotard directs a cast of familiar Wildwood faces in "Tosca." Soprano Christine Donahue and tenors George Dyer, Gregory Pearson and Robert Holden return to Wildwood's stage. Chotard has assembled a cast of 36 performers and a 14-piece orchestra.
— Read more at Arkansas Times

[Rupert Christiansen speaks in defense of the ENO's controversial decision to adopt surtitles]
The announcement that English National Opera will introduce surtitles for the majority of next season's performances at the Coliseum has provoked the same flutter of controversy that has attended this device ever since it was introduced in Toronto in 1983.
— Read more at Telegraph

Cincinnati Opera's 2005 season offers three well known works and a Cincinnati premiere, Richard Danielpour's "Margaret Garner." Co-commissioned by Cincinnati Opera, Michigan Opera Theater and Opera Company of Philadelphia, with libretto by Toni Morrison, the opera is based on the true-life story of slave Margaret Garner, whose 1856 escape and the death of her child by her own hand have become an American legend.
All operas are sung in the original languages with English surtitles (including "Margaret Garner") and are at 8 p.m. at Music Hall. Opera previews (free to ticket holders) are at 7 p.m. before each performance in the Music Hall auditorium.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

It happened sometime during the first act, while Cesare Angelotti was desperately fleeing the law and taking refuge in a church, and New Yorkers were sipping white wine and reclining on picnic blankets. The humidity eased, and a sweltering day turned into a perfectly pleasant night for "Tosca" in Central Park.
The first performance of the Met in the Parks season drew a crowd of 48,000 to the Great Lawn on Tuesday night, according to an official estimate from a Met spokesman.
— Read more at New York Times

LIBERTY Life founder Donald Gordon has been awarded a knighthood for his service to the arts and business. Donald, who has built up two successful business empires, Liberty Life in SA and top UK property company Liberty International, was named in the Queen's birthday honours list this weekend.
— Read more at allAfrica.com

Philanthropist Alberto Vilar pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges that he robbed a client of $5 million, the Associated Press reports. Vilar was once one of the world's most prominent opera patrons, giving millions to the Royal Opera, the Metropolitan Opera, the Kennedy Center, and other performing arts organizations. After his high-tech investments lost much of their value, he failed to fulfill a series of pledges.
— Read more at PlaybillArts: News

Everyone's on the run in "The Queen of Spades," the feverish and absorbing Tchaikovsky opera that opens the San Francisco Opera Summer Festival. Nannies and neurotic partygoers, card sharks and strolling citizens keep bolting across the stage at the War Memorial Opera House.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Neither Carrie Underwood nor Bo Bice would have made the final 100 singers selected for "Operatunity," the TV show that documents the English National Opera's search for a raw vocal talent capable of being groomed for a plum part in a major production. The latest "American Idol" winner and first runner-up just don't have the pipes for it.
Both would do well to watch the 90-minute documentary, however, as would the produ-cers of the pop-singing competition, its judges and its fans. There is much to be learned from "Operatunity" - about vocal technique and breath support, about stage presence, about how to nurture and encourage talent, even about how to make an entertaining, positive show.
— Read more at nynewsday.com

The remains of Bulgaria-born opera prima donna Gena Dimitrova will be transported to her homeland on Tuesday evening. The great soprano passed away last weekend in Milan, at the age of 64.
— Read more at novinite.com

When she was a student, soprano Angela M. Brown didn't think she had the stuff to make it in the opera world. Discouraged, she approached her Indiana University voice teacher, Virginia Zeani. "She said, 'Darling, if you want to be the next Aretha Franklin, go. But if you want to be the best Verdi soprano this world has ever seen, you're going to have to work.'
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Antonio Vivaldi returned to his hometown, Venice, early in 1733, eager to reclaim his place as the Venetian republic's most popular composer. During his five-year absence, younger Naples-trained musicians had come to the fore with their own "dramas with music," but now, at 55, Vivaldi was ready to take them on with a daringly modern opera inspired by HernÃ¡n Cortes's conquest of the Aztecs.
— Read more at New York Times

When you live in a country of only 5.2 million people and your native tongue is unintelligible to virtually everyone outside your borders, you'd better learn to converse with the rest of the world if you don't want to end up talking to yourself. This is the problem faced by the Finns, and among their many admirable traits has been shrewd adaptation to this exigency. While they hold dearly to the foundations of their national culture, such as the "Kalevala" epic, they also compete internationally in an eclectic array of fields, from cell phone technology to javelin throwing, and from contemporary architecture and design to ski-jumping.
— Read more at Duluth News Tribune

English surtitles above opera in its original language, introduced in this country a generation ago, have been the biggest single advance in my opera-going lifetime. In my youth, dragged to performances of which I could not understand a word, I was bored witless by works that I have since come to love. Now, surtitles help me and countless others, some of whom would never otherwise go to the opera, discover new works, new musical worlds.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Operas from the English National Opera (ENO) are to get surtitles, despite all performances being sung in English. Surtitles are used primarily to help audiences follow the lyrics in foreign language productions. But the ENO said they were responding to audience demand to see the singer's words written above the stage. ENO artistic director Sean Doran said the large size of the London Coliseum - the ENO's home - meant surtitles were a "vital" addition.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

When opera singers start making noises about wanting to sing popular songs, it's best in most cases to plug your ears, shut your wallet, and run for the hills. The funny part is that pop records should be a slam-dunk for opera singers. Despite its many charms, pop music does not demand the vocal acrobatics that opera does. The problem is that many opera singers lack the feel or, to be more accurate, the kind of soul needed for George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Stephen Foster, or any other of the handful of composers they seem routinely drawn to when the word crossover is mentioned. For lack of better terms, an approach more earthy and immediate is required. In addition, opera singers often look at crossover as slumming or easy money and so give scant attention to rehearsal or arrangements, content to toss off what, when done right, can be an illuminating milieu.
— Read more at Stereophile

New Jersey State Opera's production of Verdi's "Il Trovatore" this past weekend at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark was a typically mixed -- and typically maddening -- experience. As always, there were good, bad and neutral ingredients in a production that, while skillful in part, never felt gelled to the point of effective stagecraft. At Friday's performance, there was some good singing (soprano Olga Romanko as an elegantly fluid and adroit Leonora) and some horrid singing (tenor Lando Bartolini as Manrico, who could not find pitch center to save his life).
— Read more at nj.com

THERE will typically be a performance of "Peter Grimes" or two, and perhaps a "Billy Budd." But the presentations of Britten operas at major American festivals this summer are not so predictable: "Gloriana" next week at the Opera Theater of St. Louis and next month at the Des Moines Metro Opera; "Paul Bunyan" at the Central City Opera in Colorado and "Death in Venice" at Glimmerglass in Cooperstown, N.Y., both beginning in July.
Benjamin Britten, long known to the general musical public for his towering "War Requiem" and even to children for his engaging "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra," is perhaps best known today as an opera composer. Yet his musical output was remarkably broad, running to highly original forms as well as established ones. So it may be a good time to take stock of his multifarious achievement by way of recordings.
— Read more at New York Times

Younger festivals wax and wane. Bayreuth and Salzburg, regardless of artistic content, remain the most important summer music festivals in Europe at which to be seen. That isn't always as easy as it sounds. There's a nine-year waiting list for tickets to the Bayreuth Festival. They aren't expensive, though they're almost impossible to get. Salzburg is more accessible, yet with ticket prices often over 300 euros ($367), there is a certain exclusivity involved in being there at all.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Immutable masterpieces? Not always. Thursday night's New York Philharmonic concert at Avery Fisher Hall might have been called "Subject to Change." New venues can redirect original intentions. So do second thoughts. Consider also poor Bruckner, whose Third Symphony was on the Philharmonic's program.
Bruckner took too much advice and quailed before most of it. By some calculations, indeed, the composer went through nine versions of this piece. Sparing readers the tortured musicology, the edition used last night incorporates original thoughts and advice taken, while expurgating advice that arrived gratuitously.
— Read more at New York Times

It's one of the most important singing competitions in the world - and it's in Wales. Emily Lambert talks to past winners of BBC Cardiff Singer of the World to gauge its importance. HERE they are. A total of 25 singers from across the globe with one shared dream - becoming the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2005. Basses, baritones, tenors, a counter tenor, sopranos, mezzo-sopranos, all taking part in the world's greatest singing competition.
— Read more at icWales

WHEN you live in a country of only 5.2 million people and your native tongue is unintelligible to virtually everyone outside your borders, you'd better learn to converse with the rest of the world if you don't want to end up talking to yourself.
This is the problem faced by the Finns, and among their many admirable traits has been shrewd adaptation to this exigency. While they hold dearly to the foundations of their national culture, such as the "Kalevala" epic, they also compete internationally in an eclectic array of fields, from cell phone technology to javelin-throwing, and from contemporary architecture and design to ski-jumping.
— Read more at New York Times

The BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition opens tonight in the Welsh capital. The preliminary rounds for the main prize run June 12-16; they are accompanied by the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. The finals, which will feature the five top-ranked singers from the preliminary concerts, are on June 19 and are accompanied by the NOW.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The audience was giddily abuzz at the first intermission of Opera Company of North Carolina's "Tosca" Friday night, because they were witnessing a first-rate production of Puccini's popular drama of love and death. And they were cheering heartily at the final curtain, for OCNC had mounted the best production by far in its nine-year history. It can't be stressed enough that opera is the most difficult of art forms, the daunting demands on vocal, orchestral and scenic forces rarely supplied in equal measure. This "Tosca" proved that OCNC now has the wherewithal to produce opera at a consistently high level.
— Read more at newsobserver.com

One thing has been clear since Adam Guettel's first appearance in these parts back in 1996, with Floyd Collins: He was destined to reappear, sooner or later, with a remarkable Broadway score. That is, assuming that Guettel ï¿½ who appears to be a painstakingly slow writer ï¿½ did get around to completing a Broadway musical. The long-in-gestation Light in the Piazza is here at last, and all those people who forecast great things for Guettel can heartily congratulate themselves (although it's Guettel who had to sit alone in his room and do all the work).
— Read more at Playbill News

Lincoln Center Theater is extending its production of The Light in the Piazza for a second time. The tuner, which won six Tony Awards on June 5, will now run at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre through January 1. 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 daughter's romance with a handsome, high-spirited Florentine and the mother's determined efforts to keep the two apart. The musical features a book by Craig Lucas and a score by Adam Guettel.
— Read more at Broadway.com

Reviled by some for her bland conducting and for the hokey singer-worship that reigns at Opera Orchestra of New York concerts, maestra Eve Queler nonetheless gallantly serves musical New York. She tends to nooks of the repertory - French grand opera, pre- and post-Verdi Italian opera - often neglected by our larger companies. She has a keen ear for up-and-coming talent and a flair for casting established artists in smashing new roles: Aprile Millo's poignant Minnie in last fall's "La Fanciulla del West," for example.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks to vilaine fille]

Rehearsals began on Tuesday at Erfurt Theatre in eastern Germany for the world premiere of the Philip Glass opera Waiting For The Barbarians - based on the novel of the same title by Nobel Literature Prize laureate JM Coetzee. Following the premiere in Erfurt on September 10, the opera under the musical direction of Dennis Russell Davies will be performed later this year in Austin and Cincinnati in the United States.
— Read more at news24.com

Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music" that opened The Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera 2005 season Tuesday should produce smiles on a summer night. "The Smiles of a Summer Night," Ingmar Bergman's 1955 film inspired Sondheim's lyrics and music and Hugh Wheeler's book. Harold Prince produced and directed the original Broadway production that won six 1973 Tony Awards including those for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical and Best Music and Lyrics.
— Read more at PittsburghLIVE.com

The critics were all over town last week -- dance, theater, music -- convening with their self-importance in full array, convoking their endless panel discussions (I led one), checking out what Los Angeles had to offer that Dayton did not, allowing themselves grudging respect for local amenities. I hung out with a few of the saner members of the music crowd, who spoke with some awe about Chinatown and even more about Amoeba. After all, New York or Chicago could house some 500 high-rise apartment dwellers, all waiting in line for the elevator, on the land of that awe-inspiring emporium.
— Read more at LA Weekly

Glyndebourne opera house, long regarded as a bastion of the ageing cultural establishment, is attempting to woo younger audiences with a new work written specifically for 20 to 30-year-olds. Billed as an "operatic thriller", Tangier Tattoo tells the story of a young backpacker in Morocco who falls in love with an American undercover agent, with disastrous consequences. It begins with a shooting in a crowded cafe and develops into a complex tale of sex, terrorism, drug deals and betrayal. Tensions between the Middle East and America are highlighted, and the story, by Stephen Plaice, was rewritten in the wake of 9/11 to take the new political climate into account.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

"Falstaff" might have been Verdi's last opera; it might have been Verdi's greatest opera; it is, without doubt, Verdi's only and most hilariously comic opera. It's all sparkle, wit, buffoonery, roaring slapstick and belly-laugh-inducing comedy. An international superstar, bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, headlines L.A. Opera's stunning production, directed by Stephen Lawless, under the baton of Kent Nagano with the superb L.A. Opera Orchestra. And it's splendidly sung by the amazingly talented Welshman.
— Read more at Reuters.com

WET, a comic opera with a tragic undertow, is an opera with music by Anne LeBaron and libretto by Terese Svoboda. It will receive its first incarnation on Friday, June 10, at the Barnsdall Gallery Theater in Hollywood, at 8 PM. This is a free workshop performance of excerpts, open to the public. The world premiere of the full production takes place Dec. 1 -3, 2005, in Los Angeles at RedCat, in Disney Hall. Additional information follows, and can also be accessed on our website, www.wetopera.org.
— Read more at www.wetopera.org

Now that POPSearch 2005 is beginning to heat up, it's worth noting that the life of the 2004 winner, Tracy Silva, isn't the only one to have changed because of the Boston Pops talent contest. Silva has had a busy year singing in musical theater, at sports events, and on community occasions. Meanwhile, the second-prize winner, tenor Wayne Hobbs, has revived his ambitions for an operatic career, which he had abandoned to go into banking.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

Ian McKay, director of marketing at the English National Opera, has issued an apology for booing at outgoing music director Paul Daniel's farewell appearance, the London Guardian reports. McKay's boos at the end of the performance on May 13 were apparently loud enough to be heard over the applause for Daniel, who departed after eight years with the company, and prompted complaints from members of the audience.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

A Christian organisation has threatened to take legal action against a Birmingham theatre if it stages Jerry Springer: The Opera. The Hippodrome plans to run the musical, which depicts figures from the Bible as guests on Springer's talk show, next February. Christian Voice says the show is deliberately offensive and provocative to Christians. But the theatre says audiences "will be keen to make up their own minds".
— Read more at BBC NEWS

[Can opera be made more popular? And can you cook a decent paella?]
Born in 1946, Jose Carreras began his career singing in his mother's hairdressing salon in Barcelona. By the time he was 11, he was on stage at the Gran Teatro del Liceo, and by 28 he had starred in 24 operas in Europe and North America. Following his recovery from acute leukaemia, he set up the Jose Carreras International Leukaemia Foundation. In 1990 his friends Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo agreed to sing in concert with him to raise money for the foundation, and the phenomenal success of the Three Tenors began. He continues to tour internationally and to sing at festivals.
— Read more at Belfast Telegraph

A director of English National Opera who was caught booing at his colleague's farewell performance is facing calls for his dismissal.

Paul Daniel, one of Britain's leading conductors, was invited on stage to receive applause for his last show.

But loud boos from marketing director Ian McKay were heard above the cheers.
— Read more at ThisisLondon

In a wildly adventurous season of opera at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. here, the hottest topic of discussion is not "The Kingdom of Desire," a compelling Beijing opera version of "Macbeth." Nor is it "Die Vogel," a little-known, effusively tuneful work by Walter Braunfels, or "La Bella Dormente nel Bosco," a charming puppet opera by Respighi, as hot as all those have been. Instead it is the most standard of operas, Mozart's "Don Giovanni," in a staging by Gunter Kramer. And rightly so.
— Read more at New York Times

From Newsday, a review by vilaine fille alter ego Marion Lignana Rosenberg of last weekend's phenomenal Avery Fisher Hall concerts by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen.
— Read more at vilaine fille

If Carl Maria von Weber never quite made it into the grand procession of Romantic giants, he left behind an opera of indestructible charm. "Der Freischutz," which Eve Queler's Opera Orchestra of New York undertook on Monday night at Carnegie Hall, is first of all a darling of historians - a musicological ground zero for the German musical theater.
— Read more at New York Times

English National Opera, whose founding principle since 1931 has been singing opera in English, has announced plans to display the text of its operas above the stage. The move to surtitles has horrified the triumvirate that ran the company in the 1980s. "Surtitles are," said David Pountney, one of the three, "a celluloid condom inserted between the audience and the immediate gratification of understanding." Sir Peter Jonas, now head of the Bavarian State Opera, said: "If ENO are doing what the audience wants, they should have public executions on the stage of the Coliseum. After all, the public wants capital punishment."
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

When, in 1960, the new-founded Scottish Opera asked the Scottish Arts Council for a little help towards the cost of its planned productions of Don Pasquale, Bluebeard's Castle and The Soldier's Tale, the answer was a stern Scottish rebuke. The application, for Â£1713, had arrived too late to be included in the annual financial budget. Shedding crocodile tears, the council told the fledgling company to try again next year. As a result, what would have been Scottish Opera's opening season turned out to be a season of darkness. It all sounds depressingly familiar.
— Read more at The Herald

Raffaele Cardone's fledgling Miami Lyric Opera clearly faces an uphill struggle with many daunting obstacles ahead. Yet based on Saturday night's concert at the Artime Theater, the upstart company is already enjoying significant success in one of its principal missions -- providing a forum for young South Florida singers.
— Read more at South Florida Sun-Sentinel

The Opera Company of Philadelphia has recorded its first substantial deficit since 1995, and is eliminating the positions of five administrators, including some senior staff. The company ran a $400,000 deficit on an $8.6 million budget for the fiscal year that ended May 31, said Robert B. Driver, the company's general and artistic director. As a result, the company has let go Susan S. Ashbaker, a key member of the music staff for 16 years; plus the director of marketing, director of development, and two lower-level staff members.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

The good folks at The [Charleston] Post and Courier have setup "Spoletoblog" to keep you posted on everything Spoleto.

— Read more at Spoletoblog

Every American who cares about this country's ugly history of human beings enslaving other human beings should have seen "Margaret Garner." The Detroit Opera House hosted the world premiere of this powerful, heart-wrenching, soul-stirring opera on Saturday, May 7. In a city where more than 80 percent of the residents are of African descent, the decision to have the opera premiere here was fitting. It was a rare opportunity to see ourselves reflected on the operatic stage. I saw the final performance on Sunday, May 22.
— Read more at The South End Newspaper

The old joke has a new twist. How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Rent it.
Actually, it's a rather old twist, but outside the music world, few people know of this alternative punch line. Instead, many casual ticket buyers assume, logically enough, that all classical concerts at Carnegie Hall are in fact Carnegie Hall classical concerts. Not so simple.
— Read more at New York Times

Welsh soprano Charlotte Church has branded Italian opera star Luciano PavarottiI a "pig" for refusing to sing a duet with her at a London concert four years ago. The teen singing sensation was due to perform with the 69-year-old tenor in front of 75,000 classical music fans at Hyde Park. However, their duet was axed at the last minute after Pavarotti accused the 19- year-old of learning the wrong musical part.
— Read more at IOL

Running an opera enterprise on an annual $250,000 budget is not exactly running on empty, but it doesn't leave much margin for error.
So Opera Providence the last couple of years has refocused on grassroots offerings that continue to connect to the community, though no longer bringing to Veterans Memorial Auditorium the larger touring shows that even the better-heeled Rhode Island Philharmonic recently decided to drop.
— Read more at The Pawtucket Times

[He's famous for his film scores, the succession of beautiful wives and that Morecambe and Wise skit. Now, aged 75, Andre Previn says he wants to make composition the heart of his musical life ]
Andre Previn is renowned as a conductor, composer and jazz pianist. He is perhaps the world's best-known classical musician; certainly the only one to have won four Oscars for his film scores. So, of course, I spend my two and a half hours on the Eurostar to Paris, where he is conducting the French premiere of his violin concerto, trying to memorise the sequence of his five wives: Betty Bennett, Dory Previn (nee Langdon), Mia Farrow, Heather Sneddon and now the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. I finally get it somewhere near Abbeville. Whether I will have the guts to ask him about them is another matter.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Myrna Paris is no diva.
She's the exact opposite, in fact -- considerate, down-to-earth, funny. She's a talented singer and actress, not a prima donna.
But she knows how divas can be -- she's worked with many on opera and music theater stages across the country. She has seen how they can make life miserable for directors and dressing-room attendants alike.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

London's Royal Opera House, which runs a training program for young singers that was funded by fund manager Alberto Vilar, has found a new patron to take his place, said Tony Hall, chief executive of the opera house. "We expect to announce who it is soon," Hall said in an interview. Vilar, a New York money manager who was arrested on May 27 and charged with stealing $5 million from a client, had pledged 10 million pounds ($18.2 million) for the construction of the Vilar Floral Hall and additional money for the Vilar Young Artists program, Hall said. Only about 3 million pounds of the money for the building was received, and the opera house has been funding the training program out of cash flow, Hall said.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[She's played everything from a water nymph to a murderess. As she comes to Covent Garden as Desdemona, Renee Fleming reveals the secrets of a soprano ]
Although I've always taken great pleasure in working with the different elements that go into making an operatic character, from the music to the costumes, the most gratifying aspect is the moment of discovery. Just when I think I really know the woman I am singing, something will happen that reveals another facet of her personality.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

LONDON -- Superstar mezzo Cecilia Bartoli is lighting up the stage of the Royal Opera House these days, but the company's venture into rollicking Rossini is by no means a one-woman show. The occasion is the first production here of "Il Turco in Italia" ("The Turk in Italy"), an opera that has languished in the shadow of the composer's better known "L'Italiana in Algieri" ("The Italian Girl in Algiers"), partly under the mistaken impression that it's a cheap imitation of that earlier success.
— Read more at Metromix

There is a bandwagon rolling through the streets of the Broadway theater district on its way to the Tony Awards tomorrow evening (which will be televised at 8 p.m. on KIRO/7). This particular party started its journey at Seattle's Intiman Theatre when "The Light in the Piazza" premiered there in 2003. The Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas musical then moved on to Chicago's Goodman Theatre in January 2004, where the creators continued to hone the work.
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

THE English composer Benedict Mason says he would like to hear the music of his "ChaplinOperas" all by itself, free and clear of the three Charlie Chaplin films for which it made such a charming partner at the Rose Theater recently. I don't think I would. Mr. Mason's raucous polyglot of instruments, song and narration served the moving image with precision, his skill at lining up eye movement with ear movement a wonder of applied art all in itself. Yet the music of "ChaplinOperas" ends up as one more active mechanism in a larger machine. Music like this, removed and isolated, is like a car motor unhooked from its crankshaft. The pistons go up and down very nicely, but we are not being taken anywhere.
— Read more at New York Times

THE house lights dimmed at the BTI Center for the Performing Arts in Raleigh, N.C., one night last month, the stage lights came up on the grand piano, and in front of a rapt audience Alfred Cortot played Chopin's Prelude in G (Op. 28, No. 3), as he had not for nearly 80 years. Cortot is dead, of course. He was not present in physical form, nor was anyone else sitting at the keyboard of the Yamaha Disklavier Pro as the keys rose and fell. But this was his performance come back to life: his gentle touch, his luminosity, even his mistakes, like the light brush of an extra note at the periphery of the final chord.
— Read more at New York Times

SCOTTISH Opera will tour the country with just seven singers and a piano, the company revealed yesterday as it gave full details of its cut-down winter season.
The pocket production of Verdi's Macbeth will tour Scotland, but there will not be a single performance in Edinburgh or Glasgow. However, next May, the company will return at full strength with the Mozart opera Don Giovanni.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

The classical music critic's choice this summer is a no-brainer. It's James Levine's inaugural season at Tanglewood. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's new (as of last fall) music director will conduct only five programs, but each will be special. It's not that the programming is radically different from past seasons'. But, taken in sum, it will bring a new perspective to Tanglewood -- and, not coincidentally, a perspective on the conductor and his rapport with the BSO. In three weeks of concerts, he'll go from symphony to opera, from old music to new, from Gershwin to Wagner.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

[Deborah Voigt, Ben Heppner lead NACO seasonal series]
American soprano Deborah Voigt, who has been called "arguably the leading dramatic soprano performing today," will make her Ottawa debut July 20 with the National Arts Centre Orchestra in a concert that will also feature star Canadian tenor Ben Heppner, the NAC announced yesterday.
— Read more at Ottawa Citizen

Lyric soprano Renee Fleming is a familiar face on the world's greatest opera stages, but on her latest CD, Haunted Heart, she makes a temporary leap to the worlds of jazz, pop and folk. Paired with guitarist Bill Frisell and pianist Fred Hersch, Fleming sings in a lower range, offering intimate interpretations of songs from Lionel Hampton, the Beatles and Joni Mitchell. Fleming talks about her foray into jazz and music critic Anne Midgette offers her own review of the CD.
— Read more at NPR

[Conducting has always been a male preserve, but now one woman is storming the podium. Marin Alsop tells Stuart Jeffries how she got there ]
One day, Marin Alsop boarded an aircraft and looked into the cockpit. There were three women inside, and there was every likelihood that they would be flying the thing. "My first reaction was 'Uh-oh'." Alsop is not proud of her instinctive response. "Of course, it turned out to be the smoothest flight I'd ever been on. But my reaction was very thought-provoking. I guess I'm as much a victim of societal programming as the next person."
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Puppeteer Basil Twist and conductor Neal Goren had two options when they decided to resurrect Ottorino Respighiâ??s puppet opera â??La Bella Dormente nel Bosco.â?? One was to adhere to Vittorio Podreccaâ??s original 1920s marionette conception. The other was to make something new. Their Spoleto Festival USA production of the 75-minute opera based on the Sleeping Beauty story is an unsatisfying compromise.
— Read more at The State

Revenge, despair, passion, rage -- all are fitting words for the dark tale of Tosca, which comes to London's Grand Theatre for five performances. First performed in 1900, Giacomo Puccini's Tosca is being touted as the first, fully staged, professional opera to hit the Forest City. The production stars soprano Christiane Riel in the title role as Floria Tosca, the raven-haired diva, whose love for artist Mario Cavaradossi (tenor Marc Hervieux) leads diabolical police chief Baron Scarpia (baritone John Avey) -- who wants Tosca for himself -- to effect Cavaradossi's destruction.
— Read more at London Free Press

As soprano Renata Scotto sweeps into the boardroom of the Music Conservatory of Westchester â?? a radiant wave in a raspberry pantsuit and red-print scarf â?? you can't help but be transported. The compact singer turned vocal coach and director takes your hand and holds your gaze with warm, sea-blue eyes, just as she once held opera audiences spellbound with a blend of vocal agility and dramatic power. Those qualities enabled her to range from the doomed Cio-cio-san in "Madama Butterfly" to the mad Lucia in "Lucia di Lammermoor."
— Read more at thejournalnews.com

Friday will go down in the annals as one of the most spectacular opera evenings ever at the May Festival. Two of the world's greatest Wagnerian singers, soprano Deborah Voigt and tenor Ben Heppner, came together for the first time in Act II of "Tristan und Isolde," a concert performance under the baton of James Conlon in Music Hall. It was one of those rare moments of music making that one feels lucky to witness, and the hall erupted in cheers for nearly 10 minutes at its conclusion.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

A couple of months ago, in print, I blamed a director for a singer's lousy acting. The singer was Stephanie Friede, the director was Lillian Groag, and the opera was Puccini's "Fanciulla del West" at New York City Opera. It seemed to me impossible, given the weeks of rehearsal that precede a new production, that Ms. Friede could have turned in such a caricature of the role without Ms. Groag's condoning it.
— Read more at New York Times

English National Opera has delayed by six months Gaddafi, the opera written by Asian Dub Foundationâ??s Steve Chandra Savale and based on the life of the Libyan leader. The co-commission by ENO and Channel 4 was originally scheduled to be part of the forthcoming Sky and Artsworld Season but the date move gives the company an extra six months to produce it. The production will now open ENOâ??s 2006/7 season.
— Read more at The Stage Online

Members are to be issued with issued with instructions urging them not to accept work as choristers with Scottish Opera, until current negotiations about the terms, conditions and rates of pay for employment with the company are satisfactorily completed.
Natasha Gerson, proposing the motion for the Scottish National Committee, explained that Scottish Opera had sacked its entire chorus and was now employing choristers on a freelance basis.
— Read more at The Stage Online

Ninety-nine years ago, John Philip Sousa predicted that recordings would lead to the demise of music. The phonograph, he warned, would erode the finer instincts of the ear, end amateur playing and singing, and put professional musicians out of work. "The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music," he wrote. "Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards." Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa said. "The nightingaleâ??s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth."
— Read more at The New Yorker

The May Festival season, which ended Saturday in Music Hall, was a steady crescendo, starting with James Conlon's affecting reading of Dvorak's "Stabat Mater" to an opening night crowd of 2,477. On night two, 2,533 listeners gave an enthusiastic response to his riveting Russian night that included Shostakovich's harrowing "Babi Yar" Symphony No. 13.
Friday night's opera evening, with superstars Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner in the title roles of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" (Act II), was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, not likely to be forgotten by any of the 2,910 who witnessed it.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Talk about an atypical "crossover" record: a portion of Berg's opera Wozzeck snuggled on the same track next to Lionel Hampton's "The Midnight Sun." Mahler's song "Liebst du um Schonheit" a few tracks away from Joni Mitchell's "River." Villa-Lobos' "Cancao do Amor" paired with Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More." However surprisingly, all these musical worlds co-exist very comfortably on acclaimed American soprano Renee Fleming's new Decca release, "Haunted Heart." Paired with two impeccable collaborators (pianist Fred Hersch and guitarist Bill Frisell), Fleming performs with a tonal color and range that may stun longtime fans used to hearing her on the world's greatest opera stages rather than at an intimate cabaret.
— Read more at Reuters.com