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

A THOROUGH exploration of Aaron Copland's music, with a comprehensive look at the 20th-century American culture that shaped him and that he shaped, seems a natural idea and a likely audience draw. So the most astonishing thing about the festival "Copland and His World" at Bard College is that it was so long in coming. Bard began presenting its composer-themed summer festivals in 1990, the year of Copland's 90th birthday. (He died that December.) But that first summer, the subject was Brahms. At the Copland centenary, in 2000, the festival, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., was devoted to Beethoven. In its first 15 years, Bard has examined only one thoroughly American composer, Charles Ives (in 1996), although a few of its other subjects - Bartok (1995), Schoenberg (1999) and Mahler (2002) - had important links to the United States.
— Read more at New York Times

It was a far cry from "we don't need no education" on Monday when Pink Floyd's Roger Waters presented excerpts for the first time from "Ca Ira," his new three-act opera about the French Revolution. Waters told an enthusiastic audience, which was to all appearances made up more of Pink Floyd fans than opera buffs, that the ambitious project first came to him back in 1989, when French songwriter Etienne Roda-Gil brought him a libretto for the French revolution-inspired piece.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

'I feel like the victim of a hit and run accident,' said Marin Alsop when I rang to congratulate her. It seemed a strained reaction from a serious conductor who, aged 48, had just become the first woman chief of a US big-city symphony orchestra. But the circumstances of her appointment had been stressful, to say the least. Alsop is principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, which plays tomorrow night at the BBC Proms. She has made two-dozen popular recordings and is high on the guest list of major orchestras. She was well due for an upgrade.
— Read more at scena.org

Giuseppe Verdi and his operas are so beloved and familiar that many musicians call him "Papa Verdi." He died almost within living memory, in 1901, and we have film of his funeral, with teeming crowds in attendance. "Tosca's Kiss," Daniel Schmid's endearing documentary, recently released on DVD, shows that Verdi remains a vivid presence at the Milan rest home for musicians that he founded and considered his "most beautiful work." Even in New York, Verdi is part of our everyday landscape, towering in marble and limestone over Verdi Square north of Lincoln Center.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilaine fille]

Britain's Royal Opera House has declared troubled philanthropist Alberto Vilar in breach of a multimillion-dollar pledge that saw the company put his name on its flagship building. It gave him 60 days to resume payments. It is the latest sour note in the relationship between Britain?s leading opera house and the Cuban-born financier, who was arrested in New York in May on charges of business fraud. Vilar is well-known in the Vail Valley, having contributed millions to the performing arts center in Beaver Creek that bears his name as well as other local arts organizations.
— Read more at Vail Daily News

There's unlikely to be a shift anytime soon in what is a bread-and-butter opera from 18th and 19th century classical operas to 20th century works such as Berg's "Lulu" and Strauss's "Salome" and "Elektra." So Verdi's "Aida" and Bizet's "Carmen" will just have to do among what are now the bread-and-butter operas of American opera companies that grapple with financial realities. Yet American opera companies often have had their greatest artistic gains with the staging of modern operas such as Benjamin Britten's 1973 "Death in Venice," based on Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, which opened at Glimmerglass Opera's Alice Busch Opera Theater Saturday night.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

Così fan tutte always represents a perilous venture. The music is glorious, of course, but the drama is fragile. Should this essentially misogynous period piece, an essay on the eternal infidelity of women, be played for laughs? Should it be probed for contradictions? Does bitterness lurk beneath the fickle froth? Can the plot unravel happily, mate-swapping forgotten and couples reunited, in time for the final cadence?
— Read more at FT.com

The Houston Symphony has canceled a concert production of Strauss's Elektra planned for March 2006. Instead, the orchestra will present excerpts from operas by Strauss and Wagner with Ravel's ballet score Daphnis and Chloé. Soprano Elizabeth Connell, who was to sing the title role in Elektra, will be the soloist in the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and the final scene from Strauss's Salome.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[The last time she was at Covent Garden, mezzo Olga Borodina walked out on her conductor]
As she lights another cigarette, the Russian mezzo-soprano Olga Borodina giggles at the story of a famous American soprano who demanded that her taxi home from a concert should not only be non-smoking, but one in which no one had ever smoked. "Most singers are very precious about themselves. Mad people!" We are sitting in the villa on the Tuscan coast which she has bought with her third husband, the 28-year-old bass Ildar Abdrazakov, as a summer refuge from operatic life. Outside, workmen are busy preparing the huge garden for a party to celebrate her 42nd birthday.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The Criterion Theatre will be living up to its name this weekend by setting a new, or at least a revived, standard in musical entertainment. The Bar Harbor Music Festival Opera Theatre will be making its debut on the Criterion stage Saturday, July 23, with a production of the classic opera, Giacomo Puccini's "La Bohème."
— Read more at The Bar Harbor Times

Music Director Louis Langrée Leads Opening Night Program Starring Soprano Renée Fleming and Pianist Stephen Hough.
Soprano Renée Fleming performs works by Mozart and Handel on the program, which also includes Mozart's Symphony No. 35 ("Haffner"), interspersed with selections from J.C. Bach's Symphony in G minor; Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23; and Rameau solo keyboard works featuring pianist Stephen Hough.
Thursday, July 28, 2005 at 8:00 p.m. on PBS
— Read more at http://www.lincolncenter.org

A can't-miss is Opera Idaho's first Eagle performance in their Opera Under the Stars series. And before you say opera isn't your thing, close your eyes and conjure up the idyllic setting, and remember that the term "opera" runs a wide gamut of styles and sounds. Bring a blanket and an open mind and head out to Eagle to hear the Opera Idaho resident company with international opera stars as they perform selected arias from works like La Traviata, Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado and some Broadway tunes, too.
— Read more at BoiseWeekly

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.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

Some came to see, others to be seen. And then there was the least visible group - those who love Richard Wagner's music. For the hundreds lined up as much as six deep in front of the "Festspielhaus" (Festival Theater) ahead of Monday's premiere of "Tristan und Isolde," the focus was le
— Read more at mercurynews.com

Britain's Royal Opera House has declared troubled philanthropist Alberto Vilar in breach of a multimillion-dollar pledge that saw the company put his name on its flagship building. It gave him 60 days to resume payments. It is the latest sour note in the relationship between Britain's leading opera house and the Cuban-born financier, who was arrested in New York in May on charges of business fraud.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Thanks largely to the highly acclaimed production of "Margaret Garner," the Cincinnati Opera broke its all-time ticket income record during its 2005 summer season. The opera also had its highest attendance since the 1987-88 season, when it had five productions rather than the four it's had the past several years. The ticket income was $1.75 million, while the total season attendance was 30,742 an increase of almost 8 percent over last year.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Doug Nagel had never seen an opera before he was in one. "I've never looked back," Nagel said of his lead performance in "The Magic Flute" at age 19. Nagel, the artistic director for the Rimrock Opera Company, will serve on the National Endowment for the Arts Excellence in Opera Grant Panel. As a member of the seven-person panel, Nagel will help review 53 grant applications from opera companies and make recommendations for grant approval.
— Read more at billingsgazette.com

This year's Salzburg Festival opens its opera program this evening with a major risk. Franz Schreker's ``Die Gezeichneten'' (``The Branded''), once banned by the Nazis, hardly qualifies as a crowd puller. It was once. Following its 1918 Frankfurt premiere, the piece spread like lightning across Europe. It was given about two dozen different stagings over 15 years, in cities from Vienna to Kiel and Cologne to Breslau, now Wroclaw. Schreker (1878-1934) was one of the most-performed living German composers of his day. Paul Bekker, a leading critic, declared him the natural successor of Wagner. Then Hitler rose to power.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Four-time Tony Award winner Audra McDonald will make her Houston Grand Opera debut in March 2006. The centerpiece of McDonald's performance will be Francis Poulenc's La Voix Humaine (The Human Voice). Poulenc's work, according to the Houston Grand Opera's official website, concerns a "jilted woman [who] strangles herself while talking to her lover on the telephone." The evening will also include a companion piece written by Michael John LaChiusa that concerns "the lighter side of love."
— Read more at Playbill News

Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters has performed extracts from his new opera for the first time in New York. Ca Ira - which features Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel and other classical music stars - is an "operatic history of the French Revolution". "It's about change, and personal change; we each have within us the potential for republic," said Waters.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

It was supposed to have been one of the highlights of the Festival de Lanaudière -- Deborah Voigt and Ben Heppner with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under Asher Fisch's able baton performing Beethoven and Wagner. "The Debbie & Ben Tour," as some wags in the opera press are calling it, hit Lanaudière Saturday, opened last week at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa with the NAC orchestra, and will be heard in New York and Berlin later in the season -- always with local orchestras.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

The SNAP Foundation will present "CARMEN - A Charity Night at the Opera" on July 27, 2005 @ 7:00 pm. The show will be directed by Michael Davis and the role of Carmen will be played by Luretta Bybee.
Performed by: Artists from the Metropolitan Opera and Theater Flamenco.
Tribeca Performing Arts Center
Manhattan Community College
199 Chambers Street
New York City, New York 10007
To purchase tickets call: Edward Gartz at 585-723-1463

The world's first professional operatic podcast was announced today. The move follows a recent BBC initiative in which 1.4 million users downloaded the complete works of Beethoven, performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. The BBC claims that project, "sparked debate about classical music in the digital world".
— Read more at Macworld UK

The Chautauqua Opera has done well by Robert Ward's 1962 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera, "The Crucible." If my memory is correct, this is its fourth production in the opera's 44-year history. I have seen the last three, coming away from each with the conviction that "The Crucible" is one of the great American operas.
— Read more at Buffalo News

James Conlon, the Ravinia Festival's new music director, isn't quite the multitasker his predecessors Christoph Eschenbach and James Levine were. He doesn't play the piano for a paying audience, tossing off a bit of four-hand Schubert with a visiting virtuoso pianist or accompanying a song recital. But on Saturday night with a full-length concert performance of Verdi's "Otello,'' he reminded Ravinia audiences that he is a ferociously insightful opera conductor.
— Read more at suntimes.com

Picture it. A TV commercial. Voice-over: "Congratulations Marin Alsop! Now that you've just been named new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, what do you do next?" Alsop grins broadly and declares: "I'm going to Daytona Beach!" Not a very likely advertisement, perhaps, but the scenario isn't at all far-fetched.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Although most Ravinia patrons associate opera performances at the festival with former music director James Levine, there is a proud operatic tradition at the park that goes back to Ravinia's earliest decades. That tradition is now being honored by one of Levine's successors, James Conlon. A veteran of the operatic wars in Cologne and Paris, and a mainstay at the Metropolitan Opera for nearly three decades, Conlon is an experienced theater man very much in the Levine mold: a dynamic conductor who is uniquely equipped to put together exciting operatic experiences of the highest quality at Ravinia despite the ever-present distractions of heat, humidity and rumbling Metra trains.
— Read more at Metromix

Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, an opera with a libretto by novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, will debut at the Berlin State Opera on September 14. Foer's second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was published?to a great deal of media attention?this past April.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Music was an early vocation of Giorgio Strehler, the late founder of Milan's Piccolo Teatro. Music's tones and rhythms wove their way through his productions: in the ethereal singsong and weightless bounds of Ariel in Shakespeare's "Tempest"; in the rippling, misty imagery that Strehler crafted for Verdi's sea-drenched "Simon Boccanegra"; and in every gesture and word of his classic staging of Carlo Goldoni's "Arlecchino," which opened Wednesday at the Lincoln Center Festival. The unruly sounds of a five-man band launch "Arlecchino," whose characters burst into song at every turn. Flatulent horn-honks punctuate the merchant Pantaloon's pompous blather; the servant Smeraldina denounces masculine perfidy in a pert arietta that might belong to Despina in Mozart's "Così fan tutte"; the lovers Clarice and Silvio warble a gallant duet while dipping and glissading.
— Read more at Newsday.com

You have to admire the fact that when the Cincinnati Opera commissioned its first work in its 85-year history, it chose to tackle one of the most controversial, if not the most controversial, topics in our nation's history - slavery. To add further tension and drama, the historical events upon which the opera's production of "Margaret Garner" are based took place 149 years ago right here in Greater Cincinnati.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

No single conductor will dominate the podium during La Scala's next season, its first in 19 years without conductor Riccardo Muti as music director, the Milan opera house said. Young conductors and veteran maestros will take turns leading the orchestra as the storied theatre seeks to end the turmoil that led to Muti's resignation. The next season will open as always on Dec. 7, with 29-year-old Daniel Harding conducting Mozart's Idomeneo, La Scala said in a statement posted on its Web site.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

Tenor Plácido Domingo will create the role of Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda in a new opera, "Il Postino," by Mexican composer Daniel Catán, Los Angeles Opera company artistic director Edgar Baitzel said Friday. The premiere will be in Los Angeles in 2009. The work was inspired by Antonio Skarmeta's novel "The Postman," originally titled "Burning Patience" and turned into a hit 1995 Italian film, "Il Postino" (The Postman), which was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Some local children are spending part of their summer vacation on a beach in Italy. They are traveling there through their imaginations. In reality, they will be appearing on the stage of the Alice Busch Opera Theater in a Glimmerglass Opera production of "Death in Venice." The modern opera by Benjamin Britten, based on a book by Thomas Mann, tells the story of a famous writer, Aschenbach, who visits Venice and spends time on a beach.
— Read more at thedailystar.com

Glynn Ross, Seattle Opera's founding director, is dead at age 90. Ross died of complications from a stroke Thursday morning at his home in Tucson, Ariz., with his wife, Gio, by his side, daughter Melanie Ross said Friday. Born in Omaha, Neb., on Dec. 15, 1914, Ross grew up on his family's farm and managed it for several years until after his father's death, when his mother encouraged him to pursue a career in theater.
— Read more at Corvallis Gazette-Times

The part of the history of opera that is most obscure to us is the most recent - the last half century, or at least the last 35 years. A work gets staged. Maybe it is a triumph. Maybe it is badly directed or performed. Maybe the whole event passes unnoticed. One waits for the revival, but no revival comes. Perhaps a prejudice sets in, an unspoken view that if such a work has not yet been revived, that must mean it is unrevivable. How many people, how many musicians indeed, can look at a complex score and form an impression of how it will sound? And how many of those can be trusted to advise us as to how this opera, sounding as it does, will come across on stage? A minority of a minority of a minority. We are at the mercy of chance.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Italy's venerable opera house, La Scala, will rotate through a roster of young conductors instead of replacing its former maestro, Riccardo Muti, who lead the company for 19 years. Stephane Lissner, La Scala's new artistic director, says he's in no hurry to replace Muti, who was ousted earlier this year along with top managers after an acrimonious strike by the theatre's workers.
— Read more at CBC

The Edinburgh International Festival on Aug. 14-Sept. 4 is a celebration of challenging and imaginative programming in theater, classical music, opera and dance. The 59th edition presents a record number of commissions and cross-discipline collaborations. Three productions are world premieres by playwrights David Harrower, Shan Khan and Chiew Siah Tei. Among new opera productions are The Death of Klinghoffer by John Adams, and Curlew River by Benjamin Britten. Ireland's Druid Theatre Company stages all six plays by J.M. Synge. Among dance collaborations are Christopher Wheeldon's new interpretation of Swan Lake with the Pennsylvania Ballet and the Russian Tchaikovsky Symphony Orchestra of Moscow Radio, and the Scottish Ballet.
— Read more at South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Although Roger Waters dabbled with operatic themes in Pink Floyd?s ?The Wall,? he?s never written a traditional opera ? until now. Waters will debut ?Ca Ira (There Is Hope),? his opera about the French Revolution, Sept. 27 with a double-CD and DVD project from Sony Music. Though the production includes baritone Bryn Terfel and other classical music veterans, Waters believes ?Ca Ira? might spark some skepticism from the classical music world.
— Read more at Journal Gazette

A male violinist's discrimination suit against the New York Philharmonic underscores a little-noted phenomenon: women have come to dominate the violin sections of some of the nation's leading orchestras, or at least hold their own. And their numbers among violin players have also helped raise their prominence as concertmasters, the most important orchestra jobs after the conductors.
— Read more at New York Times

The imposing bass Stephen Milling, singing the role of Hunding in Wagner's "Walküre," rumbled forth with stage-shaking low notes in his first rehearsal with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Jaws dropped in the first-violin section. Some of the young players, students at Tanglewood and top-notch musicians themselves, smiled in amazement. One violinist mouthed "Wow!" to her stand partner.
— Read more at New York Times

Pamela Rosenberg, the outgoing general director of San Francisco Opera, who leaves the company in December 2006 after functioning for a year as executive advisor to new general director David Gockley, will return to Germany after her tenure ends to become intendant of the Berlin Philharmonic, the San Francisco Chronicle has reported.
— Read more at Opera News

American tenor Richard Croft is to return to Austria for the Salzburg Festival later this month where he will sing the title role in Mitridate, fourteen-year-old Mozart's first opera Seria composed in 1781. He is scheduled to reprise the role at the Festival in 2006.
Croft, who has recorded Gluck's Orphee et Eurydice with Marc Minkowski and Les Musiciens du Louvre, will tour with them in later in 2005 for a program of Mozart arias. He returns to America in February 2006 to star in Handel's Rodelinda at the Dallas Opera.
— Read more at soundgenerator.com

As the Cincinnati Opera celebrates the final weekend of its 85th Anniversary Summer Festival, General Director and CEO Patricia K. Beggs today announced that Evans Mirageas has been named artistic director of the nation's second oldest opera company. Mirageas will assume artistic leadership of the company effective Sept. 1.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post also: www.cincinnatiopera.org

"No human experience -- however brutalizing -- was beyond art," author Toni Morrison has observed about the American experience of slavery. "If it were, then the brutalizers will have triumphed." Morrison carried that sentiment through her 1998 novel "Beloved" and most recently to her libretto for the opera "Margaret Garner," a collaboration with composer Richard Danielpour that seethes mightily. While I have reservations about Danielpour's vast score, which tends to telegraph its emotional language all too obviously, there's no denying the power of its argument.
— Read more at courier-journal.com

It's "festival weekend," as Cincinnati Opera presents back-to-back performances of Verdi's "Rigoletto" and "Margaret Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison blockbuster about escaped slave Margaret Garner. "Rigoletto" [opens at 8 p.m. tonight] and repeats at 8 p.m. Saturday at Music Hall. "Margaret Garner" returns for its third and final performance at 8 p.m. Friday, also at Music Hall. ("Margaret Garner" is officially sold out, but tickets may be available at the last minute, call (513) 241-2742 for information.)
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

The Asheville Lyric Opera is inviting you to a FREE concert! It will be held on Sunday the 24th of July at 3:00pm at St. Matthias Church in downtown Asheville, featuring Marilyn Davidson, the Director of Education and Outreach for ALO, and Julia Kwolyk, an Intern for ALO. Virginia McKnight will be accompanying them on the piano.
— Read more at ashevillelyric.org

The Glimmerglass Opera's 2004 production of Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur will be released on the Chandos label on July 26. The live CD will be the first recording ever issued of the opera. The Mines of Sulphur, a gothic tale about a murderous maid, her henchmen, and a troupe of actors that they encounter, had its world premiere in London in 1965. It has been produced just once since in the U.K. The Glimmerglass staging, the American premiere, came about when another production? a new work by Stephen Hartke? fell through.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

This, astonishingly, was Plácido Domingo's Proms debut. That alone was enough to create an immense buzz around this wholesale transfer of the Royal Opera's Die Walküre to the Albert Hall, in staged concert form. But the fact that the evening ended with the entire cheering audience on its feet - something that rarel happens here - was down to much more than that. Not least of these factors was the fact that the orchestra has been so close to this work for so long. Antonio Pappano's fast tempos may occasionally jettison some of the music's spaciousness, but he keeps its energy flowing, and the musical tension crackled.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The next general director of the San Francisco Opera has been spending several days a week in town for a while, getting to know the lay of the land and what's in store for him when he takes over from Pamela Rosenberg in January. But on Monday, General Director-designate David Gockley had a chance to hang out with some of the just plain folks who also happen to be among the players in the Bay Area arts scene.
— Read more at sfgate.com

[When she's not singing, she's teaching rising opera stars]
Mezzo-soprano Suzanne Mentzer, who performs tonight at Aspen?s Harris Concert Hall, caught a fortuitous ear at one point in her now-dual career as a performer and teacher. And the rest, as they say, is history. Mentzer came to the Aspen Music Festival and School as a student in 1976, after her sophomore year at University of the Pacific in California. Then she decided to take a risk, leaving California for the Juilliard School, where, Menzer says, she "did OK, but didn?t stand out."
— Read more at Aspen Times News

Among the many perfections of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" is the way it combines formal artifice and emotional depth. The plot is an elegant piece of clockwork whose moving parts mesh flawlessly, yet its portrayal of love, jealousy and class struggle is rendered in exquisite detail.
The production of "Figaro" given over the weekend by the young artists of the Merola Opera Program seems to have been an attempt to personalize the piece even further -- or rather, to spotlight the opera's emotional thread within the backdrop of trickery and running in and out of closets.
— Read more at sfgate.com

[Alsop is a fine musician and the Baltimore Symphony is in poor financial shape. But she needs cooperation from the players to succeed.]
From afar, the appointment of Marin Alsop as the next music director of the Baltimore Symphony certainly sounds like something to celebrate. As one of the top dozen or so orchestras in America, it is the most important ensemble yet to appoint a woman as music director. The Baltimore Symphony has, moreover, selected an American conductor who made a name for herself by championing American music.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

The Royal Opera House (ROH) has given a philathropist millionaire 60 days to come up with the money to complete a promised £10m donation. Cuban-American Alberto Vilar promised the money to the ROH development appeal in 1999, but has so far paid only a fraction of that total.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Patrice Chéreau is one of a handful of stage directors whose name is automatically attached to the work he is directing. Thus, a landmark Wagner production at the 1976 Bayreuth Festival is remembered as Patrice Chéreau's "Ring" cycle. And again, before this month's Aix-en-Provence Festival, the buzz centered on Chéreau's "Così Fan Tutte," his first venture into opera in 11 years. Not that Mozart need feel diminished by this: His works have been the focus of this festival since it was founded in the late 1940s, and usually two of his operas are presented each season in the open-air courtyard of the former Archbishop's Palace here. This year, the other is "La Clemenza di Tito," directed by Lukas Hemleb, with Paul Daniel conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

By tradition the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra is also the artistic director of the Tanglewood Music Center, the prestigious training program for young musicians run by the Boston Symphony at its summer home here. Some previous music directors have involved themselves deeply with the program; others have essentially been figureheads. Now that James Levine has arrived, how does he see his role at the center?
— Read more at New York Times

Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson will miss the world-premiere performances of John Adams' Doctor Atomic at San Francisco Opera, SFO announced. Lieberson has canceled a series of performances because of a back injury sustained earlier this year. According to San Francisco Opera, "Ms. Lieberson's doctors have advised her that she must withdraw from the production in order to allow more time for the healing process." Kristine Jepsen will replace Lieberson in the role of Kitty Openheimer.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

In the summer heat, Bernd Loebe sports both a tie and broad smile. The smile is understandable. Since Loebe took charge of the Frankfurt Opera in 2002, the house has flourished. In the 1970s, Frankfurt was the country's most important opera company, and its success continued in the following decade. Poor management and bad decisions led to a sharp decline in its fortunes in the 1990s.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Take one expensive luxury good (Chanel No.5 ), a star director and superstar actress, professional musicians (from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra) and a budget rumoured to be as high as $10 million, and you have what it takes to flog a perfume as well as help fill the coffers of the arts company you represent. This was the mix at the Trackdown Studios on the Fox Studios backlot late in 2003 when preparations began for Baz Luhrmann's shiny global advertisement for Chanel No.5, starring Nicole Kidman. The musicians came to perform Debussy's Claire de Lune. The conductor was Craig Armstrong, who worked with Luhrmann on Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!. The orchestra, which had hired out its musicians for this purpose, collected the performance fees. All went home happy.
— Read more at smh.com.au

Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters (bio) is set to make both a return to original music and a trek into previously unmapped territory when he unveils his new album "Ca Ira," a long-anticipated "operatic history of the French Revolution," in September.
— Read more at liveDaily

Three weeks ago the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra did not exist. Yet, amazingly, during long stretches of Saturday night's concert performances of Act 1 of Wagner's "Die Walkuere" and Act 3 of Wagner's "Die Goetterdaemmerung," it was possible to believe that we were listening to one of the great opera orchestras of the world.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

'This is still, for me, a work in progress," says composer Richard Danielpour about his first opera, "Margaret Garner." "I don't think we're anywhere near a final version. In many ways, this experience is like a gigantic laboratory for me." Danielpour was taking stock of "Margaret Garner" days before its Cincinnati opening last week, over lunch at Palomino's downtown. For the composer, it's been a watershed year: He turned 50, saw his first opera mounted (the world premiere was in May in Detroit) and got married a week after the final Detroit performance.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

The muse of music must be smiling over Cincinnati after the triumphant opening of Richard Danielpour's opera, Margaret Garner. This is clearly a major new work that will be honored by intense scrutiny. Flaws will be identified, to be sure, but none will diminish the opera's dramatic and artistic power. This world premiere production succeeds perhaps in spite of the pre-show hype. Collaborators on the work include Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and Metropolitan Opera star Denyce Graves. Its story line builds on the eerily compelling tale of an escaped slave who plans to murder her children rather than accept their recapture. How could any production survive the expectations?
— Read more at Lexington Herald-Leader

Opera houses should value artistry and talent above beauty in their singers, according to Renee Fleming, who sang on the Lord of the Rings films soundtrack. The US opera star said she would choose a singer with a "really beautiful voice" over a "stunning-looking woman" with an average voice. But it "depends on the situation, the (opera) house, the singer, the artist". Last year the Royal Opera House dropped singer Deborah Voigt from a production, saying she did not suit her costume.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

A masterpiece is measured as much by its effect at full strength as how it withstands other treatments. Richard Wagner created his 18-hour "Der Ring des Nibelungen" with such inner vitality that even a condensed version sung in English is potent, even despite flaws. In a production of the second of the four operas, "The Valkyrie," Saturday night at the Byham Theater, different aspects of the epic opera came to the fore. Opera Theater director Jonathan Eaton used a reduced version by Jonathan Dove (in a translation by Andrew Porter) to center the action more on the intimate relationships of the main characters. He did so by casting singers who could act, and it paid off in the rapport between Wotan (Charles Robert Austin) and Brunnhilde (Deidra Palmour Gorton). While these struggled to capture the vocal heroics -- Austin's dark voice occasionally lost focus, and Gorton's was too thin for the role -- their mutual tenderness was deftly developed. And when's the last time someone carried a Brunnhilde, as Austin did to lay Gorton on her rock?
— Read more at post-gazette.com

here is a very good excuse for Central City Opera to stage Paul Bunyan, Benjamin Britten's neglected "operetta," which opened Saturday at the Opera House. Each summer, the company invites a boatload of bright young apprentice singers, all hoping for some quality stage experience. This season's other two offerings provide few opportunities, but Bunyan is another story: First performed in 1941 by a collegiate cast at Columbia, it's the operatic equivalent of a chirpy, over-populated Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney summer-camp show.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

[Wagner's challenging 'Nibelung' cycle a Southland first]
Long Beach Opera has developed quite a reputation in its more than 25-year history. A reputation for taking on challenges, for going where no opera company has gone before. Next January, the company will once again venture into the operatic unknown, presenting in two weekend-long four opera cycles the first-ever Southern California performances of Richard Wagner's "Ring of the Nibelung," opera's most powerful, most challenging and most daunting work.
— Read more at U-Press Telegram

Marin Alsop, one of the first women to achieve eminence in the overwhelmingly male field of orchestral conducting, will become the next music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when Yuri Temirkanov steps down at the end of the 2006-07 season, pending approval by the BSO board. This will be the first time that a woman has been chosen to head a major American symphony orchestra. Because of Alsop's already-busy schedule, she will not be in Baltimore full time until 2007-08. No details were yet available on her salary or the length of her appointment.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

When Broadway composer Adam Guettel first read Elizabeth Spencer's 1959 novella, "The Light in the Piazza," he felt immediately that it lent itself to musical theater. "There's a lot that Elizabeth Spencer does not say that is implied somehow by the tone of her writing," he said. "She has a wonderful quality of withholding while she expresses. She's expressive almost by virtue of withholding things. She's very deftly simple," explained Guettel, the grandson of Richard Rodgers. He divides his time between New York City and Tinmouth.
— Read more at Times Argus

ON Sept. 26, 1940, in the small Spanish town of Portbou, Walter Benjamin's desperate flight from Nazi-occupied Europe came to a tragic end. After being turned back just beyond the French border, within sight of his freedom, he committed suicide. Historians have long considered the death of this German-Jewish philosopher a grievous intellectual toll exacted by the Third Reich, and now a new opera tries to register the loss through a fractured avant-garde prism. Its opening scene takes place on Benjamin's final night. Entitled "Shadowtime," the work, with music by the British composer Brian Ferneyhough and a libretto by the American poet Charles Bernstein, is loosely based on Benjamin's life and ideas. It will receive its first American performances on Thursday and Friday at the Lincoln Center Festival, directed by Frédéric Fisbach, with Jurjen Hempel leading the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the Nieuw Ensemble Amsterdam.
— Read more at New York Times

IN the fall of 1972, having nearly finished the compositional sketch for "Death in Venice," his last opera, Benjamin Britten was emotionally drained and deeply insecure about the work. He wrote to the choreographer Frederick Ashton that the opera, based on Thomas Mann's 1912 novella, was "either the best or the worst music I've ever written," adding that he had an utter dread of playing it for anyone.
— Read more at New York Times

One of the moments in which time stood still in the opera 'Margaret Garner' Thursday night, was when Denyce Graves as the slave mother rocked her baby to the words, ?Sad things, far away; Soft things, come and play?? Toni Morrison's words were soothing and sweet, gently married to Richard Danielpour's spellbinding music. The lullaby stood at the heart of this sweeping epic, an emotional story of courage and hope, but more than that, the story of a mother's love as her family is ripped apart.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

[Opera dynamos Ben Heppner, Deborah Voigt unite for NAC concert]
It's the opera equivalent of a joint concert by the Stones and U2, and in a coup for the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Ottawa will see it first. Canadian tenor Ben Heppner and American soprano Deborah Voigt, who at their best possess two of the most thrilling voices in opera today, will get together Wednesday for a concert with the orchestra, performing arias and duets by Beethoven and Wagner under guest conductor Asher Fisch. Ottawa audiences will be the first to hear music the singers will also perform at Quebec's Lanaudiere Festival next week and in New York City and Berlin next season.
— Read more at canada.com

April Haines is the quintessential local girl who made good. From a modest start singing in the choir at Roland Park Presbyterian Church in the 1980s, she launched a career that eight years ago took her to one of the most prestigious jobs in music - that of a full-time member of the Metropolitan Opera Company chorus in New York.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

In the 1999 movie "Being John Malkovich," a likable loser finds a way to take over the body and mind of a famous actor in order to achieve his dream of making puppetry into a glamorous mainstream art form. Well, Basil Twist is the man who really went ahead and did it, and without a bit of body-snatching. Lincoln Center audiences went gaga over his re-creations of Stravinsky's "Petrushka" in 2001 and Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" in 2003. So his realization of Ottorino Respighi's 1922 puppet opera "La Bella Dormente nel Bosco" ("Sleeping Beauty in the Woods") was a natural choice to open this summer's Lincoln Center Festival on Tuesday night.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Understand from the outset: This is a mini-Ring. It's not Wagner's grand epic as you'd hear it at Bayreuth or the Met or even at Pittsburgh Opera, were the bigger of our local companies to tackle it. What the spunky little Opera Theater is offering this weekend at the Byham is the first two music dramas of the cycle, "The Rhinegold" and "The Valkyrie" in the excellent English translation of Andrew Porter cannily pared down by British composer Jonathan Dove. It includes mostly young artists who look and act their roles nicely, and a Pittsburgh Symphony contingent totaling about 33.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

One of the moments in which time stood still in the opera "Margaret Garner" Thursday night was when Denyce Graves as the slave mother rocked her baby to the words, "Sad things, far away; Soft things, come and play ..." Toni Morrison's words were soothing and sweet, gently married to Richard Danielpour's spellbinding music. The lullaby stood at the heart of this sweeping epic, an emotional story of courage and hope, but more than that, the story of a mother's love as her family is ripped apart.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

Cincinnati Opera invites you to head "backstage" and join the all-star cast of Margaret Garner in a lively interactive panel discussion led by Cincinnati Opera Artistic Consultant (and Met Opera Quiz regular) Evans Mirageas.
When & Where:
Monday, July 18, 7:00 p.m.
Music Hall, Corbett Tower
1241 Elm Street, Downtown
Admission: Free, but reservations are required. Call (513) 241-2742.
— Read more at www.cincinnatiopera.org

Blockbuster may not adequately describe "Margaret Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera about escaped slave Margaret Garner, opening at 8 tonight at Music Hall. With 9,069 tickets sold as of 5 p.m. Wednesday, sales exceed those of Jake Heggie's highly popular "Dead Man Walking" in 2002 (8,787). That's more than the opera's goal of 8,000, with a week to go before the final performance.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

The NPR program World of Opera will broadcast five operas recorded live at the Glimmerglass Opera over the next five weeks. The five productions are drawn from the 2002 and 2004 summer seasons. They include Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur, Handel's Imeneo, Puccini's La fanciulla del West, Leoncavallo's Pagliacci with Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, and Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Opera Barga will not perform the contested Vivaldi opera Motezuma on July 16 and 17, but will perform their own revised version of the work, according to an announcement on the festival?s web site. Earlier this week, a German court ruled that the Berlin Sing-Akademie may forbid performances of a new performing edition of the long-lost opera. A manuscript for Motezuma was discovered in the Sing-Akademie?s archives by German musicologist Steffen Voss, who prepared the edition with musicologist and conductor Federico Maria Sardelli.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Anthony Freud, director of the Welsh National Opera, was named Thursday as the general director and chief executive officer of the Houston Grand Opera. Freud will succeed David Gockley, who led the Houston opera for 33 years and is to become general director of the San Francisco Opera in January.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

American soprano Renee Fleming, the haunting voice of "Elvish" in the last "Lord of the Rings" film, says opera houses should value artistry above beauty when considering whether singers are too heavy or old to play a part. "It's difficult to say because it's a fine line," Fleming told Reuters in an interview late on Wednesday. "It depends on the situation, the (opera) house, the singer, the artist...Only the singers with the most extraordinary voices can be really far out of the audience's expectation for how a character should look.
— Read more at reuters.co.uk [Related news items]

Africa is not known for its opera but that is something Jacques-Greg Belobo is determined to change. The large Cameroonian with an infectious laugh is already Africa's best-known opera star, even if there isn't a great deal of competition. He is based in Germany but often sings in France and Switzerland.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters has completed his first opera after 16 years in the making. Ca Ira - which features Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel and other classical music stars - is an "operatic history of the French Revolution". It is due to be released on CD in September and will be performed in concert in Rome later this year.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Wagner's Ring will be staged for the first time in Pittsburgh by Opera Theater in collaboration with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in a national groundbreaking reinterpretation of the grandest operas ever written, July 15-17 at the Byham Theater. Rhinegold and The Valkyrie, the first two operas of Wagner's epic masterwork, will be performed in English this summer; Maestro Anthony Negus will conduct members of the Pittsburgh Symphony while Opera Theater Artistic Director Jonathan Eaton directs a cast of 20 outstanding singers from throughout the United States for two performances of each opera. Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods will be performed next summer. The operas are slightly condensed so that no evening runs more than three hours. The orchestration has been adjusted into around 35 players by internationally acclaimed composer Jonathan Dove and was premiered in Britain to critical praise. Opera Magazine called Mr. Dove?s adapted orchestration "an astonishing achievement...done with an authentically thrilling grandeur."

Rhinegold: Friday, 15 July 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, 17 July 3:00 p.m.
The Valkyrie: Saturday, 16 July 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, 17 July 7:00 p.m.

— Read more at operatheaterpittsburgh.org/

Meet the Margaret Garner Creative Team: On Stage with Toni Morrison and Richard Danielpour.
What: Composer Richard Danielpour and librettist Toni Morrison, the world-class team behind Margaret Garner, take the Music Hall stage for a conversation about their inspiration, their artistic collaboration, and their journey to create this new American opera. These two national treasures and leading artistic voices will share their perspective from the set of Margaret Garner. Moderated by OPERA America President and CEO Marc Scorca.
When & Where:
Friday, July 15, 8:00 p.m.
Music Hall Auditorium
1241 Elm Street, Downtown
Admission:Tickets $10. Call (513) 241-2742.
— Read more at www.cincinnatiopera.org

Anthony Freud, Welsh National Opera's General Director for more than a decade, has been named the third General Director and the first Chief Executive Officer of Houston Grand Opera (HGO). Freud will assume leadership on March 6, 2006. The appointment was announced by Houston Grand Opera's Board President John S. Arnoldy and HGO's Vice President Donald W. Short at a press conference Thursday morning (July 14, 2005) in the Wortham Center.
— Read more at houstongrandopera.org

Although Roger Waters dabbled with operatic themes in Pink Floyd's "The Wall," he's never written a traditional opera -- until now. Waters will debut "Ca Ira (There Is Hope)," his opera about the French Revolution, Sept. 27 with a double-CD and DVD project from Sony Music.
— Read more at Newsday.com

From his first visit to the United States as a kid, Anthony Freud, the English arts administrator chosen as the next head of Houston Grand Opera, found the country magnetic. "(It's) the vitality, the energy, the openness, the sense of ambition ? all of which I find incredibly intoxicating," Freud said Wednesday in his hotel suite near the Wortham Theater Center. He says he finds the prospect of moving to Houston "incredibly thrilling and incredibly exciting, both from a personal point of view and a professional point of view.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

Seattle Opera announced at its annual meeting yesterday that it would post a budget deficit of $250,000-$280,000 for 2004-05, the Seattle Times reports. The shortfall, the company?s first in 13 years, will be covered by cash reserves.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Ben Heppner has withdrawn from a fall performance with the Los Angeles Opera because the role he was to sing "no longer suits his voice," officials announced Tuesday. The acclaimed Canadian tenor was scheduled to perform the role of Canio in director Franco Zeffirelli's production of Pagliacci. The opera was set to open in Los Angeles Sept. 11.
— Read more at CBC Arts

Baritone Rod Gilfry was booed in Detroit.

Not surprising, since Gilfry portrays slave master Edward Gaines in "Margaret Garner," the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera which receives its Cincinnati Opera premiere with performances at 8 p.m. Thursday, Saturday and July 22 at Music Hall. (The world premiere was at the Detroit Opera House May 7.)
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

The Houston Grand Opera will name the successor to outgoing general director David Gockley on July 14, the company announced. Gockley, who has led the company since 1972, was named Pamela Rosenberg's replacement at San Francisco Opera in February. He will assume his new post at the beginning of 2006.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

From its origins about 400 years ago, opera has been conceived as a synaesthetic experience. The voices, the lyrics, the orchestration, stylized acting, costumes, sets and lighting are meant to add up to a total effect on all the senses of the audience. This is what has given credence to the frequent claims that opera is the greatest of arts?because it combines them all in an aesthetic apotheosis. Festival Opera?s production of Verdi?s Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball), playing this Tuesday, Friday and Sunday at Walnut Creek?s Dean Lesher Center, brings the truth of these claims home in a way that more extravagant productions in the great opera houses often don?t.
— Read more at Berkeley Daily Planet

Southern California's Long Beach Opera will stage an abridged version of Wagner's Ring cycle in January 2006, the company announced. The company will give two performances of composer Jonathan Dove's reduced version of the four-opera cycle, which was first presented by England's Birmingham City Opera in the 1990s. The first half, an evening-length combination of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, will be performed on January 14 and 21. Siegfried and Götterdämmerung are scheduled for January 15 and 22.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Call it a magnificent doodle or a clutch of giant oyster shells, but Australia believes its striking Sydney Opera House is worthy of a listing as one of the world's most important buildings. The Opera House, which sits near the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a postcard picture seen the world over, has been included on Australia's National Heritage List, the government said on Tuesday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Cincinnati performance of the opera "Margaret Garner," opening Thursday in Music Hall, has special resonance for Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate and author of the opera's libretto. "For one, I'm Ohioan. And also, Cincinnati itself, being the locus, with the plantation there in Kentucky - it's layered with so much history," Morrison said in Detroit in May, shortly before the world premiere there of the opera she wrote with U.S. composer Richard Danielpour.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

The Royal Opera's new production of Die Walküre received a critical drubbing when it opened earlier this year. It has now been revived as a vehicle for Placido Domingo and Waltraud Meier as Siegmund and Sieglinde, and things have improved somewhat. This is due partly to its stars, and partly to a newly found coherence in Antonio Pappano's conducting. The result is a musical performance of considerable power, which far transcends Keith Warner's staging.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

South Jersey's only opera company kicks off its inaugural season on Tuesday evening with opera favorites, an international cast, and special audience programming. The Atlantic Coast Opera Festival got a recent rehearsal at a South Jersey church. The event begins Tuesday with performances of three classic operas.
— Read more at kyw1060.com

[On stage he is the embodiment of operatic passion and fire. In real life Placido Domingo is the gentlest of men and driven by his art - to the world's greatest tenor, mañana is just another working day ]
On stage he is the embodiment of operatic passion and fire. In real life Placido Domingo is the gentlest of men and driven by his art - to the world's greatest tenor, mañana is just another working day 'I have the big passion,' said Plácido Domingo. He beamed and spread his arms to enfold a global contingent of fans. In his endearingly unidiomatic English, he was declaring his passion for singing. 'It is for me still like the beginning of my career.' That career began with an engagement in Mexico 46 years ago. After apprentice years in Israel, Domingo became a fixture at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, at Covent Garden (where he is appearing in Wagner's Die Walküre) and everywhere else, admired for his vocal ardour and reckless physical impetuosity. Laurence Olivier, after seeing him in Verdi's Otello in Vienna, ruefully remarked that Domingo acted it as well as he had done himself - 'and,' he added, 'the bloody fellow can sing as well!'
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Berkshire Opera set up shop in 1985 with an introductory production of Handel's chamber opera ''Acis and Galatea." The 21st season opened Thursday night with a three-hour masterpiece by Handel, ''Rinaldo," in one of the best-sung performances in the company's history.
— Read more at Boston.com

Plans to stage a long-lost opera by one of Italy's most famous composers, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), ran into legal troubles, after a court issued a temporary injunction banning a number of planned performances of the work.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

After getting rave reviews in the original Detroit cast of a dramatic new opera about slavery, murder and mayhem, a soprano from Indianapolis brings the piece closer to home. Angela Brown, who debuted as Cilla, the wary mother-in-law in "Margaret Garner" in May, will revive the role Thursday through July 22 at Cincinnati's Music Hall.
— Read more at indystar.com [Related news items]

Opera San José's 2005-06 season will include a production of Robert Ward's The Crucible and recitals by Frederica von Stade and Thomas Hampson, the company announced. Ward's 1961 adaptation of Arthur Miller's play will open the season in September. Anthony Quartuccio will conduct; Timothy Near is the director. The season also includes productions of Verdi's Un ballo in maschera, Puccini's La bohème, and Mozart's Don Giovanni.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Lexington opera lovers can rightfully claim we were among the first to see this rising star, and we're not talking about Gregory Turay. Anyone who attended performances by the Lexington-based American Spiritual Ensemble in the past few years could not help but be thunderstruck by Angela Brown. She lifted our spirits with her soaring soprano and broke our hearts performing Watch and Pray, a song in which a slave girl asks her mother whether they will be sold and separated.
— Read more at Lexington Herald-Leader

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. Not all contemporary audiences are familiar with the Margaret Garner saga, but in 1856 it was a front-page story that bitterly divided the nation.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

The Berkshire Opera Company opened its doors in 1985 with a Handel work, "Acis and Galatea," and in the cast was an unknown soprano, Maureen O'Flynn. Ms. O'Flynn has gone on to bigger things, at the Metropolitan Opera and elsewhere, and the company has soldiered on, offering summer seasons of both standard and unusual works. To open its 20th season, on Thursday evening, the company returned to Handel - "Rinaldo," this time - and Ms. O'Flynn returned to sing Almirena, Rinaldo's betrothed, amid a generally solid cast.
— Read more at New York Times

In golf, you give new friends a mulligan. So lets offer that to James Levine after yesterday evening's opening night at Tanglewood, his debut as music director at the BSO's summer home. Not that the performance was anything less than spectacular. It was just that: a spectacle of choruses, orchestra and soloists, overwhelming to the extreme. Levine offered a reprise of the Mahler 8th, which he used to introduce himself to Boston audiences in the fall in his BSO debut. With much the same spectacular cast, Levine revisited the great texts from the final scene of Goethe's "Faust'' that made such a stupendous first appearance for the BSO under its new maestro. But sometimes such an overwhelming work is inappropriate in this casual setting.
— Read more at BostonHerald.com

Why would a mother kill her children, even if faced with the horrible fate of returning them to slavery? It's a question that hangs over the story of Margaret Garner, a Northern Kentucky slave who during the 1850s escaped with her family and, when faced with recapture, killed her daughter and attempted to kill herself and her two sons. The incident led to a sensational trial revolving around the question of whether she should be tried for murder or for destruction of property. It also led to author Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Beloved and a new opera that opens in Cincinnati this week.
— Read more at Lexington Herald-Leader

[Brian Ferneyhough is the last composer you'd expect to produce a stage work. But the life - and death, and afterlife - of the philosopher Walter Benjamin inspired him to write an opera like no other, says Andrew Clements ]
Ten years ago, no one dreamed Brian Ferneyhough would compose a work that could be called an opera. Least of all Ferneyhough himself: he admits that until 1997, when he was commissioned by the city of Munich to write a stage work for its Biennale, he had never given the idea much thought. Not that Shadowtime corresponds to conventional notions of what an opera, or even music theatre more generally, can be. The work, which receives its British premiere at the London Coliseum tomorrow, features poetic examinations of the philosophy of Walter Benjamin, and at one point requires a pianist dressed like Liberace to play a furiously difficult solo while reciting texts dealing with alchemy and theories of cognition.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

If you ask James Levine what changes he has in mind for Tanglewood, he'll tell you to wait until he has experienced the place. But he said he is sure that he'll find some things he wants to develop. If you ask him about the changes he's already making at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which attracts thousands of visitors every year to Tanglewood and the Berkshires -- well, that's a different matter.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

The Princeton Festival, central New Jersey?s newest performing arts festival will present the Concordia Chamber players in concert on Friday, July 8, 2005 at 8:00 PM at Lawrenceville?s Kirby Arts Center. The concert will feature works of Johannes Brahms, Leos Janácek and Robert Schumann.
Performances of Sweeney Todd will continue Saturday July 9, 2005 at 8:00 P.M.; Friday July 15, 2005 at 8:00 P.M.; and Saturday July 16, 2005 at 8:00 P.M. Tickets (from $25 to $75) are available at the website, www.princetonfestival.org or by calling 800.585.4849.
— Read more at princetonfestival.org

AS Alameda Civic Light Opera prepares to open its 2005 season, five actors are living in a blur of dialogue, dance and songs. Tom Farris, Liz Caffrey, Sharnee Nichols, Kelsey Lappa and John Rivard will appear in all three ACLO productions: "Man of La Mancha," "42nd Street" and "Damn Yankees." For the five actors, rehearsals and performances will continue to overlap through early fall. "I have a spreadsheet to keep it straight," says Tom Farris.
— Read more at insidebayarea.com

BOTTOM LINE: Rearrange schedules, change plans and run to see this vocally and visually stunning new production featuring a young dramatic soprano (Othalie Graham) who is destined for international stardom. Salt Lake Tribune

[Melbourne Opera believes it should be the beneficiary of Victorian Government support for opera]
An independent, Victorian opera company has expressed concern at the Victorian Government's delay in announcing who will receive the $7.6 million promised to the artform over the next four years. A member of the Melbourne Opera board, Margaret Haggart, who has sung professionally around the world, said she was worried about rumours suggesting that most of the money would go to OzOpera, the educational and touring arm of Opera Australia.
— Read more at Opera wars - Arts - Entertainment - theage.com.au

Stephen Sondheim's last show on Broadway was a revival of "Pacific Overtures' that closed earlier this year.
It came on the heels of two other Sondheim revivals, Joe Mantello's highly acclaimed staging of "Assassins,' which won five Tony Awards the previous spring, and a roundly panned new version of "The Frogs' that Nathan Lane adapted and starred in at Lincoln Center last summer.
— Read more at U-Daily News

In a way, Tanglewood this summer is a tale of two debut conductors. The big news is James Levine, of course. Making his festival debut as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's first new music director in 32 years, he'll dominate the first three weeks of the BSO season. At summer's end comes the BSO debut of Marin Alsop, a Tanglewood Music Center alumna and only the fourth woman ever to conduct the BSO (only the second at Tanglewood).
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

Directed by Peter Sellars and with a score by John Adams, the San Francisco Opera's premiere of Doctor Atomic on October 1 will reveal one of most earthshaking themes for any production: the conflicted dramatic events that led up to the first atomic bomb tests in New Mexico in 1945.
— Read more at findarticles.com

There is one splendid reason to see Gaetano Donizetti's "Lucie de Lammermoor" at Glimmerglass Opera this season, and her name is Sarah Coburn. A soprano with looks to match her vocal range and strength, Coburn takes on the diva role of Lucie in this love-crazed opera with a ferocity that belies her frail appearance. From her mid-first act entrance to her lengthy, awesome mad scene in the second, Coburn's dazzling portrayal featured a compellingly morphing voice that matched the rousing and capricious Donizetti rhythms, delicately merged with the composer's flavorful flute fantasies, and soared with stunning delight. Her dramatics were sensitive; her stage presence eclipsing.
— Read more at uticaOD.com

The Bavarian State Opera's 2005-06 season will include two world premieres, a tour of Japan, a Mozart festival, and two complete performances of David Alden's production of Wagner's Ring cycle. Peter Jonas, who completes his 13-year tenure as Intendant, or general manager, at the end of the season, announced the Munich company's plans this week.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Franz Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, will become general music director of Zurich Opera in September, a spokesperson for the orchestra confirmed. The appointment is a promotion for Welser-Möst, who served as music director of the opera company from 1995 through 2002 and has been principal conductor since. He has agreed to an initial term of five years, through 2011. He will retain his position in Cleveland, where his current contract runs through 2012.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Production puts a premium on audience appeal]
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 Garland-based company, The Living Opera. While Mrs. Eisemann is an avid arts supporter ? the Eisemann Center in Richardson is named for her husband, Charles ? she considers herself an opera novice.
— Read more at DallasNews.com

The Utah Symphony & Opera is on track to implement its financial recovery plan, a new report shows. The organization had achieved 90 percent of its fundraising goals as of June 6 and ticket sales as of May 31 exceeded goals by $128,000, according to the report, which emerged from a task force set up by the US&O board to ensure recovery from operating deficits that followed the 2002 merger of Utah Symphony and Utah Opera.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

It takes a little coaxing, but Lillian Winzig Windsor agrees to talk about her career as a famous opera singer. The 82-year-old woman now behind the counter of her family's Winzig's Delicatessen and Grocery toured Europe 10 times, sang for the pope and received rave reviews in her operatic heyday. "It was a glamorous life?I remember people back home saying, 'Hey, look at that, Lilly-the-baloney-cutter is riding in a limousine!"
— Read more at thejournalnews.com

In all his years running cattle on the high plains of northern Montana and Alberta, Sherm Ewing didn't give much thought to opera. He never saw one performed, and he certainly never thought he would have any hand in bringing one to the stage.

"I'm not really an opera fan at all," said Mr. Ewing, 79, a retired rancher.

But on Thursday, Mr. Ewing spent a brilliant summer evening sitting in the auditorium of the Great Falls Civic Center, watching a performance of an opera that hadn't been staged since its premiere 95 years ago. And were it not for his efforts, the work would probably never have been performed again.
— Read more at New York Times

It's summertime, and from Konocti to Shoreline Amphitheatre, the Bay Area is alive with pop-rock concerts. Yet classical fans need not despair. There are plenty of places to hear great music in July.
The San Francisco Symphony's "Summer in the City" kicks off with a Russian spectacular. Edwin Outwater and pianist Jean-Philippe Collard collaborate on Rachmaninoff's "Second Piano Concerto," plus Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky's traditional "1812 Overture" (Friday).
— Read more at San Francisco Examiner

The Busker's Opera, which stopped oh so briefly here at Zellerbach before going on tour, was not only vivid and exhilarating. It was one of those specific moments that open like a cone far beyond this time and place, that reveal its center and invoke the world. From the indelible first images of the Busker, spilling out his empty tin cans on to the stage, drumming on them, the empty box, and even his own drumsticks, his long silky hair, swinging and rippling, designer and director Robert Lepage's version of John Gay's The Busker's Opera celebrates and castigates the culture - ours; and uses the culture's own idiom to do so. The first few pieces drive the rock/rap/hip-hop style to passionate intensity. Ultimately savvy about theater, show business, manners, politics, and the human psyche, the work is marvelous and it is mad.
— Read more at Berkeley Daily Planet

Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme" is really a winter piece. It is the cold and the dark that draw seamstress Mimi together with poet Rodolfo. Christmas in Cafe Momus brings the illusion of warmth, though not even the spring of the last act can take the chill from dying Mimi's hands.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Lucie de Lammermoor, the rarely seen French version of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, opened at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, New York, on July 1.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

During July and August, 2005, New Jersey Opera Theater will present a Dazzling Array of Summer Masterclasses in Princeton presented by various major international artists. This series represents a watershed for students of opera and voice. Rarely, if ever, has any arts organization engaged such a sterling list of major singers, conductors, directors, and coaches for such an intensive program. The comprehensive roster for July and August is one of the most extensive and varied convocations of renowned artists dedicated to opera and the art of singing to be found anywhere in the world this summer. This is New Jersey Opera Theater?s second such summer programming.
Masterclasses: at the Seminary in Princeton
* July 19, 7-10pm, Charles Riecker (MET opera Artistic Administrator 30 years ret.)
* July 20, 7-10pm, (TALK) Drs. Simring (Psychologists- "Life as a performer")
* July 21, 7-10pm, Martha Gerhart 7-10pm (Master Coach)

Woolworth Music Building, Princeton University:
* July 26, 7-10, Kathryn LaBouff (World renowned English Diction Coach)
* July 28, 7-10, Jonathan Greene (MET opera tenor- "Characterization")
* August 1, 10-12 (TALK) Janine Thames (Soprano- "A career in Europe")
* August 1, 7-10, James Morris & Susan Quittmeyer (International Bass-Baritone & Mezzo-Soprano)
* August 2, 7-10, Ira Siff (Stage Director/ Founder La Gran Scena)
* August 3, 7-10, Sharon Sweet (MET opera soprano)
* August 5, 10-1, Allan Glassman (MET opera tenor)
* August 16, 2-5, Elizabeth Blanke-Biggs (MET opera soprano)
* August 17, 2-5, Jane Bunnell & Marc Embree (MET opera mezzo & NYCO Baritone)
— Read more at NJOT.org

When Julie Taymor's production of Mozart's "Zauberflöte" opened at the Metropolitan Opera last fall, officials within the company sensed that, despite complaints from some critics, including this one, they had a crowd pleaser on their hands. Here was a spectacle that crowded the stage with Ms. Taymor's trademark menagerie of enormous puppets, exotic animal figures, flying creatures and magic tricks. All those parents who were making multiple trips with their youngsters to "The Lion King" now had another Taymor show to choose from. And Mozart's score beats Elton John's with a stick.
— Read more at New York Times

A few weeks ago, Sean Doran , the artistic director of the English National Opera in London, announced that starting next March, all the company's productions would employ supertitles. This might seem a fairly routine move. It has become common for houses like the Metropolitan Opera to use titles, even in English-language operas.
— Read more at New York Times

Glyndebourne's achievements are too various for one to speak of a company style, but there is certainly a Glyndebourne scent: of excellence and elegance, of singers and musicians enjoying at once the freedom gained by thorough rehearsal and the intimacy of a small, warm house. And its waft is strong, luxurious and exciting around the new production of Handel's "Giulio Cesare," which opened on Sunday afternoon.
— Read more at New York Times

Lincoln Center Festival 2005 presents the New York premiere of La bella dormente nel bosco, a charming version of Sleeping Beauty written for orchestra, chorus, soloists and puppets, directed by avant-garde director and puppeteer Basil Twist. In this magical production Twist reinterprets composer Ottotino Respighi'?s 1922 puppet opera, which has been performed extensively in Italy but newly rediscovered in the states. Neal Goren will lead the seven singer-soloists of the Gotham Chamber Opera, and the Westminster Festival Choir, as 75 puppet characters fill the stage of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater located on 10th Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets, on July 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 at 8:00 PM with an additional matinee on July 16 at 2:00 PM. The production will be sung in Italian with English supertitles.
— Read more at lincolncenter.org

Angela Brown, the dramatic soprano with the spellbinding voice, returns to Auckland in August to perform two concerts with the Auckland Philharmonia, both under conductor Marc Taddei.
— Read more at scoop.co.nz

The Des Moines Metro Opera presented Benjamin Britten's "Gloriana" in a lavish and scrumptious production conducted and directed by Robert L. Larsen on Saturday evening at the Blank Performing Arts Center at Simpson College.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

Perhaps it was the men's singles final or a starting time better suited to Gotterdammerung which prevented a full house. This was a pity for since their initial brilliant production of Turn Of The Screw five years ago this company of young artists has achieved an enviable reputation and this production certainly lives up to it.
— Read more at edp24.co.uk

Just across the road from Maplewood Farm there are vistas of verdant, tree-lined hills, broad, flat fields of freshly tilled soil and large homes with well-manicured lawns. It's a sweet slice of Americana any way you look at it. In her time, Margaret Garner, who was enslaved on that farm, likely looked out upon an equally lovely scene, but she was denied the freedom to enjoy it.
— Read more at ChallengerNKY.com

When it comes to opera, the singers, conductor, orchestra, director, designers, production crew, and administrators have a common goal, simple to state but hard to achieve: to give the audience an exciting and transforming artistic experience. But before the spell can be cast, two big ingredients must be present ? ones so obvious they're often overlooked. They are the story and the score.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

Stress levels at Covent Garden must be horrendous. The Royal Opera is ending the season with a plateful of revivals, all on top of each other, and it cannot have helped when Renée Fleming cancelled her first two performances in Otello and Ben Heppner's voice began playing up. In the circumstances Antonio Pappano, the company's workaholic music director, deserves credit for pulling Otello together so convincingly. The opening sounds properly fired up. Orchestral attacks are crisp, the rhythmic pulse clearly defined. Intensity and serenity rub shoulders to dramatic effect. In recent years there has been a lot of tired, inflexible Verdi conducting at Covent Garden. Pappano shows us what a theatrical composer he was, and why Otello is so perfect.
— Read more at FT.com

No matter how many times you take in The Marriage of Figaro, you're unlikely to see Cherubino jump through that window into a real garden - and run off into the distance, unseen by the gardener, Antonio, as he angrily surveys the damage done to his herbaceous border. Unless you catch Garsington Opera's delightful new version, one of its finest shows yet. If it's a beautiful summer evening, as it was on the first night, this rare moment - even for veteran Mozartians - adds uniquely to the evening's feelgood factor. And if it sounds like a cutesy country-house trick, designed to amuse corporate fat cats, I can assure you that I'd be the first to protest.
— Read more at The Observer

Far from the elaborate dinner spreads and formal dress of most tailgaters on opening night at the 49th Santa Fe Opera on Friday, five people enjoyed their dinners in shorts and T-shirts. The group ate food packaged in plastic containers from Whole Foods -- cold cuts of meat, potato salad, beets and peas in a pod -- and drank champagne.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

OPERA superstar Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is being sued for $300,000 by a promoter for refusing to perform with John Farnham earlier this year.
— Read more at Herald Sun

Few cities get a chance to build a world-class opera house from scratch with a stage and acoustics that are second to none, yet Copenhagen is one of them.
— Read more at dexigner.com

James Levine conducts his first concert as the new artistic boss at Tanglewood Friday night, but concerts are only partly the point of his weeks in the Berkshires. Away from public view, he will rehearse with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and work with the TMC conducting fellows, the vocal fellows, and probably the composers. He's on a fact-finding mission, and his coaching sessions and conversations are likely to lead to changes.
— Read more at Boston.com

Internationally acclaimed composer Tan Dun and Chinese director Zhang Yimou will debut an opera titled ?Emperor Qin Shihuang? at the New York Metropolitan Opera House on Dec. 21, 2006. It?s the third time Tan and Zhang have collaborated with the two teaming up to work on the Oscar-winning movie ?Hero? and the promotion picture for Beijing?s Olympic Games.
— Read more at Xinhua

['Haunted Heart' is an uneven journey for opera superstar]
Renée Fleming may now be the Great American Soprano. But as a shy teen growing up in Churchville, her passion was horses, not music. Back then, she had no expectation of becoming a professional singer. She listened to her dad's big band records, dabbled in theater and went on to the State University College at Potsdam to major not in voice but in music education. When she did sing in public, it was often jazz.
— Read more at Democrat & Chronicle: John Pitcher

The Glimmerglass Opera is much like the proverbial stone tossed into a pond: The ripples it makes radiate outward long after the stone has dropped from sight.
Founded in Cooperstown in 1975, Glimmerglass mounts a summer festival season that runs no more than eight weeks a year - June 30 through Aug. 23 in 2005 - but the company's influence in the opera world is felt long after the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Springfield Center has been shuttered for the winter.
— Read more at CoopersTown Crier

The cast of "Margaret Garner" lost no time walking the land where Margaret walked when they arrived in Cincinnati this week to begin rehearsals for the Richard Danielpour/Toni Morrison opera to be performed in July at Music Hall. The first commission in Cincinnati Opera's 85-year history, "Margaret Garner" is based on the 1856 escape and trial of Boone County slave Margaret Garner, who killed her 2-year-old daughter, Mary, rather than see her returned to bondage.
— Read more at