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

For lovers of adventuresome theater, the place to go continues to be the Studio Series at the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. A bonus - almost all the shows are free. There's no better place for risk-taking than a small theater in a university setting, and the 2005-06 lineup includes the regional premieres of the chamber musical "Floyd Collins," one-act opera "Babette's Feast" and Rebecca Gilman's provocative drama "The Glory of Living."
— Read more at news.cincinnati.com

Donald Runnicles has been named music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyo. He will take over artistic leadership of the 43-year-old summer festival in September, and conduct his first concerts there next summer.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Houston Ebony Opera Guild strutted its stuff Friday at Miller Outdoor Theatre in the stylish manner that's become the trademark of the group's annual free performances in Hermann Park. The setting onstage was New Orleans in the 1920s, beginning in the home of Violetta Valery, "a woman whose favors have always gone to the highest bidder," as the program synopsis delicately described her. Women decked out in period gowns, men in dinner jackets, a piano and cases of bootleg hootch suggested these people had no worries in the world (certainly not from police enforcing the laws of Prohibition).
— Read more at chron.com

As a popular school music teacher in a small town near St Louis, Christine Brewer sang gospel and folk, held backyard hootenanny parties and spent summer vacations in the chorus of the local opera festival. One day in 1989 her husband, also a teacher, took their professional certificates to the court house to be routinely stamped for renewal. When he came home, he revealed that he had only renewed his own certificate, telling his wife that the time had come for her to choose - teach or sing.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Seattle is getting another new resident who happens to be an artistic celebrity. Heading here from New York is theatrical composer Adam Guettel, who has secured digs on Queen Anne and will become an artistic associate at Seattle's Intiman Theatre.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Carsten Schmidt's Staunton Music Festival scored a significant coup Saturday, presenting what apparently was the first theatrical staging in the United States of George Frideric Handel's "Hercules".
— Read more at timesdispatch.com

A publicity photograph from one of the Abbey Road sessions for Plácido Domingo's long-anticipated recording of Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" shows the tenor at his music stand wearing reading glasses and looking a bit grandfatherly. He peers up and away from soprano Nina Stemme. She's at her own stand, several feet from him, staring intently at her score. Some gaze! Hardly a Tristan and Isolde so absorbed in each other's eyes that the world disappears. Hardly lovers lost in a desire that knows no boundaries and accepts no taboos.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

JANE Glover was all of six years old when she first took up the baton for Mozart - metaphorically speaking, of course. She recalls her headmaster father buying a recording of the horn concertos. When he played it on the gramophone at their Monmouth home, she found herself captivated. She knows all of Mozart's scores by heart, she confides, while showing me her enviable book-lined study, with its gleaming baby grand piano and shelves filled with music by a huge range of composers.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

The first performance of Anthony Neilson's Scottish Opera/Edinburgh International Festival co-production of The Death of Klinghoffer was unveiled without so much as a glance at the contents of its incoming audience's handbags and rucksacks. Within 20 minutes, the auditorium rang with gunfire. Men, women and children were dragged from their seats: hustled and pistol-whipped to the stage, where they huddled with arms over their heads and around each other. It should have been terrifying. In security-sensitive London, it almost certainly would have been. But in a city drunk on terrorist dramas, terrorist comedy, and terrorist musicals, and in front of an audience primed with leaked production details, Neilson's choreographed jihad felt less like a hijacking of the Festival Theatre and more like a hijacking of John Adams's score.
— Read more at Independent Online

John Eliot Gardiner leads a first-rate cast in a sparkling, intimate recording of Mozart's comic opera, with its famously difficult arias and broadly humorous byplay. It's a "Singspiel," in which arias and ensembles are interlinked through spoken dialogue (in the original German), about a trio of young Spaniards abducted by pirates and sold to a pasha, who installs the heroine Konstanze in his harem.
— Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com

Back in his days with Pink Floyd, Roger Waters took on the big issues of life. In high-concept projects like "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall," he grappled with such challenging topics as social oppression, the long shadows of war, the interplay of money and power, and the abuse of authority.
— Read more at billboard.com

James Levine has been good for building audiences and fund raising as well as making music at Tanglewood, even though bad weather hurt attendance at four of his five programs. Levine began his Tanglewood reign as the Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director this summer after 29 years of the popular Seiji Ozawa and a three-year interregnum without a director. The question was whether concertgoers and donors would take to a maestro who, unlike Ozawa, couldn't care less about the Red Sox and Patriots and generally tries to stay out of the public eye.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

How's this for a contrast? Next month, I'll be attending the opening of the world's newest opera house, the Ellie Caulkins in Denver. This summer, I visited the world's oldest continually functioning opera company - the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, Germany. Believe it or not, the differences between the two are not that striking.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

Understanding the nature of opera can be difficult, but Carol Forristall has managed to break it down to a comprehensible level for her students to pick it up. From Aug. 1 to 5, Forristall took part in an international workshop at the Royal Opera House in London, and came back with new information for her students at Riverside Middle School. "We have a lot of new ideas for this coming school year," said Forristall, who is the school's music teacher and writes operas for her sixth- and eighth-graders every year.
— Read more at Daily Nonparei

Bay Area resident Barry Gifford is a novelist ("Wild at Heart," "Night People," "Wyoming"), screenwriter ("Lost Highway," "City of Ghosts," "Perdita Durango") and poet ("Back in America"). He was commissioned to write the libretto for the new opera "Madrugada," which had its premiere this month at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in Kiel, Germany. Gifford gives his account of the years of teamwork leading to and including opening night of the new piece.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Less than a week after the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, John Adams and Peter Sellars gave a brief sneak preview of their new A-bomb-creation-themed opera Dr. Atomic to a group of journalists and other music industry professionals in Manhattan. (Perhaps appropriate despite the opera's San Francisco premiere since the A-bomb grew out of the Manhattan Project.) The SF Opera's musical administrator Kip Cranna and general director Pamela Rosenberg, who first initiated the project, were also on hand for the discussion at Avery Fisher Hall's Helen Hull Room, which was filled to maximum capacity.
— Read more at NewMusicBox

Opera San José drew critical praise for its inaugural season at the California Theatre, and the accountants have deemed it a financial success as well. The company finished fiscal 2004-2005 in the black, even after increasing its budget by more than half -- to $4.4 million -- as it moved into its new home, general manager Irene Dalis has reported. The company had operated in the black for 20 straight years at the smaller Montgomery Theater.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

There's a lot of musical talent floating around the Wasatch Front. The brand-new Utah Light Opera demonstrated that in its production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Gondoliers, or the King of Barataria," which opened Tuesday at Salt Lake City's Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. In only its second production, ULO has fielded a 50-member cast of uniformly strong and engaging singers, dancers and actors. Their enthusiasm and big voices leapt off the stage in Tuesday's performance.
— Read more at sltrib.com

Tickets are selling rapidly for New York City Opera's season-opening Opera-for-All Festival, the company says. Tickets for the festival, intended to draw new audiences to the New York State Theater, are $25 for every seat. The first night, September 8, includes highlights from the 2005-06 schedules as well a performer by pop singer Rufus Wainwright. On September 9, actress Cynthia Nixon introduces a performance of Puccini's Madama Butterfly.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Opera Orchestra of New York's 2005-06 season at Carnegie Hall will feature performances by Marcelo Giordani, James Morris, and Samuel Ramey. The group, founded by conductor Eve Queler in 1971, is beloved by aficionados for its performances of opera in concert. It puts a particular emphasis on operatic rarities, and has introduced a number of prominent singers, including soprano Harolyn Blackwell and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Larmore, to New York audiences.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The performers in a Neuköllner Opera House production of Saint-Saëns's Princesse Jaune smoke pot onstage, the news agency Ananova reports. Audience members are encouraged to smoke their own marijuana during the performance. The opera tells the story of a man in love with a portrait of a Japanese princess. Under the sway of a hallucinogenic potion, he confuses the portrait with his own fiancée.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Tenor Ben Heppner has joined the list of opera stars appearing at the gala opening of Denver's Ellie Caulkins Opera House on September 10, announced Opera Colorado, which is hosting the sold-out event. Heppner, a regular performer at the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera, and other top houses, will be making his Opera Colorado debut.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

German writers Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's stylized 1928 masterpiece "The Threepenny Opera" is savagely cynical, sardonic, brittle and worldly wise -- and wonderfully well-performed at the Odyssey Theater Ensemble, a tribute to savvy director Ron Sossi and a cast of 16 talented and eager performers.
— Read more at news.yahoo.com

Seattle seems Ring-crazed these days, perhaps even a bit Ring-crazy. Wagner's sprawling tetralogy has become the talk of the Pacific north west, thanks to the inspired obsession of an impresario named Speight Jenkins. Audiences that instantly buy every seat in the handsome opera-house arrive super-dressy and, perhaps, hyper-appreciative. Even the cab drivers show an enlightened interest in the slow decline of Wotan & Co.
— Read more at FT.com

If the life of Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz were an opera, critics would find fault with its improbable twists. The illegitimate daughter of an impoverished mother, Juana was born in Mexico in the mid-17th century. While still a child, she learned Latin and composed erudite poems - at a time when few women were taught to read and write. After joining the convent of San Jerónimo, Juana set up a literary salon and publicly defended women's right to an education, until religious authorities forced her to renounce worldly pursuits. She died in 1695 after caring for her fellow nuns during an epidemic. Defiant to the last, Juana reportedly left behind in her cell an unfinished poem, artfully hidden.
— Read more at Newsday.com [thanks vilaine fille]

Opera will never lose its reputation as a highbrow affair, but Opera Idaho attempts to make the fine art more accessible to the public with the Opera Under the Stars summer program (though the show finishes long before stars are visible).
— Read more at BoiseWeekly

New Jersey Opera Theater took on a lot this summer in its move from a student to professional theater organization. The company presented five productions in a two-and-one-half week period, plus a myriad of master classes and discussions on musical, production, and performance topics. In its move to McCarter Theatre, the company wisely stayed off the main stage, performing instead in the Berlind Theatre, a delightful space with stadium seating, so there is no bad seat in the house.
— Read more at Town Topics

An opera about the murder of an American Jew during a cruise liner hijack by Palestinian guerrillas gets its British stage premiere on Tuesday amid complaints by Jewish groups over the production. The Death of Klinghoffer, running on four nights, is one of the highlights of the Edinburgh international arts festival.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

Opera News, the monthly magazine published by the Metropolitan Opera Guild, will present its first annual awards on November 20, according to a spokesperson. At the ceremony at the Pierre Hotel in New York, the magazine will honor conductor James Conlon, music director of the Ravinia Festival and music director designate of Los Angeles Opera; soprano Régine Crespin; tenor Plácido Domingo, general director of Washington Opera and Los Angeles Opera; mezzo-soprano Susan Graham; and mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Question: I recently attended the most incredible opera performance of my life. The performers were amazing, and the production was beautiful. What I cannot get over, however, is the rudeness displayed by many in the audience during that performance. In-depth conversations taking place during the show was one thing, but members of the audience leaving the house as soon as the curtain dropped, failing to recognize the effort of the cast, floored me. Can you offer opera audiences a manners lesson? Answer: Offering your applause and encouragement at the end of an opera performance is a vital part of thanking that cast. Walking out before the cast has been properly acknowledged is rude.
— Read more at abqtrib.com

An accomplished opera singer on the Rutgers-Camden faculty died unexpectedly over the weekend, the school said. Martin Dillon, 48, of Camden, died of a heart attack Sunday while in Vermont for a performance of "Jungbrunnen," a song cycle written by a German composer Dillon helped rediscover.
— Read more at CourierPostOnline

Opera North is doing Gilbert and Sullivan for its second production this summer, and it has to be the first local production to boast a former Houston Oilers linebacker as a star. "The Gondoliers" brought joy and humor to Saturday's audience at the Lebanon Opera House, as Opera North, the region's professional opera company, opened a lavish, colorful and entertaining production of the Gilbert and Sullivan classic last week, in repertory with Puccini's "Tosca."
— Read more at Times Argus

Composer Ian McFarlane hopes to stage his new opera, MacRobert's Reply, at Holyrood, the Scottish Parliament building, the Scotsman reports. The opera is about Lady Rachel MacRobert, a Scottish woman who donated funds to the RAF for a bomber after her three sons died within three years during World War II. The bomber was named "MacRobert's Reply."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Opera San José has finished its 2004-05 season in the black, the San José Mercury News reports. The company operated at a profit for 20 years at its former venue, the Montgomery Theater. The amount of the current surplus was not made available, but the company reported itself profitable even after last fall?s move to the California Theatre, which has twice as many seats as the Montgomery, and after increasing its budget by more than half, to $4.4 million.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

A decade ago, the Mostly Mozart Festival, Lincoln Center's venerable summertime series, was offering some of the dullest concerts in the Western Hemisphere. I remember a performance of Mozart's Flute Concerto in D, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as the soloist and Gerard Schwarz conducting the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, which was positively bureaucratic in its self-satisfied mediocrity, as if it were being piped in from a department of motor vehicles in Leonid Brezhnev's Russia. I briefly considered abandoning music criticism for cat-sitting.
— Read more at The New Yorker

"The Horseman," an opera set in the ancient Russian capital of Veliky Novgorod, was the opening attraction that drew thousands of music lovers to the atmospheric setting of Finland's medieval Olavinlinna castle, the home of the long-running Savonlinna Opera Festival.
— Read more at moscowtimes.ru

A RENOWNED composer and director is set to have his new opera staged at the Scottish Parliament. Ian McFarlane's opera, MacRobert's Reply, tells the story of a Scottish woman during The Second World War whose bravery made her an icon of the RAF. The hour-long opera will be performed in English and Scots and the actor Bill Paterson, star of television drama Sea of Souls is currently reading the script for a speaking part as an air vice- marshall.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

It was like buying a Rolex on a Target budget. The Duluth Festival Opera's operatic concert on Saturday was stunning. The three featured tenors -- David Ossenfort of New York City, Scott Ramsay of Chicago and Duluth's own Marcus McConico -- were all emotive, dynamic singers.
— Read more at duluthsuperior.com

YOU do not have to know anything about classical music, a St. Louis Symphony-linked Web site says. You do not have to dress up "like a fancy-pants." Then there is this ringing recommendation for a musical experience: "Yes, it will be possible to get your Brahms on and enjoy yourself at the same time." The appeal is for the Seven 18 Club, a concert series meant to lure young professionals with preconcert drinks and postconcert socializing with young orchestra members - one of whom doubles as a sultry model on promotional materials.
— Read more at New York Times

[No one dies: The troupe stages its second show, stressing comedy and professionalism]
Utah Light Opera, Utah's newest opera company, presents its second production this week. Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Gondoliers, or The King of Barataria" opens Tuesday at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center in Salt Lake City. David and Shalee Schmidt started the company to fill a gap they saw in the Wasatch Front's performing-arts scene. "We're trying to focus on operetta, musicals that require a more trained singer, comic operas where no one dies," said Shalee Schmidt, who plays the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in "The Gondoliers." She added the area has many singers with strong vocal backgrounds who don't have many opportunities to perform. "We feel there are major theaters - Pioneer, Hale Centre and of course Utah Opera - and minor theaters, but not something quite on this level, kind of a level in between."
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

[Houston Ebony Opera Guild artistic director strives to enrich others' lives through music]
Willie Anthony Waters has a summer passion: the Houston Ebony Opera Guild. This year, he celebrates his 10th anniversary as artistic director of the company, which showcases African-American singers in concerts and fully staged opera productions. "I have a commitment to developing young singers and exposing opera to a larger public," Waters says.
— Read more at HoustonChronicle.com

A singer from Baton Rouge will spend her next three years in New York, in the Metropolitan Opera's Young Artists Apprentice Program. "That's basically intense graduate study," Lisette Oropesa said, "and I'm looking forward to just learning."
— Read more at DailyComet.com

To hear Carl Tanner tell it, there's nothing out of the ordinary about his trajectory to opera: from music student to truck driver to bounty hunter to globe-trotting tenor. After all, the big, burly guy with Virginia in his voice and a down-home demeanor always sang - to the country station on his dad's car radio . . . with the chorus in high school, where he also wrestled and played football . . . in his 18-wheeler, Tosca blaring from the cab.
— Read more at Floridian

Glimmerglass Opera's 2005 summer season may end on Tuesday, but great opera will continue. That's because the prestigious Chandos label has just released a recording of Richard Rodney Bennett's The Mines of Sulphur, which Glimmerglass Opera recorded last summer at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown. The two-CD set is Glimmerglass' first release on a major label, and it's the premiere recording of Bennett's terrific opera.
— Read more at democratandchronicle.com

At age 2 she was singing opera. By 6 she was tickling the ivories; and by 8 she was a Bridgeport, Conn., celebrity belting out pop tunes on a weekly television show. Several decades later and Carol Nabatoff is still a fireball of operatic energy. "This has blossomed into something really wonderful," Nabatoff said. "This" is the career she has carved out for herself as a mentor for young Southwest Floridians who have dreams of taking Broadway, or smaller stages, by storm.
— Read more at The News-Press

Soprano Renée Fleming will not sing the world premiere, as planned, of a new "mini-opera" by composer Jake Heggie and playwright Terrance McNally at the opening of Opera Colorado's new hall on September 10, the company announced. Fleming will appear at the opening of Denver's Ellie Caulkins Opera House, but Kristin Clayton will sing Heggie and McNally's one-woman opera At the Statue of Venus. According to Opera Colorado, Fleming has been unable to prepare the new work because her mother is ill.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The world-premiere performances of Daniel Catán's Salsipuedes, a Tale of Love, War, and Anchovies and Mark Adamo's Lysistrata, or the Nude Goddess will be broadcast on NPR's World of Opera this fall. Both operas were premiered by Houston Grand Opera last season.
— Read more at playbillarts

THE Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel is a bona fide opera star in the old style who, in roles like Mozart's Figaro and Verdi's Falstaff, sets the era's standard. He is also a charismatic recitalist - although his outsize personality does not always suit the concert hall - and except for the English tenor Ian Bostridge, there may be no better interpreter of British art songs today.
— Read more at New York Times

THE life of an opera singer is a rarefied thing. With constant travelling, a work environment that changes entirely every two to six weeks - and that's only if you're lucky enough to be working in a big opera house - fly-in, fly-out recitals, vast scores to learn in anything from Czech to Russian and endless autographs to sign, it would be little wonder if some singers came over slightly, well, diva-ish. The true diva, however, is an elusive phenomenon. Most opera singers - Romania's Angela Gheorghiu being a notable exception - feel obliged to spend their lives telling anyone who will listen just how mundane they are. So how do these individuals deal with the pressures of life in the operatic fast lane?
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Fresh Young Dynamic Opera ? also known as FYDO ? didn't offer anything particularly new at its inaugural concert Thursday at Union Station's Main Street Landing, but it did deliver some excellent singing of opera favorites. FYDO is a small ensemble of young professional singers ? and a pianist ? from Vermont and New York (and Washington, D.C.) that hope that their fledgling company will be able to bring their enthusiasm for opera to both of those worlds. The company has scheduled, and this concert was a benefit for, a production of George Frederick Handel's comic opera, "Alcina," Sept. 23-24 at the Elley-Long Music Center at St. Michael's College in Colchester.
— Read more at Rutland Herald

Scott Altman succinctly sums up his day. "We start early, and I start earlier," says the artistic director of the New Jersey Opera Theater. Altman's day starts earlier because he is shepherding three new productions to their first nights. The first came Friday when the festival opened its second season with Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
— Read more at CourierPostOnline

A LETTER written by a former member of Scottish Opera?s chorus to the culture minister is set to reveal for the first time the singers? profound disillusionment at their treatment. John Carlo Bellotti, a tenor with Scottish Opera for six years, believes his views to be ?a fair representation of what others think and have thought?. No longer bound by a company embargo, he has revealed how the 34 original chorus members were treated.
— Read more at Sunday Herald

Today's New York Post reports that recent Tony-winner Adam Guettel, and Academy-award winning screenwriter William Goldman have teamed up to write a musical based on the 1987 film, The Princss Bride. Goldman wrote both the original novel, and the screenplay for the film version. No timetable is given for the musical's creation, but work on it is believed to have already begun. At the Tony Awards in June, when Guettel was asked about his next project, he said "I don?t think I can legally say, but it?s an adventure and there?s a lot of swordfighting." Now, we know what he was referring to.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Tenor Plácido Domingo says he is not ready to retire, despite last week?s BBC article that suggested he was, the Salzburger Nachrichten reports.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[ Also reviewed: Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Varnay/ Thebom/ Svanholm/ Metternich/ Hines/ Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra/ Kempe ]
"This is a very, very dangerous opera to conduct," Antonio Pappano writes of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. "It works on you like a drug - you have to give your heart and soul and everything." His words function as a kind of credo for his new EMI recording of the work and provide, by and large, an accurate summary of what you will hear if you choose to listen to it. The music's narcotic quality is very much to the fore. This is a heady, high-Romantic Tristan, fierce in its cumulative sweep and lyricism, less overtly erotic or neurotic than some. Like any major interpreter of the work, Pappano understands the crucial difference between tempo and pace, frequently holding you in what feels like suspended animation while the music presses onwards. Far superior to his current Ring-in-progress at Covent Garden, it's a fine piece of conducting that marks him out as a Wagnerian of considerable stature.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Director Peter Sellars has translated the so-called Manhattan Project into a contemporary opera. Sellars is teaming up with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams on Doctor Atomic, a contemporary opera about how physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team created the first atomic bomb. The pair have previously collaborated on the operas Nixon in China and the Death of Klinghoffer.
— Read more at CBC Arts

Of the four "Ring" operas, "Siegfried" is usually the most problematic. It has a callow hero who slays his whining, conniving villain of a surrogate father; it also has a long running time (about five hours) and considerably less action than the first two operas. And the title role, requiring a singer with the stamina of a triathlete, is almost impossible to sing. That's why a triumphant "Siegfried" production is always a bit of a shock. Wednesday's "Ring" audience encountered just such a show, one in which almost everything worked wonderfully.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

The writers of profanity-laden "Jerry Springer - The Opera" are angry. The creators of the show that caused a record number of complaints when aired on British television say religious censorship is in danger of strangling the arts. "I am angry that 60,000 people made a judgement without even bothering to see it," said composer Richard Thomas.
— Read more at Reuters.co.uk

As public relations stunts go, this one is relatively mild.

But the New York City Opera hopes it will be enough to attract attention, and plenty of first-time operagoers, to a house suffering from flat attendance.

On Sept. 8, the day after it opens its new season, the company will present morsels of it in a zippy 80-minute concert, with no intermission. The pop singer Rufus Wainwright, who the house says is an opera lover, will also perform, although he is not being asked to sing the house's usual arioso fare, just some of his own songs.
— Read more at New York Times

Peter Sellars has an unusual new creation: turning the world's first atomic bomb project into music.
The director is collaborating with Pulitzer prize-winning composer John Adams on a new stage work called "Doctor Atomic." It's the story of how physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team, racing against Hitler, created the world's first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.
— Read more at casperstartribune.net

It was 61 years ago when Ella Weissberger, a child prisoner of the Terezin ghetto in Czechoslovakia, performed in Hans Krasa's children's opera "Brundibar" for an audience of fellow prisoners and camp guards. At the time, as the ravages of World War II reached their peak and millions of Jews, Poles, gypsies, Slavs and others were dying in imprisonment around Europe, Weissberger and the other children at their camp found in the simple story a little comfort to help them cope. That opera, "Brundibar," whose songs were once a lifeline for Weissberger and many of the prisoners living at Terezin, is now a production by The Washington National Opera's Opera Camp for Kids, offering a unique perspective into the Holocaust tragedy for performers and audiences, alike.
— Read more at Falls Church News-Press

The staging of the British premiere of an opera about the murder of a disabled Jewish holidaymaker by Palestinian terrorists has been criticised as insensitive in the wake of the London bombings. The Death of Klinghoffer, by leading American composer John Adams, is set to be one of the feature productions at the Edinburgh Festival later this month. But organisers have had to defend the show against charges that it romanticises terrorism
— Read more at TotallyJewish.com

New York City Opera will open its season with discounted performances featuring stars from television and pop music, the company announced. The Opera-for-All Festival, which offers an evening of highlights from the company's season and a regular performance with discounted tickets, will take place September 8 and 9. The festival is intended to provide financially accessible performances to a wide audience.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Seattle Opera will produce a new International Wagner Competition next August, with funding from philanthropist Charles Simonyi's Fund for Arts and Sciences. The competition, announced yesterday at a press event, is open to singers 25-40 and will take place Aug. 19, 2006. Underwriting the competition is $300,000 from Simonyi, part of which also will go to Seattle Opera's ongoing elementary-school opera project, "Theft of the Gold: The Ring Begins."
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Osvaldo Golijov's first opera, Ainadamar, was a disappointment at its premiere two years ago, especially for anyone susceptible to the Latin rhythms of his wildly popular St Mark Passion. But at a subsequent performance in Los Angeles, Peter Sellars saw its potential and teamed up with the composer and the librettist David Henry Hwang for a revised version, now in repertory at the Santa Fe Opera in a production by Sellars.
— Read more at FT.com

It was back in the early days of Mikhail Gorbachev that the Kirov Opera starting touring to the UK. Since then the company has become a regular visitor, arriving operas by all the great Russian composers - Tchaikovsky, Musorgsky, Prokofiev and others. A couple of years ago the company tried to vary its Russian diet with a season of Verdi, but that was greeted with a general thumbs-down. This summer it retreated to the relative safety of two Russian classics - Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina - but threw in Puccini's Turandot as a potential wild card.
— Read more at FT.com

Abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor John P. Parker, whose historic home is located in Ripley, Ohio, has had his life story commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera. Currently, the working title of the opera is "Freedom is Calling." It is to be based on Parker's autobiography, His Promised Land, which was written in the 1880s, but wasn't discovered until 1996, the year it was also published.
— Read more at The Ledger Independent

"Die Walkure," the second opera in Wagner's "Ring" cycle, has long been considered one of the singular masterpieces in the opera canon. It is unlikely few would dispute that claim after hearing, and seeing, Seattle Opera's production Monday night at McCaw Hall: the performance was that riveting, from the torrent of sound in the pit during the prologue to the bittersweet magic fire music at the end. The drama was real, reaching deep into human experience, and the music realization at turns profound, sublime and supremely moving.
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

Hans Wolf, one of the most enduring figures in the Northwest opera scene for the past three decades, has died. Wolf, who died Friday at age 92 after a massive heart attack, held several positions with Seattle Opera from 1969 until his retirement in 1983, including associate conductor and chorus master. He also was a co-founder of Tacoma Opera, acting as its conductor and artistic director.
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

[ Päivi Nisula shuttles back and forth between Tammisaari, Oulu, and Turku ]
The demand for soprano Päivi Nisula's services is quite overwhelming during these summer months.
She just finished singing two different programmes as soloist for the Finnish Chamber Orchestra in Tammisaari. Today she is practicing Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman by the river Aurajoki in Turku, together with Matti Salminen and Juha Uusitalo. And in September, the premiere of Olli Kortekangas's new opera Messenius and Lucia awaits her in Oulu.
— Read more at Helsingin Sanomat

Seattle Opera has polished up its "Rheingold" to a new level of brilliance, as a sold-out crowd of excited Wagnerians discovered in the first performance Sunday evening. The level of expectation was so high that Seattle Opera General Director Speight Jenkins got a sustained ovation just for appearing on the stage before the opera's opening. (Usually such an appearance is a bad omen, because this is traditionally the opportunity for announcing the indisposition of a singer. Jenkins, however, asked for a very appropriate moment of silence in honor of his late predecessor, Glynn Ross, who died recently; the 2005 "Ring" is dedicated to Ross' memory.)
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Wherever there was opera, operetta or song in the Pacific Northwest, you could count on finding Hans Wolf ? usually on the conductor's podium, with a bounce in his baton and a twinkle in his eye. The indefatigable ambassador of opera died at noon Friday (Aug. 5) after suffering a massive heart attack. At 92, the community-outreach director and longtime conductor still came to work every day at Seattle Opera, and he was making plans for another of his beloved "Neglected Masterpieces of Operetta" concerts to be held this fall.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

[Conductor's appointment to lead US orchestra exposes sexist undertones ]
"I remember when one of my teachers told me girls couldn't conduct," Marin Alsop, American music director of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and the first woman to lead a major British symphonic band, once confided. "Do you know what my dad did? He went out and bought me a box of batons."
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Helen L. Phillips, a soprano who broke the color barrier among singers at the Metropolitan Opera seven years before Marian Anderson's historic debut, has died at 86. Phillips died of heart failure July 27 at New York's Isabella Geriatric Center, her nurse there said. Although the opera company had no formal policy barring non-whites from appearing on its stage, Phillips became the first black chorister when she was hired as an extra for five performances of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana from December 1947 through February 1948, said Met archivist Jeff McMillan. In 1933, a troupe of black dancers performed with the Met, he said.
— Read more at USATODAY.com

[CHEBOYGAN - The opera is coming.]
The Bay View Music Festival will again return to Cheboygan for its ninth season on the Opera House stage. "La Boheme," an opera in four acts, will be presented at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday and at 2 p.m. on Sunday.
— Read more at Cheboygan Tribune

Risk-taking in opera is in short supply these days. Which is why a trip to Glimmerglass Opera, the summer festival now in its 30th season, can feel like such a breath of fresh air. Each year the festival chooses four operas, often from the adventurous end of the operatic repertoire. Last year, Richard Rodney Bennett's atonal 1965 "The Mines of Sulphur" proved to be the surprise hit of the summer. This year's intriguing prospects include Benjamin Britten's final operatic masterpiece, "Death in Venice," and a French double bill of one-act operas by Massenet and Poulenc. With one notable exception, the offerings don't disappoint; they're worth the scenic 3?-hour road trip from Hartford.
— Read more at courant.com

The staging at the Edinburgh festival of an opera about the murder of a Jewish man by Palestinian terrorists has been condemned as "beyond contempt" by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of the Los Angeles centre, has called on audiences to boycott the British stage premiere of John Adams's 1991 opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, a fictionalised account of the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, during which a disabled 69-year-old American tourist, Leon Klinghoffer, was shot while in his wheelchair by Palestinian militants and then thrown overboard.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The Cincinnati Opera has commissioned its second opera, "Freedom is Calling," which will be a one-act production aimed at children and families based on the life of a conductor on the Underground Railroad from Ripley. The opera's first commissioned work, "Margaret Garner," debuted this summer and helped the opera have its best season in its 85-year history. The new opera will not be full-length like "Margaret Garner" but will be about 45 to 60 minutes long. It will feature a cast of seven and chorus and be accompanied by a chamber orchestra.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

They're tough, they're tuned-in, they're a little bit obsessed. Diehard Wagnerian fans who assemble wherever "The Ring" is performed are called Ringheads, and often you can tell them by their plastic horned helmets with the long blond braids. Or their Wagner T-shirts, or their credit-card bills (as they fly from Bayreuth, Germany, to Chicago or Seattle or any of several places "The Ring" is performed).
— Read more at The Seattle Times

This is the event for which opera fans have been waiting ever since 2001, when Seattle Opera's then-new production of Wagner's four-opera "Ring" opened to sold-out houses and international acclaim. Now, "The Ring" is back ? retooled, revised and re-energized with a new conductor and several new leading singers. The fans from around the world who swamped Seattle Opera's ticket lines last November (selling out all 12 shows within a single day) have been drumming their fingers and polishing their horned helmets in readiness for more than 17 hours of opera, spread out over a week's time.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Audience pleasers are great for the box office. But what really makes a summer opera festival unique is an enlightening, engaging and compelling mix of new and old masterpieces. Cincinnati Opera's season concluded last month with three chestnuts and the regional premiere of "Margaret Garner" by Richard Danielpour and Toni Morrison, a co-commission with important local relevance. "Margaret Garner" engaged the whole community. And the effectively updated "Rigoletto" was an old favorite seen through new eyes.
— Read more at news.enquirer.com

A BITTER row has erupted over one of the biggest productions at this year's Edinburgh Festival after it emerged gun-toting actors playing terrorists plan to hide among the audience before storming the stage. John Adam's infamous opera, The Death of Klinghoffer, has not been performed in the US for years because of its perceived sympathy for Palestinian terrorists.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

[ The best thing in Russia comes from Croydon]
The Kirov Opera launched its seven-day residency at Covent Garden with a new, or new-ish, production of Boris Godunov. As with La Scala's slapstick La forza del destino of last year, the original director had removed his name from the programme. Full responsibility for what hit the stage must therefore lie with conductor Valery Gergiev and designer George Tsypin, who share the credit for "stage conception".
— Read more at Independent Online

[Barry Armbruster attends Washington National Opera?s Institute for Young Singers.]
Barry Armbruster, a senior at Westfield High School, is 17 years old, but his youth may not be quite so apparent when he's singing. "He certainly does not have a teenager's voice," said Scott Pafumi, the drama director at Westfield High School. "He has a semi-professional voice." The Cappie-award-winning singer and actor put his talent to the test when he attended the Washington National Opera's Institute for Young Singers this summer and was selected to perform on The Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, along with five others, at the program's conclusion in mid-July. "I took away [from the program] a lot of confidence." Armbruster said. "It really showed me where I stand amongst my peers."
— Read more at Connection Newspapers

Opera always poses unique challenges for conductors, but Wagner's "Ring" presents the greatest test of all to anyone who would be the Ringmaster. The sheer size, scope and musical complexity of these four vast operas demands the ultimate in concentration, imagination and sheer stamina.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

Chances are pretty high these days that if it's a new opera recording, it's a DVD. CDs still trickle in, but operas on DVDs are becoming a virtual flood. The good news is that some classic opera films and videos will soon be back in circulation; the bad news is that not everything released on DVD is a classic or destined to become one.
— Read more at The Advocate

The curtain will not come down on one of Britain's leading country house opera companies following the death of its founder and chief executive, staff and directors said yesterday. Leonard Ingrams, 63, an international financier and music lover who set up Garsington Opera in the grounds of his Oxfordshire manor house in 1989, died of a heart attack last week as he drove home from a performance of Verdi's Otello at Glyndebourne.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

World premieres during Rudolf Bing's 22-year reign at the Metropolitan Opera can be counted on the fingers of one hand, so it is a sign of Samuel Barber's prestige in the 1950s and 1960s that his two main operas are part of the tally. Anthony and Cleopatra was a notorious flop, thanks mainly to Franco Zeffirelli's overblown production, but what of the earlier Vanessa, an intimate piece set in a Chekhovian household in northern Europe? It is an opera that one wants to like, and the Central City Opera, in the Rocky Mountains, is right to stage it.
— Read more at FT.com

The good news: Seattle Opera's long-awaited production of Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen" opens Sunday, making this city a mecca for international "Ring" devotees. The bad news: Those who do not already have tickets are extremely unlikely to get any. The three "cycles" of four operas, for a total of 12 performances, sold out in a single day last November when they went on sale. Shortly thereafter, Seattle Opera also closed the ticket waiting list because it had assumed Wagnerian proportions.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

The Light in the Piazza will welcome two new cast members into its sunny Florentine square in September. On September 2nd, Aaron Lazar will replace Matthew Morrison as Fabrizio, the young man who falls under the spell of inamorata Clara in the Tony Award-winning Adam Guettel show. On September 13th, Chris Sarandon will succeed Mark Harlik as Signor Naccarelli, Fabrizio's affable, tie shop-owning father.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Local opera lovers with an eye on their budgets will have to wait more than a month for Lyric Opera of Chicago's free preseason concert at Millennium Park. Stars from the company kick off a weekend showcasing Lyric, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Steppenwolf Theatre Sept. 10 in the Pritzker Pavilion.
— Read more at suntimes.com

Some operas are little known because they are acquired tastes. Benjamin Britten's "Death in Venice," for instance, is a wonderful, subtle valedictory work - it was Britten's last opera - but it moves with the stasis of Thomas Mann's novella. It takes a little effort to get inside it, though that effort is rewarded with a rich piece that ripples like sun on water, showing new sides of itself with each hearing. Other operas are little known because they have little worth knowing. Take Jules Massenet's one-act "Portrait de Manon," a sweet little throw-away sequel to the composer's successful "Manon." It is full of wistful longing for its predecessor, both in its music and in its story, which depicts Manon's lover Des Grieux in middle age.
— Read more at New York Times

Six months after boisterous calls for the resignations of Utah Symphony & Opera CEO Anne Ewers and company music director Keith Lockhart, following revelations that the company's finances were "perilous," and that a projected 2005 deficit would amount to $3.2 million, Ewers has reassured the public that the organization is on its way to financial recovery, the Deseret Morning News has reported. The results of an independent audit released to the board in February reported that the company's "structural" deficits totaled $1.7 million in 2003 and approximately $3.3 million in 2004. Despite the fiscal emergency, the information was kept private from the public and company musicians until the board of directors voted for its dissemination, prompting bitter denunciations of the company's current administration.
— Read more at Opera News

Once upon a time, if Needham residents wanted a night out at the opera, it would mean battling city traffic to make their way into Boston after dishing out a hefty chunk of their paychecks on tickets. But, for the past 15 years, the Longwood Opera has provided residents with a quality performance right in their own backyards. Scott Brumit, general director for the Longwood Opera, said the company moved to the Christ Episcopal Church on Highland Avenue from its original home of four years in Melrose.
— Read more at TownOnline.com

Ça Ira, the new opera by rock musician Roger Waters, will be performed live for the first time at the Santa Cecilia Auditorium in Rome on November 17, the Italian news agency ANSA reports. The world-premiere performance will feature the Rome Symphony and its chorus. Waters may be the conductor.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

History will surely come to recognise Mussorgsky's first thoughts on his masterpiece, Boris Godunov, as definitive. The "Opera in Seven Scenes" he completed in 1869, which so baffled die-hard traditionalists inside Russia, was quite simply ahead of its time: the unvarnished truth.
— Read more at Independent Online

Local vocalist Tim Bostwick, a West High graduate and vocal performance major at Drake University in Des Moines, had sent Milnes an e-mail out of the blue, not knowing what to expect. Then, days later, Bostwick's cell phone rang while he was talking with one of his professors. The caller-ID on his phone tagged the call as coming from an unknown number. So Bostwick told the caller to hang on while he continued the conversation with his professor. When he was finished, he realized it was Milnes he put on hold.
— Read more at WCFCourier.com

Mayor Thomas M. Menino is quietly blocking plans to stamp the corporate logo of Citizens Bank on Boston's historic Opera House. Four months after the bank and Clear Channel Entertainment announced plans to rename the newly reopened Washington Street landmark, it remains the Opera House -- a name the theater is likely to keep, in one way or another, as long as the mayor has any say in the matter.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

If only Mozart could see his hometown now. His letters are full of disdain for Salzburg, which he saw as hopelessly narrow-minded and parochial. As he wrote to his father, he felt constantly undervalued by his employer here, the Archbishop Colloredo, whom he despised "to the point of madness." He finally ended his service to the court on "that happy day" in 1781 and described to his father being booted out the door by Colloredo's deputy, with what is surely the most famous such kick in music history.
— Read more at New York Times

The San Francisco Opera returned to Stern Grove for the first time since 1999 on Sunday, and a crowd estimated at more than 9,000 braved the breezy fog and patches of sunlight to welcome them back. The highlight of the afternoon was the performances of mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves and baritone Rodney Gilfry, offering arias and songs from a number of opera and Broadway composers including Bizet, Verdi, Kern and Loesser.
— Read more at sfgate.com

[Ionart's Charles T. Downey writes:] "Let me just say that I love Barber's music, and Vanessa is one of the classics of American opera in the 20th century, a work that should be performed every season somewhere in the United States, by federal law. Another summer opera destination (Opera in the Summer 2005, June 2) where Ionarts did not put in an appearance was Central City Opera, in Colorado, which is wrapping up a production of Vanessa (July 2 to August 7) that I am sorry to have missed. Critic Kyle MacMillan was there to review the production..."
— Read more at http://ionarts.org

Victoria, Australia, will have a new state opera company, the Melbourne Age reports. The unnamed company, which will appoint its directors within the next two months, will be funded by A$7.6 million that the Australian government has earmarked to develop opera in Victoria. The state has suffered a decline in opera performances?and a concomitant loss of opportunities for performers, designers, and musicians?since the Victoria State Opera merged with the Australian Opera to form the Sydney-based Opera Australia in 1996.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Thundering applause followed a rare performance of French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau's enigmatic "Zoroastre" opera as it was brought alive with breathtaking music, plush costumes and the authentic setting of Sweden's 18th century royal theater.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Brian Castles-Onion, Canterbury Opera's artistic director, has revealed the company's programme for 2005/6: "the most exciting year yet", including an Italian opera double-bill production of Pagliacci with Suor Angelica in October. Continuing CO's year of verismo opera, it will be an evening of action and high-voltage emotion. "These fabulous works couldn't be more different," says Castles-Onion, "yet they're united by their relevance to the drama of our everyday emotions. "Pagliacci, although full of passion and revenge, features one of opera's most famous and tender arias (Vesti la Giubba); and the agony of Suor Angelica, reputedly Puccini's favourite work, has never failed to move me," he says.
— Read more at STUFF

The Los Angeles world premiere of What to Wear?, a new opera by composer Michael Gordon and playwright Richard Foreman, has been postponed, the Los Angeles Times reports. The opera was to debut on September 18, opening the fall season at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), the smaller venue at Walt Disney Hall. It has been postponed until 2006.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Composer Sam Belich presents the world premiere performances of a recent work in midtown Manhattan this summer. The Eglantine is being presented at The Actors Temple in four concert presentations in August.
The one-act opera explores the horrors of the Holocaust as experienced by a Jewish woman trapped by the anti-Semitic ethos of the Third Reich, and ostracized by her family for marrying a non-Jew. Now, abandoned by her husband, she struggles to save her children from the inferno that threatens to engulf them. On the eve of their escape, an encounter with a fugitive from a concentration camp forces her to choose between freedom and the fire.
Semi-staged concert performances, accompanied by a synthesized orchestra will be performed Thursday, August 4th at 8:00 PM; Saturday, August 6th at 8:00 PM; Sunday, August 7th at 4:00 PM; and Tuesday, August 9th at 8:00 PM.
All performances take place at The Actors Temple, 339 West 47th Street, NY, NY, 10036.
— Learn more at theeglantine.com

The Austrian composer Franz Schreker was one of the great dreamers of early-20th-century music, a cartographer of distant sonic utopias and a prophet of their demise. His fame reached its height in German-speaking Europe around 1920, when his operas rivaled Strauss's in popularity, and he was hailed by some as the true heir to Wagner. But he was crushed by the double blow of shifting Weimar fashion and then by the Third Reich. As a progressive composer of half-Jewish descent, he was dismissed from prominent teaching posts, his music later banned. He died of a stroke in 1934 and his reputation lay in tatters for decades after the war. He was surely the most successful composer of his generation to simply vanish from music history.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

The New York Grand Opera Company will perform Turandot this evening in New York City's Central Park Naumburg Bandshell. The concert is free.
— Read more at NYGO

[Ionart's Charles T. Downey writes:] Ionarts can only go to so many opera locations in one summer, and we have seen opera this summer in Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Santa Fe. One place I really wanted to go this summer, but could not, was Cincinnati Opera Summer Festival.
— Read more at ionarts.org

YOUNG opera singers these days need more than just fine voices - it also pays to have a marketing plan. New Zealand-born tenor Geoff Sewell, founder of the British opera group Amici Forever, speaks of mass audiences and unique selling propositions. "We never intended to just be on the classical charts," says Sewell, a former accountant. "We targeted the mainstream pop charts."
— Read more at theaustralian.news.com.au

New York City Opera will present free midday concerts in Manhattan's Bryant Park on August 12, 19, and 26, the company announced. In the concerts, called Afternoon Arias, young artists from the company will perform excerpts from operas featured in NYCO's upcoming season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

It was a far cry from "we don?t needno education" on Monday when Pink Floyd?s Roger Waterspresented excerpts for the first time from "Ca Ira," his newthree-act opera about the French Revolution. Rogers told an enthusiastic audience, which was to allappearances made up more of Pink Floyd fans than opera buffs,that the ambitious project first came to him back in 1989, whenFrench songwriter Etienne Roda-Gil brought him a libretto forthe French revolution-inspired piece.
— Read more at leadingthecharge.com

Always an attractively pastoral destination, the Bard Summerscape 2005 festival is a near-mandatory visit for those wanting to reencounter the would-be greatness of composer Marc Blitzstein, whose infrequently heard but most fully realized work, Regina, is receiving a serious, often-original production. Between distinguished efforts by singer-actress Lauren Flanigan and installation artist-designer Judy Pfaff, you can't help but be suitably steeped in this horrific tale of Deep South skulduggery, which plays through this week at Bard College.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez received standing ovations for his interpretation of Richard Wagner's final opera "Parsifal" that rounded off the so-called "premiere week" of the prestigious Bayreuth Festival here.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

It is not every day that a character in a play invents the destiny of its author. But in the case of the revolutionary martyr Mariana Pineda and Federico García Lorca, who memorialized her in a historical drama a century later, a heroine seems to have arisen from the page, stepped down from the stage and said, "You will die as I did." "Ainadamar," Osvaldo Golijov's brief opera at the Santa Fe Opera Saturday evening, remembers the deaths of these two people but confesses its fascination with death in general. Pineda was garroted in 1831 by counterrevolutionaries not unlike the fascists who shot García Lorca in 1936. In the opera, their stories are told by way of Uruguay, where the playwright's erstwhile leading lady Margarita Xirgu is long exiled and approaching death in 1969.
— Read more at New York Times

[Jens F. Laurson of Ionarts.org writes:] Last Friday, I saw Shadowtime, Brian Ferneyhough's "thought opera" on the life and work of Walter Benjamin at Lincoln Center Festival. As the Star-Ledger wrote on July 10th, 2005, the festival has a way of "showcasing experimental new operas that likely could not find a home at a standard American opera house." And experimental an opera Shadowtime is. Some might question whether it is opera at all, but that of course would be as silly as the claims (that I?ve heard) that Peter Grimes is not opera or, for that matter, should not be called art. Shadowtime is an opera, it is art? it is merely difficult art based on a difficult subject and with an aim (according to the composer and librettist Charles Bernstein) to target the engaged and thinking, rather than sympathetic, listener. I am not sure if "unreconstructed high modernism" would do any more to explain the opera than a summary of the nonexistent plot or the suggestion that it sounded like sheet music of John Adams sent through the shredder and randomly glued back together, but it is this critic?s best attempt to describe charitably the experience that has brought him the closest to physical pain ever experienced in a concert.
— Read more at ionarts.org

'm cross about crossover. What is crossover? The term usually means that music of a particular genre has become appealing to listeners who are used to another genre entirely. This is not a new phenomenon. A good example is Mozart's "Piano Concerto 21." When used in a popular, romantic movie, it became identified as "Elvira Madigan." Many who had no interest in Mozart were captivated. And look at the impact of music in the movie "2001." Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra" is now probably better known as "The theme from 2001." In each case, the music "crossed over" some unidentified boundary.
— Read more at voiceofsandiego.org

Performers, administrators and concertgoers who have long fretted over the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall had a lot invested in the experiment that was tried out last night: the temporary reconfiguration of the stage. The occasion was the opening of the 39th season of the popular Mostly Mozart Festival, and the hall was packed. The dynamic French conductor Louis Langrée directed the festival orchestra in an eclectic program featuring the starry soprano Renée Fleming and the fine pianist Stephen Hough as soloists. With such musical news being made, PBS chose to broadcast the concert as part of its "Live From Lincoln Center" series.
— Read more at New York Times

Tatyana Larina, humiliated heroine of Eugene Onegin and, according to queer musicology, Tchaikovsky's alter-ego, is an everywoman. We've all met a handsome stranger, fallen for their flattery, and declared our feelings too quickly and too honestly. But who is the object of Tatyana's affections? Tom Hawkes's ostensibly traditional production for Opera Holland Park - I say ostensibly as 19th-century Russia was not famed for its ballpoint pens and lick'n'stick stationery - makes no attempt to answer this question.
— Read more at independent.co.uk

Gilbert and Sullivan's classic The Mikado will be presented with full staging and costumes, orchestra and all-professional lead singers by Ridge Light Opera. Come see this outrageously funny version and bring all the children and grandchildren for an introduction to G&S August 4, 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13, 2005, at 8:00 PM in Pleasant Valley Park, Basking Ridge, NJ.
— Read more at baskingridge.americantowns.com

LAST year Joseph Volpe, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, went to Robert Tuggle, the Met's archivist, with a simple question. In how many seasons throughout its history, Mr. Volpe wanted to know, had the Met presented a production of Puccini's "Turandot"? At one time, Mr. Volpe's question would have sent Mr. Tuggle, who has been the Met's director of archives since 1981, riffling through the record books and flipping through rows of index cards in the archive, a windowless office in a subbasement of the opera house.
— Read more at New York Times

[Charles T. Downey of Ionarts.org writes:] "Following up on my first Bayreuth post this year (Oh, Bwoonhilda, You're So Wovewy, July 25), there is no real controversy to speak of, but they are still performing Wagner's operas in the Festspielhaus. In general, however, the critical reception has been lackluster, to say the least. Are the best of the best (singers and others, with Plácido Domingo excepted) just not lining up to go to Bayreuth anymore? Here's a sampling of press reviews I have read of the five operas staged this year..."
— Read more at Ionarts.org

Opera's "age of the director" is upon us, or so The New York Times declared last month. This writer begs to differ. While the pronouncement might stand in Berlin or Barcelona, it seems a tad premature for New York. True, New York City Opera, the Met and smaller troupes all mount their share of riveting shows. By and large, though, local audiences resist even mildly innovative stagecraft, branding productions that stray from nostalgic rectitude with that ultimate term of revulsion: Eurotrash.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Thanks vilaine fille]

There is something curiously satisfying about dueling divas on a hot summer night. The Rimrock Opera Company serves up the feisty divas - Emily Burr and Laura Loge - in the local company's version of Mozart's "The Impresario." The 35-minute piece is among four being performed this weekend in ROC's first-ever One-Act Festival. The final two performances are today at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $15. "I picked four one-act operas, and I thought we'd do two one night and two the next. But they were all so good, I decided to do them all every night," ROC artistic director Douglas Nagel told an opening night crowd Friday.
— Read more at billingsgazette.com

The "Ring" is the mother of all opera experiences. It is four operas performed over six days, totaling 17 hours of entertainment and six intermissions. Written by Richard Wagner and staged fully for the first time at his custom-made opera house in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1876, the "Ring" ? its story taken from Norse mythology ? has since become a tradition in certain houses around the world. Seattle Opera is one of them.
— Read more at TheNewsTribune.com

James Levine said he wouldn't be making any major changes during his first summer with the Tanglewood Music Center. But he did, simply by investing so much time in the work of the students at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer academy for advanced musical training. During the past month at Tanglewood, the music director spent more than 50 hours working with the TMC fellows -- musicians, singers, and conductors who are the creme de la creme of college and conservatory students, hailing from as far away as Australia, China, and Slovakia. Soprano and teacher Phyllis Curtin, associated with Tanglewood for 60 years, says no music director since Tanglewood founder Serge Koussevitzky has spent more time with the students.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

"I want magic!" the soprano Renée Fleming once demanded, singing an aria from André Previn's opera, "A Streetcar Named Desire." Well, now she has it - and so do we. The first concert of this year's Mostly Mozart Festival, in which Fleming performed with the festival's orchestra and its music director, Louis Langrée, proved that Langrée and Lincoln Center's vice president for programming, Jane Moss, made the right decision in boldly reconfiguring Avery Fisher Hall.
— Read more at Newsday.com

An opera will make its world premiere in the 2005 New York Musical Theatre Festival Sept. 25, when Don Imbroglio ? billed as "an opera you can't refuse" ? begins at the Lion Theatre Off-Broadway. The new, original work by Peter Hilliard (composer) and Matt Boresi (librettist) is directed by Jenny Lord and produced by Beth Morrison Projects and True Love Productions. It has been seen in developmental presentations prior to this full-production six-performance run.
— Read more at Playbill News