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

It took an elaborate technological hookup for the San Francisco Opera to relay Saturday's opening-night performance of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" from the stage of the War Memorial Opera House to the thousands of chilled, enthusiastic fans watching the free video simulcast two blocks away at Civic Center Plaza.
I suspect Patricia Racette's powerhouse performance in the title role could have covered the distance all on its own.
— Read more at sfgate.com

[FSU produces Bizet's 'Carmen,' Holst's 'Savitri']
Florida State Opera's summer productions are often devoted to productions directed by candidates in the university's master's program in opera production. The operas given are usually one-act pieces, and often outside the mainstream of the repertoire.
The operas given this past weekend at Opperman Music Hall, Gustav Holst's "Savitri" and Marius Constant's adaptation of George Bizet for "La Tragedie de Carmen," were directed by degree candidate Karen Esquivel. Esquivel proved herself a competent director, if not a particularly daring one, though it must be said that neither opera gave her very much to work with.
— Read more at Tallahassee Democrat

It was an experiment intended to draw opera fans and first-timers alike, but when the San Francisco Opera announced it would simulcast its summer season opener, "Madama Butterfly," on a big screen at Civic Center Plaza, nobody really knew whether the masses were ready for a highbrow concert on the green.
Any doubts were erased when an estimated 8,000 spectators, according to Opera officials, crammed onto the pavement and spread out on the grass across from City Hall to watch the performance Saturday night. It was beamed from the War Memorial Opera House to an 18-by-25-foot LED screen, with music coming from giant speakers held aloft by cranes.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Edward Johnson, who was in charge of New York's Metropolitan Opera from 1935 to 1950, was a tenor. But Joseph Volpe, head of the Met since 1990 (he plans to retire this year), came up through the ranks in a more unusual way. He started by building sets at the Met. It was a first.
Volpe has written a book about himself and the Met, "The Toughest Show on Earth." Its title is meant to evoke thoughts of the circus motto and all kinds of exciting things going on at once.
— Read more at South Bend Tribune

The board in charge of Jersey's Opera House has strongly defended itself after criticism of how it is run.
Former owner Dick Ray had said the Opera House was badly managed and wasting money.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

The 20th-anniversary season of the Los Angeles Opera was supposed to culminate on Saturday night with the premiere of "Grendel," a new opera by the composer Elliot Goldenthal, directed by Julie Taymor, who is also a co-librettist with the poet J. D. McClatchy.
But on Thursday, just two days before the scheduled premiere, a major event in the international opera world, the company postponed the opening because of computer-related problems and a mechanical breakdown of a huge rotating set piece on which some 80 percent of the action is staged.
— Read more at New York Times

Thanks to Anne-Carolyn Bird, I learned about a fascinating production at the Northwest Puppet Center in Seattle, which I featured in my preview of Opera in the Summer 2006. It is an ingenious resurrection of an 18th-century ballad opera, Tom Thumb (based on a 1731 play by Henry Fielding, with music by Thomas Arne and Johann Hasse, as well as popular tunes), performed here by the Carter Family Marionnettes. Puppet opera was a rather important subgenre in the 18th century, especially as a relatively easy way to create parodies of popular mainstream operas, and I am delighted by modern attempts to recreate it. This particular combination, of puppeteers and live musical performers, is the most exciting of all.
— Read more at ionarts - Charles T. Downey

[Youth's a stuff will not endure]
Like salad leaves and steamed puddings, operas go in and out of fashion. Così fan tutte, or Il scuola degli amanti, is a case in point. In the 19th century, its ambiguities sat uneasily with Romantic sentiments. In the 20th century, eased by the slick wit of neo-Classicism and the Pandora's box of psychoanalysis, its popularity grew to rival that of Die Zauberflöte and Le nozze di Figaro. These days, barely a season goes by without a new Così, though as Nicholas Hytner's subtle staging shows, it is still as disturbing as it is beautiful, wry, and sexy.
— Read more at Independent Online

Trinity Lyric Opera, based in Castro Valley, will present its inaugural production, a fully staged version of Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Pilgrim's Progress," in Walnut Creek in three performances June 16-18.
The production at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts will mark the West Coast premiere of the opera, written in 1951, and will include several current and past members of Opera San José: Jason Detwiler, singing the title role; Adam Flowers, singing three roles and making his debut as a stage director; and Michele Detwiler, Kirk Eichelberger and Nik Schiffmann.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

Soprano Mary Dunleavy is the winner of the Dallas Opera's 2006 Maria Callas Debut Artist of the Year Award, the company announced.
The award, voted annually by the Dallas Opera's subscribers, recognizes the singer "who has made the biggest impact in his (or her) Dallas Opera debut."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Hettinger native Korliss Uecker is returning to North Dakota to perform in "Phillip Marshall," an opera by American composer Seymour Barab that will be presented here later this week.
The Western Plains Opera is presenting the opera Thursday through Saturday in Minot State's Ann Nicole Nelson Hall. It is set in the American South, just after the Civil War, and tells the story of a returning Confederate soldier struggling with his own mental health. The action of the play takes place in Marshall's mind, in a doctor's office in 1866 Virginia.
— Read more at grandforks.com

American Opera said goodbye to its first lady on Saturday, exalting Sarah Caldwell in prayer and song in a tribute fit for a musical giant.
Caldwell, who died March 23 of heart failure at age 82, staged and conducted some 100 performances in more than 30 years as founder-director of the Opera Company of Boston.
She was hailed in a 1975 Time magazine cover story as "the best opera director in the United States."
— Read more at Yahoo! News

When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought inspiration for her opera, she looked not to Wagner's "Ring" cycle but to the Olympic rings, where such themes as power, envy and greed are plentiful.
In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and time spent in jail.
— Read more at Chicago Tribune

Indianapolis Opera will hold chorus auditions for its upcoming 2006-2007 season on from 2 p.m. to 9 p.m. May 31 and June 1 at Fairview Presbyterian Church, 4609 N. Capitol Ave.
Interested singers should contact John A Schmid, chorus master at (317) 253-5982 to arrange an audition time. Applicants are asked to prepare two selections, preferably with one selection in a language other than English. An accompanist will be provided.
— Read more at frostillustrated.com

A $2.8 million opera about a medieval monster fell prey to a 21st century computer problem on Thursday, forcing producers of "Grendel" to delay its world premiere in Los Angeles from Saturday until June 8.
"Grendel," with music by Oscar-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal and directed by Julie Taymor, who created the Broadway hit "The Lion King," was to have opened before a black tie audience on Saturday night in one of the most ambitious projects ever mounted by the Los Angeles Opera.
— Read more at Reuters.com

Houston Grand Opera's production of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel next year will be designed and directed by the celebrated puppeteer Basil Twist, the company announced.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

ANDREAS SCHOLL is having a very good year. Earlier this month, the German-Swiss countertenor made his Metropolitan Opera debut as Bertarido, the deposed king in Handel's "Rodelinda"; Bay Area audiences who tuned in to the May 6 "Live from the Met" broadcast heard one of the great vocal performances of the season.
For Scholl, though, the breakthrough moment came last September, when he sang at the Last Night of the BBC Proms. He was the first countertenor, and the first German singer, ever to perform at the concert, broadcast worldwide from England. "It's the biggest classical music event on the planet, and it was a great honor for me to be invited," Scholl explained in a recent phone call from New York, where he was finishing the run of "Rodelinda."
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

There was little advance notice that the season for opera in Washington got an exciting addition, but the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater was filled nonetheless when Lorin Maazel presented Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw on Monday night. Everyone who was there will likely agree: it was the best opera performance that this city has witnessed this season. By far.
— Read more at ionarts

On Friday, June 2 and Saturday, June 3, 2006 at 8pm AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS (AOP) will present concert readings based on three literary works as part of its FIRST CHANCE opera workshop series. Audiences will hear the premieres of new scenes from Tarik O'Regan's HEART OF DARKNESS based on the novella by Joseph Conrad, Stefania de Kenessey's THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES based on the novel by Tom Wolfe, and Richard Wargo's SHARON'S GRAVE, based on the play by James B. Keane as well as view a video presentation of scenes from AOP's recent world premiere production of DARKLING. Award- winning librettist and lyricist Mark Campbell (Volpone, Songs from an Unmade Bed) will host the evening and moderate a post-show discussion with the creators. The performances will be held in the Great Room at South Oxford Space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the home of American Opera Projects. The First Chance presentation is part of THE WRITE OF SPRING, AOP's current season focusing on adapting literary works for the stage.
— Read more at operaprojects.org

[San Francisco Opera's sixth general director talks to the B.A.R.]
I couldn't believe my ears. David Gockley, the new general director of the San Francisco Opera, who looks like a cross between a choir boy and an investment banker, kept using this word that I had to ask him to repeat. Finally, he looked at me quizzically ? he knew I was representing the B.A.R. ? and asked, "Don't you know what fisting is?"
— Read more at ebar.com

Classical-music lovers are an opinionated lot, and among the judgments that listeners have lobbed at Martin Bookspan in his three decades as the voice of "Live From Lincoln Center," one in particular still smarts.
"I will not forget the language," he recalled. "He said I have diarrhea of the mouth. He said, 'Everything that you say, we see on the screen.' I was superfluous."
Resonating in Mr. Bookspan's unmistakable timbre, the word pierced like an arrow through the heart.
— Read more at New York Times

Oscar-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal says he has been having nightmares about a monster named Grendel and then when he wakes up, the monster is there, consuming his every moment.
The bad dreams should end on Saturday when Goldenthal's opera "Grendel" -- directed by his life partner and collaborator Julie Taymor -- has its world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera in a $2.8 million production that seemingly spares nothing.
— Read more at Reuters.co.uk

Getting together brings out the beast in them.
Anyone who's seen the fabulous creatures of the stage version of "The Lion King" knows that. And now Julie Taymor and Michael Curry are at it again with "Grendel," the new opera by composer Elliot Goldenthal, premiering Saturday at the Los Angeles Opera.
— Read more at LA Daily News

Legendary star of the Metropolitan Opera, Roberta Peters, visited Long Lots Elementary School last week to perform and discuss her life with students.
Born in Bronx, N.Y., as Roberta Peterman, Peters got her start in the music business when her grandfather told Jan Peerce, a famous tenor with New York City's Metropolitan Opera, about his granddaughter's beautiful voice. At just 13, Peerce arranged for Peters to study with William Herman, a famous operatic coach of that era. Peters told the elementary students she studied for six and a half years with Herman before attempting a public performance. Her big break came, unexpectedly, when she was just 19.
— Read more at Westport News

Ever wonder what it would be like to study voice under the world's most famous opera divas? Cinnabar Theater offers a taste of operatic divinity in a production of Terrence McNally's "Master Class" opening Friday.
McNally's drama constructs a crash course in how life and love inform one's art with an imaginative recreation of the master classes taught by opera star Maria Callas at the Juilliard School of Music in New York during the early 1970s.
— Read more at arguscourier.com

The Spoleto production of Charles Gounod's opera promises to be colorful and inventive, a rich goblet of Bourdeaux. Brought to life by directors Jean-Phillipe Clarac, Olivier Deloueuil, and Hillary Spector, this Roméo et Juliette will have an international and contemporary flavor tweaked by contemporary New York theatricality. Conducted by Tommaso Placidi, it will undoubtedly be musically solid. Maestro Placidi, who has led major orchestras across Europe and makes his American debut with this piece, was also assistant conductor of the London Philharmonic and has worked with stellar personalities Colin Davis and Georg Solti, Mstislav Rostropovitch, André Previn, and others.
— Read more at Charleston City Paper

At the height of Act 1 of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, Don Pizarro's prisoners are freed and they sing of the joy of being allowed in the open air again.
This typified the whole experience of the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus's concert performance of the opera ? a breath of fresh air.
Under their Principal Conductor Sir Colin Davis, and with a line-up of international soloists, the orchestra gave the most warm and coherent performance of the work imaginable.
— Read more at musicomh.com

"I hope we can do it, because I can think of nothing more important in one's life than finding another medium (the operatic) for this wonderful story."
- Benjamin Britten, writing in February 1965 to Colin Graham

Britten was excited about doing the music for Graham's libretto for an opera based on Anna Karenina, the great Tolstoy novel (and one of my personal favorites). But Britten, a pacifist, decided not to go ahead with the project in 1968 after the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and so one of the 20th century?s most important operatic composers never did set his hand to the tragic story of a woman led astray by her passions.
But next April, Florida Grand Opera will give the world premiere of Anna Karenina, directed by Graham, who has provided American composer David Carlson with the libretto. The production will mark a new stage for FGO, which will become a six-production company with Anna; all six of the performances will be given at the new Miami Performing Arts Center's Ziff Ballet Opera House.
— Read more at Greg Stepanich - palmbeachpost.com

Don José has killed Carmen 11 times, and Florida Grand Opera has bid a not-so-fond farewell to Miami-Dade County Auditorium as the company prepares for the biggest event in its history with the move into the new Ziff Opera House this fall.
The sole remaining bit of business in Florida Grand's 65th season took place Saturday night at the Lincoln Theatre, with the annual concert giving the singers of the Young Artist Studio a chance to show their stuff.
— Read more at South Florida Sun-Sentinel

San Francisco Opera has ratified a new five-year contract with its orchestra musicians, the company announced yesterday, which will revoke the 5.5% pay cuts instituted amid a $4.4 million deficit in 2003 to help the then-fiscally challenged company.
In addition, Musicians Union Local 6 of the American Federation of Musicians, the orchestral players' union, reportedly agreed to contractual increases in the annual compensation guarantee of 2 percent for the first year of the new agreement, with subsequent yearly increases of 2, 4, 4, and 4 percent.
— Read more at Opera News

Barney the homeless mongrel has landed a walk-on stage role in a tragic opera just two weeks after he was rescued. The Yorkshire terrier cross found wandering the streets of Gorsedd in Flintshire is to appear in Puccini's La Boheme in Llandudno later this month.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Startlingly, blood begins to ooze from the walls during the sleepwalking scene of Bernard Uzan's production of Macbeth in Seattle, seeping down the panels of Robert Israel's stark set in mockery of Lady Macbeth's attempt at hygiene. This one sensational moment is effective because of Uzan's perceptive treatment of the drama elsewhere. One instance: during Macbeth's hallucination of Banquo's ghost, Uzan rightly has the chorus keep their distance, sensing something is amiss, while his wife alone realises how far he has sunk.
— Read more at FT.com

I recently had the pleasure of attending the Chicago Opera Theater's (COT) recent production of Nixon In China, an opera by John Adams, at Chicago's Harris Theater.
I'm a fan of this opera but I wasn't so sure what to expect with this particular production as there were a number of unknown variables: ...
— Read more at Adaptistration: Drew McManus

BRYN TERFEL has revealed how he became an opera star despite his love of rock music, sparking comparisons to powerful rocker Meat Loaf.
As many classical stars like Charlotte Church strive for crossover success in the pop charts, Terfel has spoken of how he did the opposite.
In a documentary to be broadcast shortly on ITV1Wales, the bass baritone said rock and roll and jazz were more to his taste than classical musical as he grew up on a North Wales farm.
— Read more at icnetwork.co.uk

Grendel - a new opera directed and co-written by by Tony Award-winner Julie Taymor based on the fantastical epic poem Beowulf--will have its L.A. Opera premiere at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on May 27th, according to Variety.
After seven performances in L.A., the opera - which will feature an array of imaginative puppets--will then run for four performances (July 11th through 13th and July 15th) as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Six months before the premier of The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz, 46 year old composer Stefan Heucke completed the musical score for the opera, the Netzzeitung reported.
The opera will premier September 16 at the United Municipal Theater of Krefeld-Mönchengladbach (Vereinigten Städtischen Bühnen Krefeld/Mönchengladbach), in Mönchengladbach, due west of Duesseldorf. 11 further shows will take place at both the Krefeld and Mönchengladbach venues.
— Read more at ejpress.org

Sitting in a hotel courtyard near a gurgling fountain, Nicole Cabell would draw anyone's attention. She is tall and slim, her glowing skin framed by a cascade of dark curls falling onto her shoulders. She wears a flowing black skirt belted by a splash of rhinestones and a snug top.
She reaches down to rummage in her purse, pulls out a tissue, turns her head and blows.
"Very attractive," she says with a smile. "I'm allergic to Charleston."
Cabell, a 28-year-old California native, will make her debut at the Spoleto Festival USA this week as Juliette in the 1867 opera "Romeo et Juliette" by French romantic composer Charles Gounod.
— Read more at The State

The Princeton Festival announces its second season, "A Celebration of the Performing Arts," from June 24 to July 9 2006. Returning to the campus of The Lawrenceville School and expanding on its successful inaugural 2005 season, the 2006 season includes three performances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, an afternoon of chamber music with the Concordia Chamber Players, jazz with Joe Locke and the Milt Jackson Tribute Band, a semi-staged performance of Gian Carlo's one act opera The Old Maid and the Thief, and an all Mozart orchestral concert featuring pianist Natalie Zhu with guest conductor Daniel Beckwith. Charting the vision of The Princeton Festival is Artistic Director for The Festival, Richard Tang Yuk, who is also on the music faculty at Princeton University. With its presentation of traditional opera, an orchestral concert, jazz and chamber music over two weeks, The Princeton Festival takes a step closer to its vision for a multi-disciplinary professional summer arts festival for the greater Princeton community.
— Learn more at princetonfestival.org

It is never too soon to start making your summer travel plans, which if you are like us, involve going places to hear classical music. Last year was our first year at Ionarts covering the range of top-notch operas produced in the summer (see the summary of our coverage last summer in 2005), often at special festivals or by companies that work exclusively in the summer. Operabase has updated its database of opera festivals for 2006, too, which attempts to be comprehensive (and is so, as far as I can tell). I choose those productions that interest me and any that are in the Washington area.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

The Grand Seducers: Giovanni Meets Xi-men Qing, a new East-West fusion opera, makes its world premiere at San Francisco's Chinese Culture Center this weekend, May 18th through 20th.
The Grand Seducers tells the romantic and fatalistic stories of two legendary Casanovas, Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Xi-Men Qing of the Water Margin Heroes novel (Song Dynasty, 960-1280 AD) and features Tony Award-winner Eugene Brancoveanu (2003 Honor for Excellence in Theatre in Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme).
This innovative operatic creation combines Mozart's great rendition of Don Giovanni and famous characters from classic Chinese opera in a new story by prolific librettist Cao Lusheng. The opera, sung in English punctured with Chinese, features Merola Opera artists with vocal brilliance and comic ebullience, under the direction of Isabel Milenski' and music by Gang Situ.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Left without a venue for its annual summer production due to the ongoing renovations at the Town Hall Theater, the Opera Company of Middlebury [Vermont] instead is bringing English-style opera in the country to the Champlain Valley.
Next month the company will host "A Touch of Glyndebourne," an event that invites guests to tour and picnic on the grounds of Fran Bull's Gallery in-the-Field in Brandon before enjoying a musical performance in the art gallery.
— Read more at Addison Independent

It is a measure of how fast operatic taste has advanced these past 25 years that The Makropoulos Case is no longer a rarity, writes Andrew Clark. The story on which it is based - about the monstrous woman who, having swallowed a life-prolonging potion 300 years ago, discovers that an endless life is not worth living - is not nearly as anti-operatic as it once appeared. Even the music now sounds romantic and tender, where once it was jagged and elliptical.
— Read more at FT.com

"Eighteen years, and I've built a home with all who love this mountain. But I have enemies for every friend."
So writes gorilla researcher Dian Fossey, moments before a murderer's flashing blade takes her life and hurls forward "Nyiramachabelli" -- a one-act, 40-minute opera conceived and composed principally by teenagers in Kentucky Opera's VISIONS program. The results will be unveiled Tuesday at the Kentucky Center.
— Read more at courier-journal.com

Joseph Volpe's reputation as a tough-guy, no-nonsense general manager of the Metropolitan Opera who kept everyone from carpenters to conductors in line took a hit in April 1996. The occasion was the gala to celebrate James Levine's 25th anniversary at the Met. Though Mr. Volpe tried to rein in the event, Mr. Levine kept inviting singers to participate. That program wound up lasting nearly eight hours.
— Read more at New York Times

[Los Angeles Opera's 'Grendel' Finds Modern Meaning in Ancient Lore]
The world premiere of the Los Angeles Opera's Grendel is less than two weeks away and the company's costume shop is a flurry of activity. It is 10 a.m. on a Monday morning and most of the staff is elbow-deep in fabric.
— Read more at LA Downtown News Online

James Levine is one of the world's major conductors, so the eyes and ears of the musical world would have already been focused on his appearances at Tanglewood this summer.
But now there is an added element of drama, because Levine is returning to the podium after an unprecedented four-month hiatus. The Boston Symphony Orchestra's music director fell onstage in Symphony Hall at the end of a concert in March, sustaining a rotator-cuff injury to his right shoulder that required surgery.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

IT began operatically enough in the summer of 1968 at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany, the Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson later recalled. The morning of each performance, a large bouquet of dark red roses was waiting at her door. There was a card with the signature "L. Black" and a few lines that seemed to come from a book.
— Read more at New York Times

The dateline on the obituary seemed out of place.
Sarah Caldwell, the first lady of opera, died in Portland in March after a robust life of 82 years.
She founded the Opera Company of Boston, was the first woman to conduct at New York's Metropolitan Opera, and Time magazine featured her on its cover.
— Read more at mainetoday.com

A dozen years after his death and more than three decades after he left the White House in disgrace, Richard Nixon is alive as never before in the grand opera world, which can't seem to get enough of the him.
"Nixon in China," the John Adams' opera first staged in 1987, is in the midst of a new wave of popularity and performances, the latest being a triumphal turn on the stage of the Chicago Opera Theater where it opened May 19.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

It wasn't an ailing diva that brought Brian Dickie, general director of Chicago Opera Theater, onstage for an unscheduled announcement Wednesday night just before the start of Act 2 of John Adams' "Nixon in China" at the Harris Theater.
The emergency was a projector that blew just before it was to begin beaming English supertitles for the opening scene of Adams' groundbreaking 1987 opera inspired by President Richard Nixon's slightly more groundbreaking visit to Communist China in 1972. Looking stricken, Dickie apologized for the "crippling'' technological breakdown but expressed certainty that the audience would enjoy the rest of the opera.
— Read more at suntimes.com

"If you want to sing Tosca, you have to jump."
That's what legendary soprano Renata Scotto said while directing Deborah Voigt in her first production of Giacomo Puccini's opera, "Tosca." She was referring to the title character's final, fatal leap from the top of a castle wall, but taking on the role was a big jump for Voigt. She was a soprano expert in the operas of two German Richards, Wagner and Strauss, but was not known for her way with the Italian repertoire.
Not until this year, that is. This has been Voigt's "Italian season," taking on the female leads of Verdi and Puccini at the Metropolitan Opera, Vienna Staatsoper and elsewhere, including the Twin Cities.
— Read more at St. Paul Pioneer Press

BEFORE there can be opera, you need a libretto. Nominally that's no big deal. However grand the finished product, the words add up, literally, to a "little book." Yet when an opera fails, the librettist is the usual suspect. Even favorites - Mozart's "Zauberflöte," Verdi's "Trovatore" - still take flak from critics for "libretto problems."
— Read more at New York Times

SCOTTISH Opera's return to the stage faced the threat of industrial action yesterday after backstage staff voted to strike.
But the company insisted its first productions in nearly a year, of Don Giovanni and Carmen, would go ahead in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
The Broadcasting, Cinematograph and Theatre Union (BECTU) announced yesterday that its 35 members at the company had voted to strike.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

According to Variety, an opera adaptation of Tony Kushner's Tony-winning two-part play Angels in America, is set to have its American premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts' Stanford Calderwood Pavilion on June 16th, 17th, 20th and 24th.
The piece will be a compressed chamber opera version of Millenium Approaches and Perestroika, composed by Transylvanian-born Peter Eotvos and with a libretto (in English) by Mari Mezei. "At two hours and 25 minutes, the opera runs a little more than a third of the total running time of Kushner's twin plays," states the article.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

[The Met's longtime manager, Joseph Volpe, exits the company he ruled by efficiency - and fear]
For the past 16 years at the Metropolitan Opera, whenever the spotlight found a corner of the closed scarlet curtain and a suited man with a thin perimeter of beard walked onstage, he was greeted with disappointed moans. Joseph Volpe, the Met's general manager, usually brought bad news - a bedridden baritone, a stalwart soprano who would be singing through a cold.
Then there was the night - Jan. 5, 1996 - when Volpe entered to send everyone home; tenor Richard Versalle had suffered a fatal heart attack onstage, minutes into the Met premiere of Janácek's "The Makropulos Case." A few months later, Volpe had a cheerier task: Before a performance of "La Bohème," he told the audience that the cast's principals, Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu, had married the previous night. That time, he got applause.
— Read more at Newsday.com

New York is aquiver. On Saturday the Metropolitan Opera will close its season with a snazzle-dazzle variety show honoring Joseph Volpe, its grandiose, self-aggrandising, about-to-be-ex- general-manager, writes Martin Bernheimer. He steps down after 16 years at the helm of what may be the world's leading haven for the lyric muse.
— Read more at FT.com

SHE'S glamorous, blonde and a petite size 10, so you wouldn't think that Katherine Jenkins would need to complain about her figure.
But, although it's hard to believe, the mezzo soprano says she's often criticised for her image.
Neath-born Katherine claims she is often not taken seriously by the opera world, which has traditionally been regarded as a platform for larger ladies.
— Read more at icWales icnetwork.co.uk

May 27, Los Angeles Opera presents the world premiere of Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel, an opera based on John Gardner's novella of the same name. The composer is known for his many film scores, including Michael Collins, The Butcher Boy and his Oscar-winning Frida. Julie Taymor, Goldenthal's partner in life, as well as in many theater and film projects, is Grendel's co-librettist (with J. D. McClatchy) and director of the L.A. premiere production, which will come to the Lincoln Center Festival in July.
— Read more at Opera News

"Drink, O my friends, the philters of this art! Nowhere will you find a more agreeable way of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush."
No artist ever had a keener critic than Richard Wagner did in Friedrich Nietzsche. The philosopher held that "Parsifal," Wagner's final opera, was the composer's most seductive and dangerous work, a noxious brew of musical beauties and nihilistic sickness.
— Read more at Newsday.com [thanks viliane fille]

The Metropolitan Opera in New York bids farewell to its general manager, Joseph Volpe, this Saturday (May 20, 5:30 pm) in a gala concert. Of course, James Levine's medical problems prevent him from conducting, but Valery Gergiev, Marco Armiliato, James Conlon, and Patrick Summers will share the podium in his place.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts.com See also: Sieglinde's Diaries

Eight finalists have been selected for the Seattle Opera's first international Wagner competition on August 19, the company announced.
Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, choose the finalists from a pool of 43 candidates who auditioned in Vienna, Berlin, London, Paris, Seattle, and New York. The singers are aged 25 to 40 and have not had more than one engagement in a major opera house. They will compete, accompanied by an orchestra including members of the Seattle Symphony led by conductor Asher Fisch, in Seattle Opera's Marion Oliver McCaw
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Watching an opera, any opera, requires a willing suspension of disbelief. Watching English National Opera calls for nothing less than a complete renunciation of the critical faculties if one is to imagine that the company has turned a corner since the past year's upheavals that swept away two music directors, a chief executive and a chairman in less time than it takes to make an opera.
— Read more at scena.org

Last week, I recommended the final production of Washington National Opera's season to you. Monday night, DCist was in the audience for the second performance of Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, and I can now say confidently that this production is a "smashing success" (as Tim Page described it for the Post). While not perfect as I heard it, the voices and musical performance are all of high quality and the wacky story is likely to please even the opera neophyte. I have heard people sometimes explain their reluctance to attend an opera because they "do not want to think too much." If that is your concern, trust me: with this opera, no cogitation is required.
— Read more at dcist.com

[The Glyndebourne opera season starts tomorrow. Rupert Christiansen talks to two of this summer's biggest stars]
Bad news for all those susceptible males bewitched by one particular feature of Glyndebourne's sensational production of Handel's Giulio Cesare last summer.
Danielle de Niese, the 26-year-old soprano sex kitten who brought the house down as Cleopatra - bumping and waggling her way through Kyliesque disco routines at the same time as singing seven baroque arias with stylish aplomb - is spoken for.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

It was just the first intermission at the season-opening performance of Puccini's "Tosca" at the Metropolitan Opera on April 22, and already some hard-to-please buffs in the lobby could be overhead complaining about Deborah Voigt's performance. This was Ms. Voigt's first appearance as Tosca at the Met, a daring departure from the Strauss and Wagner roles with which she had established her reputation.
— Read more at New York Times

Galas are a big part of operatic tradition. You need to have one every few years. At the Met they have become practically part of the standard opera landscape. This Saturday's season-ending gala, a tribute to the departing general manager, Joseph Volpe, is being billed as a particular blockbuster. Yet, inevitably, people are already comparing it to another blockbuster gala in recent memory, the 1996 celebration of James Levine's 25th year at the house, which went on for more than seven hours.
— Read more at New York Times

Remember this name: Giuseppe Filianoti. The Italian tenor's Metropolitan Opera debut last fall in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" whipped up more genuine, word-of-mouth excitement than any of the season's more ballyhooed events.
Without a record company or handlers hawking him, Filianoti made his mark the old-fashioned way, through artistic excellence. As Edgardo in "Lucia," he radiated a fiery energy and sang with whole-hearted abandon, old-school elegance and a molten, tears-in-his-voice tone that left audiences hollering for more.
— Read more at Newsday.com [thanks viliane fille]

"Our definition of opera is that it has music more interesting and complex than musical theater," said Harriet March Page, artistic director of Goat Hall Productions, which will be staging Fresh Voices VI with 10 short operas - as well as bookending their NOW Festival of new compositions and a program of art songs - Thursday through Sunday for the next two weeks at Thick House on Potrero Hill in San Francisco.
Besides her expanded definition of opera, Page said that Fresh Voices is committed to accessible operatic storylines, even "to do something a little political." This explains in part the festival's subtitle or motto, "Pipers & Puppets," taken from Music Director Mark Alburger's piece, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (from the Robert Browning poem, but insinuating that a present-day president may be the piper to more than just hordes of terrorist rats), as well as the sock puppets that cropped up as choruses in a couple of the works that will be staged.
— Read more at Berkeley Daily Planet

So entertaining is the MOT production of Rossini's brilliant comedy "Cinderella" that you simply never think about the virtuosity required of every singer on that stage. It's a terrific show -- vivacious, colorful, infectiously tuneful and very funny.
The spirit of true love wedded to true goodness remains unaltered in Rossini's version of "Cinderella" -- or "La Cenerentola" in the opera's original Italian, which is sung here.
— Read more at The Detroit News

Lyric Opera of Chicago posted a surplus for its third consecutive season and for the 18th time in the last 19 campaigns.
According to preliminary results announced at its annual meeting Monday, Lyric had a surplus of $140,000 on a budget of $49.2 million last season.
The surplus was narrower than those of $330,000 and $903,000 in the prior two seasons, but as a not-for-profit, Lyric measures financial success by having revenue match or top expenses. In 2002-03, Lyric ran a $1.1 million deficit.
— Read more at Chicago Tribune

The proud Roma cigarette woman Carmen invented by the dramatist and short-story writer Prosper Mérimée was the perfect siren for the typical French bourgeois of the mid-to-late 19th century: She sang of freedom from everyday constraints and a life lived according to passion.
She's still a perfect heroine (or anti-heroine, depending on your point of view) for the frustrated cubicle farm dweller of today. Cast off your loyalty to the things that tie you to the world and be truly free, she says, and in this way she is the ideal metaphor for the life of quiet desperation.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

The resignation of Pittsburgh Opera music director John Mauceri is a serious loss for the company, breaking up the artistic leadership team that general manger Mark Weinstein installed in 1999 under the banner of a "bold new voice." Yet he also leaves the company in a far stronger position than when he arrived.
Mauceri was the point of artistic consistency at Pittsburgh Opera. Stagings were uneven, ranging from the excellent "Madame Butterfly" (2002) and "Cinderella" (2003) to the appalling "Don Giovanni" (2001) and "Julius Caesar" (2004). But the musical quality of the company's presentations were transformed by his work.
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

A little more than a month after her Metropolitan Opera debut, Erika Sunnegardh was thrust into a high-profile concert as the company rejiggered its Carnegie Hall concert schedule because of music director James Levine's season-ending shoulder surgery.
The 40-year-old soprano, virtually unknown before she replaced Karita Mattila as Leonore in Beethoven's "Fidelio," made her Carnegie main stage debut Sunday in a performance with the Met orchestra that featured tenor Ben Heppner and bass Rene Pape, two of opera biggest stars.
— Read more at mercurynews.com

The Metropolitan Opera Guild will present a one-night-only staged reading of Terrence McNally's Master Class on June 19 at the Broadhurst Theatre. A roster of actresses will share the role of opera great Maria Callas during the evening, including Kathy Bates, Edie Falco, Dixie Carter (who performed the role on Broadway), Swoosie Kurtz, Chita Rivera and Leslie Uggams.
— Read more at Broadway.com

The pairing of two short or one-act works may be a more familiar concept from the ballet season, but it can be just as powerful in the world of opera, too.
The textbook example is of course Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, which weren't written to be performed together but make a more satisfying night at the opera than performing either work alone.
Next year, the Royal Opera is creating a new double bill, consisting of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (with Bryn Terfel in the title role) and Ravel's L'heure espagnole.
— Read more at musicomh.com

Wagner called Parsifal a "stage-consecrating festival play", and most companies these days apply modern sensibilities to the complex narrative. Some adapt abstraction, others impose stylisation. Some focus on symbolism, others invoke sociological, even political commentary. There can be more here than meets the ear.
One would not have guessed that on Friday at the Metropolitan Opera, proudly regressive haven of pretty-postcard literalism. The production dates back to 1991, and it looked old- fashioned then. With quaintly innocent direction by Otto Schenk (reproduced by Zoe Pappas) and kitsch décors by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, the drama remains stubbornly though neatly decorative. Wagner?s convoluted flights of mystical mumbo-jumbo, his painful pieties and lovely longueurs are recreated on face value, for better or worse. Probably worse.
— Read more at FT.com - Martin Bernheimer

In the dark days before CD's, DVD's and bootleg boutiques, piracy of intellectual property thrived, though on a more primitive scale than today. In 1903 the Metropolitan Opera was itself a culprit in the "Case of the Pilfered 'Parsifal.' "
Wagner's soaring crypto-religious pageant, in gestation for more than 30 years and finished in 1882, was to be a kind of house opera: its performance restricted to the composer's own festival in Bayreuth, Germany; its function, a vernal reawakening in music and stage pictures, somewhere between a church service and an ancient rite of spring. Not incidentally, tourists would come to see it, bolstering the economy of Bayreuth, not to mention that of Wagner's soon-to-be-widowed wife.
— Read more at New York Times

The Elephant Man has become an iconic figure in the 25 years since the play, written by Bernard Pomerance, and the movie, directed by David Lynch. The real-life Joseph Merrick lived in late 19th-century England and suffered from a rare condition that disfigured his face and body. He eked out a living as a side-show attraction before spending his last years in a London hospital where he became something of a medical exhibit.
Frenchman Laurent Petitgirard composed his opera, "Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man," in 2002. Like the movie version of the story, the original opera production portrayed Merrick's disfigurement with a mask. But in the new staging, countertenor David Walker won't be wearing a mask or make-up. Instead he'll show Joseph Merrick's disability through limited movement. Director and choreographer Doug Varone says he wants audiences to see the true nature of the Elephant Man and not be shocked by his deformity.
— Read more at MPR

New York City Opera presented readings of 12 new or unperformed American operas at its VOX Festival at New York University on May 5 and 6.
For the first time in VOX's history, the festival included electronic music, including Anne LeBaron's Crescent City, a tale of a fictional city recovering from a Katrina-like disaster with a libretto by Philip Littell, and scenes from composer/DJ Mason Bates' first opera, California Fictions.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Conductor Daniel Barenboim will play a key role with Milan's La Scala opera house for at least the next five years in the wake of the stormy departure of Ricardo Muti.
Barenboim, 64, an Israeli of Argentinian origin, will not take Muti's title of musical director but will produce two or three operas each season, beginning with Wagner's "Tristan and Isolde" in 2007, artistic director Stephane Lissner said.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Mention the Glyndebourne festival and most people tend to think black tie, posh frocks and champagne picnics in the Sussex Downs. Last summer, however, the festival stumbled almost by accident on something much more exciting. On the opening night of David McVicar's new production of Handel's Giulio Cesare, after the original Cleopatra (Rosemary Joshua) had dropped out early in rehearsal, the role of the Egyptian queen was sung by an almost unknown soprano, Danielle de Niese.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

THE first fitting of "The First Emperor's" new clothes was outsourced from New York to China last month in an unusual workshop for the most expensive and complex opera the Metropolitan Opera has ever commissioned.
Workshops for new operas are typically held with singers around a piano, and there were sessions like that last week at the Met. But "The First Emperor" is not typical. It is a bold and risky venture that could have an impact on the problematic futures of the Met and opera in America, and even on relations between China and the United States.
— Read more at New York Times

As all Ionarts readers are not only aware but surely tired of, 2006 is a Mozart year, the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth. The celebrations were at their peak in January and February (Mozart was born on January 27), but we are still hearing a lot of Mozart. Not to be left out, Washington National Opera is currently mounting a production of Mozart's final opera, the somewhat stiff opera seria La Clemenza di Tito. The WNO production combines sets clearly based on imperial Rome, where the libretto is situated, with 18th-century costumes (see reviews at right). This 1980 film version, re-released on DVD last month by Deutsche Grammophon, may have been one of the inspirations behind Michael Hampe's staging, which makes a similar juxtaposition of time periods. It is one step stranger here, because the costumes (designed by Pet Halmen) are exaggerated examples of 18th-century Viennese dress, complete with outrageous wigs, lost in the ruins of Rome. Although the filming was done in May and June, it was mostly done at night in the outdoor ruins, and you can often see the singers' breath in the cold.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

[American composer Mikel Rouse's signature work was inspired by a novel about the murder of a Midwest family, writes Angela Bennie.]
The flamboyant writer Truman Capote seems very much alive and well these days. Having spent almost 20 long years silent in the grave, suddenly here he is again, the full force of his strange, narcissistic personality fascinating writers, artists and audiences all over again.
We have had the film Capote, with its Oscar-winning performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman as the man himself; there has been the rush into print of Summer Crossing, Capote's first, but unpublished novel. There has been also this year the publication of Deborah Davis's Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and his Black and White Ball, documenting "the most wonderful party New York had ever seen" which Capote threw in 1966 and to which everyone who was then anyone was invited - as well as 500 of his "intimates".
— Read more at smh.com.au

Take one traditional romantic comedy in a nontraditional production. Blend in a beloved opera in a Wagnerian vein. Add one psychological study based on a classic novel. For flavor, stir in a crossover hit filled with American spices.
Season it all with fine conductors and directors, young singers who look their roles as well as sound them. Place over one of the world's great orchestras.
Serve up fresh in a beautiful setting, picnics optional, and you have Opera Theatre of St. Louis' upcoming season.
— Read more at STLtoday.com

Opera returns to the Wichita River Festival after a one-year absence when Opera Kansas presents "Ring of the Fettuccines" at 8 p.m. Monday and Wednesday in Mary Jane Teall Theater.
The 55-minute comic opera introduces listeners to grand opera, telling a typically improbable tale using melodies borrowed from 17 classic operas.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

We recently received a delightful note from Patrizia Morandini announcing her Masterclass in Florence, Italy. It will be held from July 16th through July 30th. Participants include: Susanna Sgrilli, Prof. Alberto Paloscia, Prof. Daniele Agiman and Giorgio Sollazzi.
— Learn more at florenceopera.com

Antsy children froze midsquirm when singer William Whitmire opened his mouth, filling the parish hall with an echoing baritone vibrato.
Most under the age of 11, the children sat transfixed as two other Southern Methodist University singers joined Whitmire to perform - of all things - an opera.
— Read more at Chron.com

When Robert Lyall, the artistic director and conductor of the New Orleans Opera, set about programming this year's spring season two years ago, he was determined to open with Jenufa, a dark, complex work by the Czech composer Leo Janácek. Then Hurricane Katrina hit and left both the city and its opera company adrift. Jenufa features a scene of a boy drowning and Lyall recognized at once that the opera "would be singularly inappropriate" for a season opener. "It was uncomfortably close," he says.
— Read more at Chron.com

It's been a scandalously long wait, close to 20 years, but Chicago is finally going to see a fully staged live production of an opera by John Adams, one of America's leading composers who has broken important ground with operas inspired by contemporary history. At 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Chicago Opera Theater will present the local premiere of Adams' first opera, "Nixon in China," which had its world premiere at the Houston Grand Opera in 1987.
— Read more at suntimes.com

The most famous Symphony Hall event this season was nonmusical: the scary moment when Boston Symphony Orchestra music director James Levine tripped and fell to the floor, tearing his rotator cuff, after a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

The Metropolitan Opera's weekly live radio broadcasts next season will begin on December 9, 2006, with a production of Mozart's Ideomeno, and run through May 5, 2007, the company announced.
The broadcast's intermission features will be overhauled in keeping with incoming general manager Peter Gelb's focus on reaching new audiences, the Met said. The broadcasts, according to a press release, will now serve as "a virtual backstage pass to the Met," featuring live interviews with artists and production staff and taped features offering behind-the-scenes information. The long-running and much-beloved Opera Quiz will continue.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Joseph De Rocher, in his orange prison jumpsuit, has just learned the date of his execution. "My little brother's birthday," he sings, and an oboe pipes a few bars of "Happy Birthday" in the orchestra pit.
"Dead Man Walking" has been performed in nine U.S. opera houses since its 2000 premiere. Last Sunday, at Dresden's Semperoper, Nikolaus Lehnhoff staged the opera's European premiere, starring Kristine Jepson as Death Row nun Sister Helen Prejean. The response was muted.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

The new administrative director of the Berlin Philharmonic said Thursday the orchestra would play more 19th-Century German romantics after several years exploring the broad range of classical music.
Pamela Rosenberg, an American who served as general director of the San Francisco Opera before taking the Berlin job, says she's already "deep in discussions and doing some brainstorming over the future" though she won't take up the post until August.
— Read more at mercurynews.com

TRAGEDY AND comedy will share the stage this weekend as Golden Gate Opera presents two one-act productions in "Puccini Night at the Opera."
While devoted opera fans may expect a single tale to last two hours or more, directors of "Suor Angelica" and "Gianni Schicchi" promise that the double bill won't add up to opera lite.
"This is the full opera experience - the joy, the sadness, the set-up, the fall - in a double serving," says Roberta Wain-Becker, general manager of Golden Gate Opera.
— Read more at Marin Independent Journal

The Atlanta Opera will leave the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center for the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center, a new complex under construction northwest of the city center.
The company announced yesterday that it would move to the John A. Williams Theatre, a 2,750-seat hall at the center, starting with the 2007-08 season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky has dropped out the Los Angeles Opera production of La traviata, which opens the 2006-07 season on September 9, due to "scheduling conflicts," the company announced.
Hvorostovsky will be replaced by Renato Bruson as Germont in Verdi's opera. The appearance will mark Brunson's company debut.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Jerry Hadley, a tenor who has performed in the world's leading opera houses, has been arrested for being intoxicated while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car, the district attorney's office said Thursday.
Hadley, 54, was arraigned Wednesday night in Manhattan Criminal Court on charges of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and impaired, said Barbara Thompson, a spokeswoman for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
— Read more at Chron.com

Daniel Barenboim will take on a prominent role at Teatro Alla Scala opera house in Milan, a Scala spokesman said yesterday, and will partly fill the vacuum created by Riccardo Muti's stormy departure a year ago.
Mr. Barenboim, who is the general music director of Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin and winds up his music directorship at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June, will have a "continuous and important commitment" to La Scala, a spokesman, Carlo Maria Cella, said in a telephone interview from Milan.
— Read more at New York Times

The 2006-07 Metropolitan Opera Radio Broadcasts, which will mark their 76th season of transmission on December 9, 2006 with a performance of Mozart's Idomeneo over the Toll Brothers-Metropolitan Opera International Radio Network, will be supplemented by new intermission features designed to "give listeners a virtual backstage pass to the Met," the company announced today.
The broadcasts, currently the longest-running classical music series in American broadcast history, will now feature several supplements to its on-air intermissions, including live interviews with singers, designers and directors; pre-produced features with behind-the-scenes stories and additional context for the operas being broadcast; and the cherished Opera Quiz. The move to enhance the company's broadcast intermission features is just the latest effort by the Met's incoming general manager Peter Gelb, who has made revitalizing the company and bringing opera to new audiences the cornerstones of his latent tenure.
— Read more at Opera News

The dustbins of the world's lyric stages are stuffed with operatic turkeys. In most cases, that's the best place for them. In recent times, you just have to think of Nicholas Maw's terrible "Sophie's Choice" at the Royal Opera or Poul Ruders's clunky "The Handmaid's Tale" at English National Opera.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Tan Dun's Tea: A Mirror of Soul will get its American premiere during Santa Fe Opera's 2007 season, which will mark the company's fiftieth anniversary. The lineup also includes new productions of Puccini's La bohème, Rameau's Platée, and Strauss's Daphne, general director Richard Gaddes announced.
The season opens on June 29 with La bohème, followed by a revival of Mozart's Così fan tutte on June 30. Puccini's opera will be conducted by Corrado Rovaris and staged by Paul Curran. Kevin Knight makes his company debut as set and costume designer; Nicole Cabell makes her company debut as Musetta.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Anywhere you go in Europe, you will see a pride in national artists. Some years ago, over ten days in Prague and Brno, I saw nine of the 16 operas by Bohuslav Martinu and three by Dvorak. Strauss and Pfitzner are fixtures in Berlin and Vienna. In Paris, Gerard Mortier has made a priority of restoring French masterpieces to the Opera, starting with Charpentier's Louise and Halevy's La Juive. All fit and proper and just as one would expect from public-funded institutions charged with curating the lyric corner of the national genius.
— Read more at scena.org

Excepting the holiday concert of soprano Renée Fleming in December, eons seemed to have passed since a singer of Frederica von Stade's stature had given a recital in Houston.
Like most American cities, Houston has let the genre disappear. Timidity of sponsors, disinterest and unfamiliarity among a mass of listeners, attention spans sapped by multitasking ? all have contributed to diminish the appeal of an occasion where communication between artist and listener is intimate, one-on-one and totally concentrated.
— Read more at Chron.com

Like novelists or, for that matter, music critics, some composers first work out the overall draft of a composition and gradually refine it, edit it and fill in the details. Others begin with the first phrase and get it right before adding the next, and so on.
From the fascinating final group of Schubert selections that the tenor Ian Bostridge and the pianist Leif Ove Andsnes performed in their rewarding recital on Saturday night at Zankel Hall, it would appear that Schubert often worked the phrase-by-phrase way. For someone who died at 31, struggling continually, Schubert left behind a stunningly large catalog of completed works. He also began dozens of pieces that he never finished.
— Read more at New York Times

The sun eventually smiles, and the mustachioed bad guy gets his comeuppance in "Brundibar," the opera for children that opened last night at the New Victory Theater. But the story behind this little musical charmer does not include many happy endings.
Just before its premiere in 1942 at the Jewish boys' orphanage in Prague, its composer, Hans Krasa, was arrested and sent to Theresienstadt, or Terezin, the concentration camp disguised as a "model ghetto" that was essentially a hub for transports to the Nazi death camps. Rudolph Freudenfeld, the conductor of the premiere performances, took the score with him when he and the boys from the orphanage were also sent to Theresienstadt.
— Read more at New York Times

The Santa Fe Opera unveiled its 2007 season Monday and got down to the business of creating a whirlwind of activity for 2006, to celebrate its 50th year. General Director William Gaddes said sales are soaring for this summer with 75 percent of the available tickets sold.
— Read more at lamonitor.com

Gianna Rolandi has been named director of the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, the Lyric Opera of Chicago's training program for young singers, the company announced.
Rolandi succeeds Richard Pearlman, who died April 8.
The Opera Center's director of vocal studies since May 2002, Rolandi worked closely with Pearlman, and has served as acting director since his death.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

An opera set in a baked bean factory has won a prestigious Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) Music Award.
Judges praised Alban Berg's Wozzeck, performed by the Welsh National Opera, for "musical and dramatic excellence".
The awards were held at London's Dorchester Hotel to honour achievement in the field of live classical music.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Rival groups of protesters blocked both sides of a city centre street as the controversial musical Jerry Springer The Opera opened in Norwich last night.
Loosely formed into two factions, the Christian element claiming the production was blasphemous clapped and sang, while pro-freedom of speech demonstrators responded with chants and waved placards.
— Read more at edp24.co.uk

Starting this fall, student orchestras and choruses will be able to pay for the chance to rehearse with the music staff of the New York City Opera, the company announced.
With Pro Musica Tours, an "arts education tourism" firm, NYCO will offer sessions focusing on La bohème, Hansel and Gretel, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, The Pirates of Penzance, and La traviata. The packages include musical parts, transportation and accommodation, a tour of the Juilliard School, a day of rehearsals with City Opera staff, and seats for NYCO's own performance of the opera.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Metropolitan Opera is a company that, for better or worse, wants a tree to resemble a tree. A swan is certainly supposed to look like a swan. Robert Wilson offered a notable exception to the rule, however, with his abstraction of Lohengrin, last seen in 1998. Essentially it is a lovely light-show with music.
The current revival, witnessed on Saturday, seems a bit less strict than the original. Just a bit. The stage remains bare, apart from two quasi-chairs and geometric slabs that occasionally descend from the flies. Wilson, who doesn't worry about story-telling, reduces his players to zombies, robots and singing statues. Fingers crucially splayed, they strike awkward poses, even on the infrequent occasions when they move. Forbidden to gaze at each other, much less touch, they contradict emotional urgency. Unaccustomed to such modernism, the audience reads the translations dutifully, listens earnestly, waits patiently, claps.
— Read more at Martin Bernheimer - FT.com

On Thursday, June 1st, 2006, beginning at 4:30pm, NYU's Center for Ancient Studies will host a conference entitled Enacting Medea: Theatre, Opera and Film. This special, one-evening event will be held at Hemmerdinger Hall, 100 Washington Square East, New York University.
The conference will bring noted panelists together to discuss interpretations of Medea across the spectrum of performing art forms.
Peter Meineck, Artistic Director of the Aquila Theatre Company, and clinical assistant professor of Classics at NYU, will be the moderator.
— Learn more at aquilatheatre.com

The San Diego Opera's upcoming season will include a new production of Berg's Wozzeck, directed by La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, the company announced. The season also features Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Saint-Saëns' Samson and Delilah, Verdi's Il trovatore, and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Poland will stage the world premiere performance of an opera by Pink Floyd's Roger Waters as part of commemorations in July of a brutal communist-era crackdown.
"Ca Ira," an operatic history of the French Revolution, took the Pink Floyd singer, bass player and songwriter 16 years to write. The music from the opera was played publicly for the first time at a concert in Rome last year.
— Read more at Reuters.com

With a new production about Libya's colourful leader Muammar Gaddafi, the English National Opera boldly goes where no opera house has gone before.
Gaddafi, which opens in September, will feature Asian beats and rap in place of arias and romance, and the title role will be performed by a 39-year-old Irish-Indian nightclub MC called JC-100.
— Read more at ninemsn.com.au

Saturday night's "Cosi fan tutte" at the Benedum Center was the most successful presentation of a masterpiece by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that the current regime at Pittsburgh Opera has offered. Music director John Mauceri led the uncommonly stylish and dramatically insightful performance, while the staging by Ron Daniels was the point of superiority over recent productions of Mozart.
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

In the fall of 1791, three months before he was buried in an unmarked grave, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart debuted "The Magic Flute" in an unfashionable little theater in suburban Vienna.
Commissioned by the impresario Emmanuel Schikaneder, it was a quirky mix of high opera, low comedy and heavy-handed symbolism, much of it centered on the threatened craft of Freemasonry, to which both Mozart and Schikaneder subscribed. Basically, it was a vanity project, not for Mozart ? who was sick, short of cash and working for hire ? but for Schikaneder, who wrote, produced and directed the production, and cast himself in the juicy, crowd-pleasing role of the bird catcher Papageno.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

It is impossible to avoid Placido Domingo at present, with his lap of honour at the Brits underscored by his Wagner and Italian-ballad CDs, plus soft-focus interviews on the box. But the little-known opera in which Domingo has chosen to star at Covent Garden showcases him in cruelly sharp focus: not only is his voice exposed, but also the state of his physique.
Fencing at full tilt while simultaneously singing your heart out is not the kindest way to treat yourself at the ripe old age of 65.
— Read more at Independent Online

As the musical season creeps to a close here in New York, I've been thinking back over what most impressed me. Rossini and Mussorgsky sung by Ewa Podle? were, without question, the year's high point for me: music-making of such spiritual intensity, visceral force, and utter mastery that everything else seemed trivial by comparison.
[interview with Giuseppe Filianoti]
— Read more at vilaine fille

FOR Scotland's brow-beaten giant of high art, deciding what production to put on after a year 'in the dark' was never going to be an easy task. After all, with so much at stake - an artistic reputation, an unstable funding structure and a fickle public - the wrong choice could be cataclysmic. But Scottish Opera has made its bed, and the choice, Don Giovanni, which opened on Thursday, would seem ideal.
— Read more at scotsman.com

More than six months after the restored North Park Theatre reopened amid hoopla and optimism, the venue's resident managing tenant - Lyric Opera San Diego - has not made a significant dent in roughly $1 million that remains to be raised toward the theater's $8 million renovation.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

When we meet Figaro in Utah Opera's newest production, "The Barber of Seville," he is preparing to have his morning cup of espresso. But Figaro, being a "man about town," needs more than a French press and some good beans. He needs women.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

HANDEL'S wonderful operatic hymn to marital love and fidelity, "Rodelinda," returned to the Metropolitan Opera Tuesday night with Renée Fleming in lustrous voice.
She was partnered by the German counter-tenor Andreas Scholl, making a remarkable Met debut as her husband, Bertarido, the rightful King of Lombardy.
The formal opera seria story of an ornate court with betrayals, high treason and redemption is illumined with Handel's unusual psychological insight, which gives all that gorgeous musical ornamentation of trills and thrills its own compelling sense of drama.
— Read more at New York Post

When Robert Lyall, the artistic director and conductor of the New Orleans Opera, set about programming this year's spring season two years ago, he was determined to open with "Jenùfa," a dark, complex work by the Czech composer Leo Janácek. Then Katrina hit New Orleans and left both the city and its opera company adrift. "Jenùfa" features a scene of a boy drowning, and Lyall recognized at once that the opera "would be singularly inappropriate" for a season opener. "It was uncomfortably close," he says.
So on March 23 when, after much intrigue, the handsome Count Almaviva was finally united with his beloved Rosina in the company's opening night production of "The Barber of Seville" at Tulane University's McAlister Auditorium, the audience cheered wildly, as much for the performances as for the welcome happy ending and the return of opera to a New Orleans stage seven months after Katrina canceled the fall season.
— Read more at MySA.com: Travel & City Guide

It's hard to imagine tall, shapely Kirstin Chavez, with her long curly hair, transforming into the role of Cherubino, an adolescent boy, for theOpera Company of Philadelphia production of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro."
In fact, she has performed a few other "trouser" roles, like Octavian in "Der Rosenkavalier" and the composer in "Ariadne auf Naxos." But at the other extreme of her repertoire is a sizzling "Carmen" (sung with the New York City Opera) and a saucy Rosina in "The Barber of Seville."
— Read more at Philadelphia Daily News

"Rodelinda" was the spearhead of the Handel revival, and that point is as sharp as ever. Remembered for 200 years (if remembered at all) as series of arias beautiful in themselves but dramatically inert, this piece and Handel operas in general awoke in the early 1920's, thrived in German opera houses and have since spread to the kind of luxurious production the Metropolitan Opera gave it last season and revived on Tuesday night.
— Read more at New York Times

When Tufts music student Abigail Al-Doory sought inspiration for her opera, she looked not to Wagner's "Ring" cycle but to the Olympic rings, where themes like power, envy and greed are plentiful.
In "Tonya and Nancy: The Opera," Al-Doory provides 18 movements on the scandal that turned the once-dainty sport of figure skating into a soap opera of whacking, wailing and time spent in jail.
— Read more at 6abc.com

We all hear voices, surely in reality and possibly in our minds. The title (and only) character in "The Tyrant," a new opera by Paul Dresher and Jim Lewis, is haunted by sounds vocal and otherwise, a phenomenon that prompts him to question every aspect of his pathetic existence.
Spending an hour with this complicated fellow turns out not to be a depressing experience. As portrayed by composer Dresher and librettist Lewis and sung with stellar urgency by tenor John Duykers, "The Tyrant" is a compelling study in paranoia, pettiness and pretension, just a few of the qualities that inhabit those for whom power is paramount.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Verdi was a fervent admirer of Shakespeare and was determined his "Macbeth" would have sufficient merit to justify his borrowing of the famous play for his opera.
However, Bernard Uzan, stage director for Seattle Opera's new production of Verdi's efforts, to be premiered Saturday night at McCaw Hall, notes, "I am doing Verdi not Shakespeare. This is a lesson I learned from (tenor) Alfredo Kraus when I was doing (Massenet's) 'Werther,' based on Goethe: 'We are doing the opera not the novel,' he told me. And he was right.
— Read more at nwsource.com

It was a performance that was fantastic -- Riverside Little Opera's presentation of "Die Fledermaus."
It was a top quality performance. More an operetta than an opera, it requires singers who can act. This it had and what is amazing is that most of them are local. For three hours or so the Life Arts Center in Riverside was in three quarter time.
— Read more at DailyBulletin.com

The English National Opera's upcoming production of Gaddafi, the company's musical theater work commissioned from members of the Asian Dub Foundation about the contentious leader of Libya, will not feature arias, but electronica, techno beats and rap, with the title character being portrayed by an Irish-Indian nightclub MC called JC-100, Reuters has reported.
The production, which opens in September at the London Coliseum, will reportedly adapt for the stage several of the most controversial moments of the Libyan leader's three-decade reign, including the Lockerbie disaster of 1988, the 1986 U.S. attacks on Libya and the shooting death of British policewoman Yvonne Fletcher at an anti-Gaddafi rally outside London's Libyan embassy in 1984. The work will reportedly utilize both the ENO Orchestra as well as live North African musicians.
— Read more at Opera News

Many opera lovers - sometimes even this one - pine for the golden past when singers could really soar in the romantic arches of Verdi. Of course, hardly anyone in those not-so-distant days could manage Handel. Now the woods are full of florid-flight specialists, and even countertenors come a dollar a dozen. The only authentic element missing, thank goodness, is the castrato.
— Read more at FT.com - Martin Bernheimer

The New York City Opera said it won't proceed with a plan to build a costly opera house west of its current home at Lincoln Center.
The 63-year-old opera company said in a joint statement with developer A&R Kalimian Realty: "Despite the best efforts of all parties, an agreement could not be reached on a number of legal, financial and design issues."
— Read more at Bloomberg.com See also: playbillarts.com

It's not often that concertgoers in New York can hear a singer of the renown of the baritone Thomas Hampson in a recital hall that seats only 280. But the Morgan Library and Museum, which this weekend opened the doors to a splendid new pavilion that unites its existing and expanded building, wanted to call attention to a special component of its new campus: Gilder Lehrman Hall, a new space for chamber music, recitals, lectures and readings. So the Morgan secured the services of Mr. Hampson, along with the pianist Craig Rutenberg, a noted accompanist and opera coach, and the Vermeer String Quartet, to inaugurate the hall with an engaging program on Tuesday night.
— Read more at New York Times

Peter Eötvös's Angels in America, an opera based on Tony Kushner's landmark play, will be seen in North America for the first time next month. The staging, which runs June 16-25 at the Boston Center for the Arts, is a production of Opera Unlimited, a collaboration between Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Opera Boston.
— Read more at PlaybillArts