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

[Lincoln Center Festival presents the New York premiere of Grendel, a new opera from composer Elliot Goldenthal and director Julie Taymor, starting July 11.]
By retelling the epic of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster Grendel, John Gardner created an extraordinarily powerful and strangely modern parable in his 1971 novel. Among its early readers were life partners and frequent artistic collaborators Elliot Goldenthal and Julie Taymor. But when the book first came out, the composer and the director-designer, both multiple award winners, were still students and had not yet met each other. Both, however, remained obsessed with it. And this summer at Lincoln Center Festival, Goldenthal and Taymor will bring their opera Grendel to the stage for four performances, July 11-16. Aside from being a lavish spectacle--the most elaborate event ever to be staged by the Festival--the opera's creators hope that it will open up people's minds to the possibility of multiple perspectives amidst our ongoing war on terrorism.
— Read more at Frank J. Oteri - PlaybillArts [Related news items]

Here at Ionarts, we love Mariss Jansons in recordings, and we love Mariss Jansons live. How great would it be to hear him conduct Dmitri Shostakovich's memorable opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at De Nederlandse Opera, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam? Well, readers, you have until July 2 to find out yourself, or you can read some reviews. The earliest review I saw was by Sébastien Foucart (Orgasmes et meurtres, June 4) for ConcertoNet.com (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

[Years in the making, 'Our Town' makes East Coast debut at SPAC]
When most people think of opera, the images they conjure up are set at the extremes of emotion, enacted by characters who might be vengeful clowns, or young bohemians facing death amid poverty, or gods and warriors battling for a magic ring.
— Read more at TimesUnion.com [Related news items]

Booed off the karaoke stage? Make the leap to opera.
The Canadian Opera Company needs extras for its upcoming production of Richard Wagner's complete Ring Cycle in September. But no singing, please. The company is looking for 55 men and women, aged 18 to 50, to participate in non-singing roles as supernumeraries.
— Read more at canada.com

Give Mark Morris an extended 17th or 18th century score and watch him make magic.
The choreographer's characteristic touch is there, and then some, in his latest full-length project, the intoxicating production of Henry Purcell's "dramatick opera," "King Arthur," which premiered at the London Coliseum on Monday evening. A collaboration between English National Opera and the Mark Morris Dance Group, this delectable hybrid features the entire company and, in multiple assignments, a septet of talented young British singers, under the crisp musical direction of Jane Glover. Staged and choreographed by Morris, "King Arthur" plays in repertory until July 8 and then travels across the Atlantic for its American bow Sept. 30 at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall, with Cal Performances as co-producer. The package also will be presented at a later date at New York City Opera.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Christian protesters were set to protest at Fairfield Halls last Night (Tuesday) before the Croydon premiere of the controversial stage production of Jerry Springer The Opera.
Representatives from religious group Christian Voice said they would descend on the theatre last night to protest against the play.
— Read more at Croydon Guardian

Earlier this month, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa (b. 1970) directed the premiere of his new opera, After Life, on a libretto adapted from the film of Hirokazu Kore-Eda, at De Nederlandse Opera in Amsterdam. Van der Aa also wrote and directed the video and sound pieces that are integrated into the live performance. Here is a brief summary of the plot from the DNO Web site:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

[After technical woes - and head trauma - Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal finally get a Vietnam allegory onstage. Just in time for Iraq.]
It was decades in the making, and had a shaky opening in early June in Los Angeles, but composer Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel, directed by his longtime partner, Julie Taymor (best known for Broadway's The Lion King), is finally onstage. It's the first opera by the Grammy-, Tony-, Emmy-, and Oscar-nominated Brooklyn native. Based on John Gardner's 1971 novella and on Beowulf, the opera is told from the monster's perspective (Eric Owens, pictured, sings the role), and it arrives at the Lincoln Center Festival on July 11. The couple spoke with Alicia Zuckerman.
— Read more at New York Magazine

Central City Opera leaders certainly knew what they were doing when they savvily hired composer Douglas Moore to compose an opera based on the legendary love story of mining tycoon Horace Tabor and Elizabeth "Baby" Doe.
"The Ballad of Baby Doe" gained immediate attention with its 1956 premiere and a recording three years later featuring soprano Beverly Sills. It has gone on to become a staple of the American operatic repertory, with 18 professional productions by Opera America companies since 1991.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

Composer David Carlson wrote to me over the weekend in response to my May 19 blog entry about his new opera, Anna Karenina, which will have its world premiere at the new Miami Performing Arts Center on April 28 of next year.
I'm going to quote a big chunk of Mr. Carlson's e-mail (with his consent) because it sheds some interesting light on the progress of this opera, how it's been structured, and the overall focus of the piece. I don't know how many other opera world premieres we've had recently here in South Florida, and that makes what Carlson has to say important.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

Opera fans will flock to southern France from Sunday for the international lyric arts festival which this year pays homage to both Mozart and Cezanne as well performing Wagner for the first time.
The prestigious Aix-en-Provence festival, now in its 58th year, is taking place as the southern French town marks the 100th centenary of the death of its most famous son, the painter Paul Cezanne.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Join the Kingwood College Music Department as they celebrate more than a decade of opera in Kingwood when the 2006 Summer Opera Workshop culminates with two public performances, Saturday, July 8, at 8 p.m. and Sunday, July 9, at 2 p.m. in the SFA Performing Arts Theater.
— Read more at Kingwood News

When I tried to convince a friend of mine to go see Madame Butterfly last year at the Central City Opera in Colorado she remarked, "What for? If it's like all opera there is a lot of dramatic singing, unrequited love and then a tragic death in the end." I was forced to admit that she had a point, having been a soggy eyed observer of many an opera death myself. However, I remained steadfast in my support of the art form and have related the main points of my argument here below. Employ them freely in your own endeavors to convert the opera pagan.
— Read more at newwest.net

["Deadly She-Wolf Assassin" dips into kung fu and comics. Still rough, it shows the composer's talent.]
"So what are you up to this afternoon?" came the idle inquiry.
"I'm seeing Deadly She-Wolf Assassin at Armageddon. It's a kung-fu comic-book opera."
There's no better conversation stopper, so beyond comprehension is this fusion of unlikely genres. Yet even in a bare-bones world-premiere production by Peregrine Arts on Sunday at Drexel University's Mandell Theater, the vision behind the piece couldn't have been clearer. Conceived, cowritten and composed by Fred Ho, himself a walking fusion of progressive jazz and cutting-edge classical, Deadly She-Wolf was a paragon of shrewd decisions about what this particular theatrical animal would and wouldn't do.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Composer Ned Rorem still has a letter written to him from Thornton Wilder, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play on which Rorem's new opera, 'Our Town,' is based.
Rorem remembers meeting the playwright and novelist around 1961 in Paris, and may have subsequently written to Wilder about the possibility of writing an opera from the play. (Rorem at the time did not keep copies of his personal correspondence.)
'He wrote to me and indicated in a friendly way that I should do another of his works,' Rorem said.
— Read more at The Saratogian [Related news items]

A spokesman for the Los Angeles Opera confirmed that the company is in discussions to revive Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel during the 2007-08 season, as it was a financial success.
The production finished its Los Angeles run on June 17 and will open at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City on July 11.
— Read more at PlaybillArts [Related news items]

[The story of Jerry Springer the Opera reveals a cowardly shift that lets religious intimidation triumph]
Jerry Springer the Opera reaches the end of its noisy tour next week with a grand finale at the Brighton Dome. It will have made a hefty loss for its producers, who toured it despite knowing that trouble would dog it and that it would lose money. But they were determined not to let the evangelicals win.
This will be the last chance to see it, as its co-author Stewart Lee says glumly that he doubts it will ever be performed again. It shows how insidiously the tentacles of religious zeal invade every sphere of national life, despite the very small number of religious practitioners in this most secular of nations.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

In this landscape of oil derricks and Rangerettes - a renowned drill team dressed in smiles and miniskirts - a tiny radio station sends out a lifeline to classical music lovers in East Texas.
It is KTPB, the station of Kilgore College, which educates the children of oil hands and other blue-collar workers. Now the college has decided it can no longer afford to support the station and has announced its sale. The new owner? A Christian-music broadcasting company from California, which will pay the college $2.46 million over 10 years.
— Read more at New York Times

Vancouver Island Opera's upcoming presentation of The Barber of Seville will be performed in its original Italian, thanks to the insistence of the cast.
VIO director Tatyana Vasilieva says the singers urged her to change the planned English rendition, as it not only brings an air of tradition to the performance, but one of authenticity as well. Non-speakers of Italian need not worry, she adds, as they will have translation on the big screen at Knox United Church and excerpts in the program.
— Read more at pqbnews.com

Last month, the Théâtre du Châtelet presented a new opera that it commissioned from Patrick Burgan (b. 1960), on the story of Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie. It was one of the final actions of the theater's departing director, Jean-Pierre Brossmann. I read a review by Marie-Aude Roux ("Peter Pan" se déploie au Théâtre Zingaro, May 27) for Le Monde (my translation and links added): ...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Editor's Note: In the years between college and his conducting debut, Will Crutchfield took a detour into the newspaper world, writing for The New York Times from 1984 to 1989. In that capacity he interviewed dozens of musicians, and when The Journal News invited him to return to his journalistic past with an article on his work as director of opera at the Caramoor International Music Festival, he decided to wear both his hats and "interview" himself.
— Read more at thejournalnews.com

When the Royal Opera House staged Henry Purcell's 17th-century opera "King Arthur" in 1995, it was four hours long and there was much snoring. Tonight, a new production opens at London's English National Opera. It's two hours long including the intermission, and it's unlikely there'll be any snoring with Mark Morris directing.
The 49-year-old U.S. choreographer-director is known for his amusing productions which move you when you least expect it. He's camp, sharp as a knife and voluble.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[An opera pregnant with the future]
In opera, childbirth happens off-stage while the audience pace nervously with their cigars. Jenufa's love-child goes from cytoblast to new-born between Acts I and II of Janacek's opera, while Cio-Cio San's Sorrow is conceived, born and achieves toddlerhood in one 20-minute interval. Only lately has this fundamental experience found its way to centre-stage: first in the ecstatic agonies of John Adams's dramatic oratorio El Nino, then in Sally Beamish's gothick opera, Monster, and now, courtesy of Tête à Tête, composer David Bruce, and playwright Anna Reynolds, in Push!
— Read more at Independent Online Edition

The Living Opera lives up to its name.
With little funding but lots of love, the young company brings opera to life.
Its second season opened Thursday with Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro.
Based at the Eisemann Center for the Performing Arts, the company performs in the 350-seat Countrywide Theater instead of the larger Hill Performance Hall, which engulfed them last year.
— Read more at dallasnews.com

The nearly sold-out audience at the Barre Opera House Saturday evening couldn't have been more thrilled.
The tumultuous show-stopping applause that followed the overture was indicative of the enthusiasm that was to continue throughout the evening, perhaps the first time ever that the hall has ever had fully produced professional opera with orchestra, Supertitles and everything. The event was the Mad River Valley's Green Mountain Cultural Center inaugural production of its Green Mountain Opera Festival, "The Barber of Seville," one of the most popular comic operas of all time.
— Read more at timesargus.com

Mozart's whimsical "The Magic Flute" is one of the most popular operas ever written.
Since its first performance in Vienna in the fall of 1791 a few months before Mozart's death at the age of 36, it has been produced again and again by opera companies around the world to such an extent that it has never left the opera stage.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

Two new Deutsche Grammophon releases by legendary conductors made their debuts on the Billboard classical chart this past week. Pierre Boulez's recording of Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony (No. 2) with the Vienna Philharmonic arrived at no. 10, while Claudio Abbado and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra saw their version of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, starring Christoph Strehl, Dorothea Röschmann, Erika Miklósa, René Pape and Hanno Müller-Brachmann, landed at no. 17.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

There are two ways to view the career of Joseph Volpe, the pugnacious Brooklyn-born general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, who joined the company in 1963 as an apprentice carpenter and climbed his way to the top job, one of the most prestigious posts in the international world of the performing arts.
From one perspective, it's almost shocking that a young man who had barely finished high school, shunned college in order to open his own service station and was indifferent to opera wound up with a position once held by Sir Rudolf Bing, the Austrian-born son of a steel magnate, an erudite impresario who had run opera festivals in Glyndebourne and Edinburgh before being recruited by the Met.
— Read more at New York Times

[It's the biggest job in opera: New York's Metropolitan has a new boss [Peter Gelb] - and he is promising to shake up a cautious institution with big names and a fresh creative outlook. Rupert Christiansen meets him]
The position of general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera is probably the biggest job in the business. It carries responsibility for an annual budget of more than £120 million and 220 performances, for which the audience tops three quarters of a million - figures double those of the Royal Opera.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

This silly, ingenious operetta was one of Jacques Offenbach's first big successes (Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, 1858), which did not prevent the composer, ever a man of the theater, from significantly revising the work (Théâtre de la Gaîté, 1874) later in life. This DVD is a re-release of a film, made for television in the 1990s, of a production of the operetta at the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels. The Brussels production used an adaptation of the 1874 version of the work. In writing the clever libretto (that electronic version, probably scanned, is deplorably full of errors), Hector Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy were conscious that the Orpheus story is the cornerstone of opera history, and Offenbach makes several references to Gluck's famous setting, Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), especially Orfeo's aria Che farò senza Euridice?.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

[Opera lovers needn't head to Europe this summer. In U.S. venues from Seattle to New York, great performances abound.]
When opera lovers dream of summer festivals, their minds turn naturally to Old World spots like Verona, Salzburg, Bayreuth, Glyndebourne or St. Petersburg. Yet summer opera abounds in the New World as well. No matter which of America's top tourist spots you visit, high-quality opera is probably nearby. In Cooperstown, New York, opera lovers at Glimmerglass mingle with baseball fans at the Hall of Fame. Purple-streaked Southwestern sunsets serve as the backdrop for the Santa Fe Opera's covered outdoor theater. In Colorado, the Central City Opera performs in the restored opera house of an abandoned mining town. At the Wolf Trap Opera's outdoor venue, just outside the nation's capital in Washington, D.C., patrons bring picnics. Dozens of other cities, from St. Louis to San Francisco, offer similar fare.
— Read more at MSNBC.com

COMPOSER Elliot Goldenthal's troubled "Grendel," which closed its Los Angeles Opera run June 17, wound up such a financial hit that the company may bring it back at the start of the 2007-08 season, according to artistic director Edgar Baitzel.
— Read more at calendarlive.com [Related news items]

There probably isn't much point in arguing whether Peter Eotvos's "Angels in America" is really an opera or not. Defining genres is not a useful way to approach art because the function of important artists is to redefine genres, breaking down barriers.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

It's doubtful that many in the Cincinnati Opera audience of 2,240 Thursday night had ever heard of "L'Etoile" (The Star), an obscure little gem of an operetta by Frenchman Emmanuel Chabrier. But by evening's end, the fantastical farce impressed not only with its tuneful score - but also as one of the most imaginatively staged shows ever to grace Music Hall.
Chabrier is most remembered for his musical postcard, "España," and another rarely mounted operetta, "The King in Spite of Himself" (Le Roi malgré lui). His "L'Etoile" of 1877 is bursting with tongue-in-cheek wit, and anticipates the 20th-century Paris of Cocteau and Satie. Like fizz in champagne, it has periodically come and disappeared again.
— Read more at The Enquirer

Conductor Grant Gershon, who will preside over the work's [The Grapes of Wrath] premiere next season, led the Utah Symphony, Utah Opera Chorus and 16 soloists in excerpts from the opera's first act. Composer Gordon and librettist Korie helped set the scene for the eight ensemble and chorus numbers with their succinct narration. Based on Friday's performance, Korie and Gordon are well on their way to bringing Steinbeck's masterpiece to compelling operatic life. The opening chorus, "The Last Time There Was Rain," painted an evocative picture of the Dust Bowl, when "the dust was thick as stew" and where "when dawn would break, there would be no day, just a dull red glow behind the gray."
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

If computers can be used to create an entire virtual metropolis of sleaze in Sin City, then surely they can help transport a slice of stately Salzburg to the dusty fringes of Toronto.
With that in mind, filmmaker Kevin Sullivan figured if you can't take your feature film production of The Magic Flute to Austria, then bring Austria to the production. Mozart -- if not Mohammed -- would be proud.
Shooting wrapped earlier this month on Sullivan's interpretation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's beloved fairy-tale opera, shot largely against CGI-friendly green screen backdrops at Sullivan Entertainment's Scarborough production facility. It's slated for a theatrical release this November.
— Read more at jam.canoe.ca

I am way behind in my press roundup work for Opera in the Summer 2006. Now that there are fewer concerts to review, there should be time to catch up, although more recordings keep coming across my desk and I am truly engrossed in my reading of Don Quixote and listening to the Jordi Savall recording. The biggest operatic buzz of the summer was probably for the world premiere of Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel, which was supposed to take place on May 27, in a production directed by Julie Taymor at Los Angeles Opera. As we learned from many newspaper reports, the date of the premiere had to be moved back.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

The Mozart 250th anniversary is being celebrated with the usual chorus of whingeing. No, the doomsters declare, there is nothing more to be learnt from his music, or gained from performing the same old masterpieces in the same old way.
Sooner or later a performance had to come along to prove them wrong and here it is. This first revival of the Royal Opera's new production of Le nozze di Figaro has no spectacular ingredient and does nothing outrageously different from usual, but it feels as fresh as the day the opera was born.
— Read more at FT.com

The newly-formed company Opera Cleveland has announced its 2007 inaugural season - which features Salome, La traviata, A Little Night Music, The Turn of the Screw and Tosca.
The spring-to-fall season opens on April 20 with Salome, with soprano Lise Lindstrom in the title role, baritone Stephen Powell as John the Baptist and Paul Nadler conducting.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Michael Hunt, an opera and theater director who is currently the chief of Ireland's Theatre Royal Waterford as well as artistic and general director of Co-Opera - Ireland's national touring company - has been named as the new chief executive of Wexford Festival Opera. Hunt's appointment effectively fills the role left vacant by the death of Wexford's executive director Jerome Hynes, who collapsed on September 18, 2005, two months before the start of the 2005 festival season.
Hunt, who produced the first series of "Operatic Scenes" for the festival in 1982, has directed a production of Traviata for Opera Ireland in addition to his directing duties for Co-Opera. He has directed more than fifty opera productions for national and international venues and companies, including Portland Opera, English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Opera North; the Las Palmas Festival, Spain's Bibao Opera Festival, the Harrogate and Cheltenham Festivals, London's Queens Theatre, London and Royal Albert Hall, London.
— Read more at Opera News

English National Opera named Vernon Ellis as chairman to succeed Martin Smith, who quit in December after protests over his hands-on management style.
Ellis, 58, is international chairman -- a part-time role -- of Accenture Ltd., the world's second-largest consultant. In the 1990s, he managed Accenture's operations in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and India, an ENO statement said. A member of ENO's board since 2001, Ellis is also a trustee of the Royal College of Music, the statement added.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Terrence McNally's 1995 play "Master Class," set during the interim in opera singer Maria Callas' life when she gave 12 master classes at the Juilliard School in 1971, gives a pretty good idea how a master class works.
An opera student enters with a prepared piece and goes to work on it.
Then the acting-vocal coach goes to work on the student.
It's less graphic than what happens in a medical amphitheater, but it can nonetheless be an emotionally messy experience for the student.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

"Audiences now don't really know who the composer is," John Musto said. "The composer is somebody who stands up in the audience for a bow at the end of a piece and gets pointed at. Or the person who gives you a preconcert lecture. And I've done that, and it's fine. But to have a composer as a musician onstage, saying, 'I made this piece, and this is how it goes,' and interact with an audience onstage ? that's what I wanted to do."
Mr. Musto, 52, is being presented as exactly this kind of performing composer at this year's Caramoor festival, in Katonah, N.Y., where he is composer in residence for the 2005-6 season. The festival opens tomorrow with a concert that includes a piece by Mr. Musto: the overture to "Pope Joan" (1998), an unfinished project he calls "the opera that never was." But the main event arrives on July 15: the world premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1, with Mr. Musto himself as soloist.
— Read more at New York Times

In a move that might have excited Bertolt Brecht, the Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera performed the June 20 evening show without the help of microphones or an orchestra.
Broadway audiences are now accustomed to being able to hear the subtlest sotto voce thanks to modern technology; the days of marquee names needing to belt out to the balconies have long since passed. But on June 20 that changed at the historic Studio 54 - where the Brecht and Kurt Weill work plays when a computerized soundboard would not "take commands" according to a show spokesperson.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

IMG Artists, a major classical music management company, is in talks with the talent agency giant International Creative Management to acquire its classical music division, a person close to the negotiations said Wednesday.
IMG and ICM Artists have had contacts over the years, but this time the discussions were serious, the individual said, adding that the information could be relayed only on an anonymous basis because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. Several discussions had taken place at a senior level, the person said.
— Read more at New York Times

The new general director of Houston Grand Opera, Anthony Freud, was designated an Officer of the Order of the British Empire on June 17, Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday.
Recipients of the honor for outstanding achievement, among the highest available to U.K. and Commonwealth citizens, are named twice a year by Buckingham Palace upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

René Pape, the magnetic German with the "black diamond" voice, has decided to take on the Mount Everest of bass roles, Wagner's Wotan, in a Ring cycle to be conducted by Daniel Barenboim and planned for 2010.
The production is a joint project of the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, where Barenboim is Music Director for Life, and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he was named principal guest conductor last month.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Michael Hunt, currently director of the Theatre Royal in Waterford, Ireland, has been appointed chief executive of the Wexford Festival Opera, the company has announced.
Previous titles held by Hunt include director of performing arts at Riverside Studios London, associate and artistic director of the Cheltenham Everyman Theatre and artistic director of the Bloomsbury Festival. He has also staged 50 productions at Wexford, English National Opera and the Portland (Oregon) Opera, among others.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Opera lovers will be able to watch a performance of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro as it is screened live in Manchester's Exchange Square.
The performance will be broadcast from the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to the BBC Big Screen on 28 June.
Classical artists will perform ahead of the opera, from 1700 BST on Wednesday.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Placido Domingo said he is always nervous before a performance - whether singing one of the 120 roles he has mastered, or as the conductor. But he is most nervous when his wife, Marta is directing a new production, as she did opening night of La Traviata for the Los Angeles Opera. But there was no need for him to be concerned, because Marta scored a perfect 20 in this visually stunning production, featuring soprano Elizabeth Furtal as the beautiful and doomed Violetta.
— Read more at movieweb.com

As an opera composer, Peter Westergaard usually thinks big. Among his five completed operas are complex, 12-tonish works for large casts, chorus and orchestra. His subjects have included Shakespeare's "Tempest," no less. But for his sixth opera, "Alice in Wonderland," Mr. Westergaard, a professor emeritus of music at Princeton University, is thinking small, though still complex.
In a dramatically fantastical and musically modernistic adaptation of the Lewis Carroll classic, "Alice in Wonderland" is a work in progress. On Monday night at the Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater at Symphony Space, the admirable Center for Contemporary Opera presented the first 40 minutes of Mr. Westergaard's new work (6 of what are to be 11 scenes and an epilogue). Determined to include 36 of Carroll's characters in his adaptation, even those who make fleeting appearances like the white rabbit's head gardener, Mr. Westergaard choose to assign multiple roles to a cast of seven singers. In addition, rather than reduce the orchestra to a chamber ensemble, he has eliminated it altogether.
— Read more at New York Times

For the most recent episode of my book, I'd promised something about how the finale of Mozart's Don Giovanni was partly improviesd at the opera's premiere. And then I forgot to put that in the episode. I'm going to add it, but because it's such fabulous stuff, I thought I'd put it here in the blog, too. It comes from Thomas Forrest Kelly's book, First Nights at the Opera, and should be filed under the heading "How spontaneous classical music could be, before it became classical."
— Read more at artsjournal.com - Greg Sandow

Hungarian minister of culture István Hiller has fired Árpád Jutocsa Hegyi, the controversial general director of the Hungarian State Opera in Budapest, Italy's ANSA news agency reports.
Lajos Vass, an undersecretary of culture, will oversee the struggling company for the next six months.
Hegyi's tenure was marked by a budget crisis that has forced the company to lay off staff, cut performances and renegotiate its musicians' contract. In recent weeks, he has clashed with workers and other officials in a series of bizarre events.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The classical music world of Washington seems to have Baroque music on its mind. After plugging the Washington Early Music Festival in this week's Classical Music Agenda, it is time to tell you about the two Baroque operas that were staged over the weekend. For its first production this summer, the Wolf Trap Opera Company is staging Telemann's Orpheus, which I heard on Friday night. This opera, rediscovered only in the 1970s, combines a mostly German libretto with some pieces in Italian and French, the latter probably just left untranslated from the original libretto. It was adapted from a French libretto by Michel du Boulay (he was not the one who combined German with other languages, as the Post reviewer suggests), which uses the ancient Greek versions of the Orpheus legend selectively, most importantly adding the role of Orasia, Queen of Thrace, who loves Orpheus and causes a snake to bite his wife, Eurydice. By killing her rival, she hopes to win Orpheus, her court musician, for herself but it does not work out that way.
— Read more at DCist - Charles T. Downey

Dicapo Opera Theatre's 2006-07 season will include the New York premiere of Tobias Picker's Thérèse Raquin and a new production of Lehár's The Merry Widow with Wendy Wasserstein's English dialogue, the company announced.
The 25-year-old company presents performances in an intimate theater in the basement of the St. Jean Baptiste Church on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Gods, demi-gods and heroes of antiquity kicked up a storm over the weekend, thanks to a rare double-dose of opera history.
Ignoti Dei Opera, the adventuresome company founded a few years ago by Peabody alum Timothy Nelson to explore works from opera's early years, presented the U.S. stage premiere of Francesco Cavalli's La Didone from 1641.
And Wolf Trap Opera, one of the country's leading developers of emerging artists, gave the U.S. premiere of Georg Philipp Telemann's Orpheus from 1726 in a production that, fortunately, still has a couple more performances.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Pier Francesco Cavalli's La Didone got its North American premiere in Washington over the last three days, nestled away in American University's pretty and functional Greenberg Theatre. Ionarts promised a little star for your book if you attended; we should offer another one for everyone who sat through the entire opera. If you did, you will have gotten your secco recitativo fill for the year, La Didone's three-plus hours (after Ignoti Dei Opera's artistic director Timothy Nelson had mercifully cut some 45 additional minutes) consisting of three-quarters recitative as it does. Baroque audiences were more different than alike us; and they would doubtlessly have experienced and enjoyed the entertainment and novelty that La Didone provides to its patient listeners in a different, perhaps more intense way. Baroque fanatics and musicologists alike must have been spellbound at the production, though: how long has it been since we saw and heard a little orchestra replete with cornettos, lirone, two (!) theorbos, viola da gamba, and the like?
— Read more at ionarts See also: washingtonpost.com

When Central City Opera first presented "The Ballad of Baby Doe" in 1956, the world premiere came more than 350 years after Claudio Monteverdi's "Orfeo," which is generally considered the first operatic masterpiece.
Although Italy can claim an unbroken four- century opera tradition, it's almost impossible to delineate an American operatic tradition because the form is still so comparatively young in this country.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

Much of life is spent thinking about death. Primary in our thoughts are the rate of its approach and hour of its arrival. It is a little like driving a car whose accelerator and brakes are out of our control. This idea may explain the public's hideous and enduring fascination with executions and suicides, for in both cases time races and the date is set. People are in control.
— Read more at New York Times See also: sequenza21.com

We saw "Grendel" last night. I can't imagine wanting to see it again. There are many good things to say about the production, the design, the cast, the orchestra. There are even a few moments when the music is interesting, but they aren't very many. The central problem begins in the first scene (of 12) when the light of Spring hits the wall of ice and the monster Grendel appears. The music written for Grendel never rises above the level of interest you hear in a typical recitative. The composer writes many, many notes for the character; the notes run the range from low bass to high falsetto; the notes are in the rhythm of American English speech; the notes are absolutely uninteresting and do nothing to convey a sense of character or of emotion. This is a rather severe problem since the character appears in every single scene, usually as the dominant factor in each. It seems typical that the most interesting music for Grendel, when he has fallen in love with the Anglo-Saxon queen and dreams of drifting in a boat with her, is written for one of Grendel's shadows, not for the character himself. This is not fun to write. I was hoping for so much more.
— Read more at Sequenza21.com

They saved the best for last.
Kurt Weill's "Street Scene" is the fourth and final production in Opera Theatre of St. Louis' 2006 season. It is wonderful in every respect: casting and performances, staging, music direction, set and costume design. There's not a weak link in it.
With its mixture of musical styles, "Street Scene" has been compared to "West Side Story," for which it helped pave the way. But in some ways it's more reminiscent of a predecessor, "Porgy and Bess," with its setting in a virtual village and pronounced operatic leanings.
— Read more at stltoday.com

There are musical moments during live operas when a melody begins that is so familiar and so lovely that you hear a collective, satisfied sigh from the audience.
Some have "hooks" that are so catchy, even people who think they don't know opera recognize them from popular commercials, even cartoons.
Des Moines Metro Opera Artistic Director Robert Larsen can point to such moments in this season's operas: Mozart's "The Magic Flute," Verdi's "Rigoletto" and "The Rake's Progress" by Stravinsky with a libretto by W.H. Auden.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

The Mad River Valley's new Green Mountain Opera Festival made its debut Friday evening at the Joslyn Round Barn, and its high vocal and acting quality predict a fine "Barber of Seville" on Saturday at the Barre Opera House.
The Green Mountain Opera Festival was created by the Green Mountain Cultural Center when it severed ties with the Vermont International Opera Festival in January. The local nonprofit arts organization hired Montreal bass-baritone Taras Kulish to create a new festival. Kulish brought together a bevy of young singers, both American and Canadian, an Italian conductor, an English director and an orchestra from throughout the Northeast.
— Read more at Rutland Herald

In a list of the places on Earth that require no extended rationalization for a visit, Santa Fe would be near the top.
Its touristic virtues are well known:
Great location, great hostelries, great food, great art, great shopping - even great for lazing about or vigorous outdoor activities.
This is all on the record and attested to by Santa Fe's regularly high ranking in surveys of travelers' favorite destinations - which is pretty good for a dry patch in the high desert that year-round is home to fewer than 70,000 people.
— Read more at Chron.com

[ Operas tend to make a lot of noise about matters of love, life and death. So why has it taken until now for someone to write one about giving birth? Alice Jones reports]
"Can you sing down there?" The director Bill Bankes-Jones peers down with fatherly concern at a mezzo-soprano who is lying on her back underneath a table. On top of the table stands a petite soprano, trilling: "I am full of ba-a-a-by!" Four more heads appear beneath her, poking their heads, one by one, out of a gap in the dusty purple velvet curtain that trails off the table and down to the floor. Suddenly, they are all singing at once, jostling for space and crouched on the floor in deafening proximity. A man in a builder's hat and fluorescent jacket strides into the mêlée, breaking off from singing to complain that he has been "clobbered" with too many props - namely, a stepladder, a megaphone and a chainsaw.
— Read more at Independent Online Edition

When the annual conference ("New Visions for New Times") of the American Symphony Orchestra League convened in Los Angeles on June 1, everyone seemed to be in heaven thanks to a May 28 article in the New York Times by Alan Kozinn which concluded that "there is immensely more classical music on offer now, both in concerts and on recordings, than there was in what nostalgists think of as the golden era of classics in America."
— Read more at Gramophone

You know, I bitch and moan myself hoarse about how we need more performances of Baroque opera, and suddenly this weekend, I will be attending two of them. Not only should all of you Ionarts legions attend the Ignoti Dei La Didone: if you want two Ionarts stars in your workbook, find a friend who can drive you out to Wolf Trap. For its first production this summer, the Wolf Trap Opera Company is staging Telemann's Orpheus, with two performances this weekend and two next weekend (Fridays at 8 pm, Sundays at 2 pm).
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Three opera stars who got their start in San Francisco are back in town headlining the company's spring season, providing glamour, vocal firepower - and the kind of unifying theme beloved by marketers.
"Return of the Divas," proclaim the banners hanging in front of the War Memorial Opera House. Well, sort of.
The slogan certainly describes the performances of two of the leading ladies: soprano Patricia Racette in Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" and mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick in Tchaikovsky's "The Maid of Orleans."
— Read more at sfgate.com

"The Grapes of Wrath" is almost ready to harvest. Utah Symphony & Opera will present the first act of the opera-in-progress on Friday, the first time an orchestra will perform the music. It is one of the final steps before the world premiere at Minnesota Opera in February and the Utah Opera premiere in May.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

Puccini's "Tosca," with its lush, arching melodies and gripping drama, has remained an audience favorite through more than 60 performances at Cincinnati Opera. But, likely in few of them have the stars aligned like they did Thursday night in Music Hall.
The season opener brought together American soprano Aprile Millo as the tragic heroine Floria Tosca and a stunning new Italian tenor named Antonello Palombi as her lover, Mario Cavaradossi. Combined with the sumptuous scenic design by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, choral pageantry and exquisite conducting in the pit from Giordano Bellincampi, it was simply a great night at the opera.
— Read more at enquirer.com

MONDAY is the dark night for "The History Boys" at the Broadhurst Theater, but this week the house will open for a history lesson of another sort, as Terrence McNally's "Master Class" returns to the Broadway stage for one night only. Six actresses - Kathy Bates, Dixie Carter, Edie Falco, Swoosie Kurtz, Chita Rivera and Leslie Uggams - will share the plum role of Maria Callas. Leonard Foglia, the original director, will oversee the affair, a benefit for educational programs of the Metropolitan Opera Guild.
— Read more at New York Times

[The Royal Opera's new Tosca is stunning, with Terfel at his evil best. So why did Gheorghiu falter, asks Hugh Canning]
Mai Tosca alla scena più tragica fu! - "Even on stage, Tosca was never more tragic" - yells Baron Scarpia as he torments Puccini's temperamental diva with the screams of her lover being tortured in an anteroom. It is one of the great moments of melodrama at the theatrical climax of this most melodramatic of operas, and Bryn Terfel delivers it with a kind of sardonic triumphalism that chills the blood at Covent Garden.
— Read more at Times Online

Few plays are as inherently operatic as Tony Kushner's epic "Angels in America." The sprawling, two-evening Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece about everything from AIDS to the zeitgeist of the 20th century burst onto the national scene more than a decade ago with all the force, brilliance and even confusion of the Angel that famously comes crashing through the ceiling of AIDS patient Prior Walter's bedroom.
When an opera is crafted from a play, the point should be to expand the emotional world of the plot and text. But any operatic "Angels" is more likely to result in a reduction of both. And that's what we find in Transylvanian composer Peter Eotvos' 2004 "Angels in America" opera, now enjoying its North American premiere at the Boston Center for the Arts courtesy of Opera Unlimited, a collaboration between Opera Boston and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
— Read more at BostonHerald.com

Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" is an epic, historical, political, personal , and apocalyptic drama that is also an opera waiting to happen. It is full of larger-than-life characters who deliver long aria-speeches of interior questioning; characters meet each other in dream landscapes and there are interwoven, simultaneous episodes that resemble operatic ensembles. There is even a grand death scene.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

Maybe not too many opera singers live in Dorchester. Skepticism usually greets Nikolas Nackley when he tells his neighbors what he does.
`Most of the time they just ask me to sing for them, as if that would be proof, which I never do," Nackley said with a laugh.
"It'd be like somebody told you they're a professional baseball player," he said. `` `Really! Hit a home run for me right now! I want to see it!' Like I'm in the dry-cleaning store with people in line behind me, and I'm going to launch into `Largo al Factotum' from `Barber of Seville'! "
— Read more at The Boston Globe

After years of success in Pink Floyd Roger Waters has made a jump from rock music to opera.
His new opera Ca Ira has received harsh criticism but he has always said music is music and that it didn't seem like much of a leap.
— Read more at itv.com

I raved about one of those neglected 17th-century opera composers, Antonio Caldara, when Cecilia Bartoli brought her Opera Proibita recital to Washington. Another prolific composer whose operas are now mostly forgotten is Francesco Cavalli (né Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni; he took the name of the noble patron who brought him to Venice as a teenage singer). We owe most of the authoritative information we know about him to three musicologists, Lorenzo Bianconi, Jane Glover, and Ellen Rosand.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Opera Unlimited, a collaboration between Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Opera Boston, announces additional programming. The Opera Unlimited centerpiece, the North American premiere of Peter Eötvös's Angels in America, based on the Tony Kushner play, opens June 16, with four performances on June 16, 17, and 20 at 8:00 p.m. and June 24 at 3:00 p. m. at the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts (BCA).
— Read more at operaunlimited.org

No less than the Metropolitan Opera of New York, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden has long counted on Franco Zeffirelli's lush and safely traditional productions to fill the hall for yet another revival of an opera evergreen. While music critics may grow tired of them, the public rarely complains.
— Read more at New York Times

The Seventh Regiment Armory's future in the arts has suffered a small setback. Lincoln Center said Wednesday it was pulling a semi-staged production of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" scheduled for next spring from the armory. The costs of improving audience amenities in time for the performances next spring were too high, Lincoln Center said.
— Read more at New York Times

Canadian celebrities from the worlds of business, politics and the arts hit the red carpet in Toronto on Wednesday night to help inaugurate the Canadian Opera Company's new home.
Governor General Michaëlle Jean, Margaret Atwood, Steven Page and Conrad Black were among the glittering guests who attended the gala opening concert of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
— Read more at CBC Arts

Every summer, the quiet college town of Wooster, Ohio, comes alive with song. Such has been the case since 1979, when James Stuart and the College of Wooster teamed up to create the Ohio Light Opera.
— Read more at toledoblade.com

Opera Quad-Cities is holding open auditions for principal roles and chorus for its upcoming 2006-07 productions.
Those interested in auditioning are asked to prepare an appropriate solo that displays range and character. An accompanist will be provided. To schedule an audition appointment, please contact Angela Hand at (563) 359-4364 or dr.diva2000@earthlink.net.
— Read more at QCTimes.com

TICKETS are now on sale for one of the highlights of the local opera season - a touring production of The Barber of Seville.
Opera East brings its latest production to Dullingham House near Newmarket on Saturday, July 1, before coming to West Road in Cambridge on July 19.
The cast have chosen an English translation for Rossini's classic tale of hilarious deception and the triumph of true love and are aiming to win over those who see opera as entertainment for the elite.
— Read more at cambridge-news.co.uk

A.G. Edwards said Thursday that it made a $500,000 corporate gift to the Building for Opera campaign at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and a rehearsal hall will be named after the firm.
The large production rehearsal hall is in the Opera Theatre's new Sally S. Levy Opera Center in Webster Groves, Mo. The A.G. Edwards Rehearsal Hall can accommodate a full opera rehearsal, including members of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra.
— Read more at St. Louis Business Journal:

When Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu performed the title role of "Tosca" for the first time ever on stage late on Tuesday, it was as if Maria Callas was watching from the wings.
Comparisons with the great diva were inevitable at the opening of the first new production of the Giacomo Puccini classic at London's Royal Opera House since 1964.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Plácido Domingo has pulled out of the title role of the Bavarian State Opera's performances of Parsifal that had been scheduled for April and July 2007, the company announced.
A statement posted on the State Opera's website attributed the tenor's decision to leave the production "to his taking out the title role from his repertoire for the foreseeable future." Domingo previously had bowed out of Parsifal performances in both Hamburg and Berlin.
— Read more at Opera News

A THEATRE workers' union announced a strike aimed at Scottish Opera yesterday - only to see it voted down by members two hours later.
The Broadcasting, Entertainment, Cinematograph and Theatre Union is in dispute with the opera company, claiming new contracts are being forced on backstage staff.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

When an international opera house revives a production perennially for 42 years, staggering on until the sets practically collapse on the singers, you would be entitled to suspect a case of Italian indolence or English penny-pinching - unless the staging was, like The Mousetrap, so dependable a piece of theatrical furniture that its removal becomes commercially unthinkable.
Covent Garden's Tosca was The Mousetrap of the opera world, a box-office certainty whose allure belonged to a bygone opening but which rolled on regardless through changes of cast and fashion as a fixity in the public mind. Its replacement last night by a new setting in the hands of Jonathan Kent, a respected but non-celebrity theatre director, was an act of knuckle-clenching courage, the most daring opera deed of the year. Setting aside the instant critical acclamation, it puts the work and its presentation into a less hysterical perspective.
— Read more at scena.org

Citing lower-than-expected ticket sales and donations, Houston Grand Opera officials expect to report a $2.5 million deficit - more than 10 percent of the annual budget - at the end of its fiscal year on July 31.
Last-minute fundraising could reduce the amount, HGO board Chairman John S. Arnoldy told the annual meeting of the Houston Grand Opera Association on Tuesday.
— Read more at Chron.com

The punk-rock club where Infernal Bridegroom Productions stages its shows is in a rough neighborhood, far from this city's velvet-curtained theater district. So it is not surprising that the troupe's latest offering, "Speeding Motorcycle," is equally far from some of the traditional fare offered at the city's more conventional sites.
An original rock opera, "Speeding Motorcycle" consists entirely of songs by Daniel Johnston, a musician and artist whose childlike and hallucinatory work chronicles his mental illness.
— Read more at New York Times

For innovation in commemorating this year's Mozart anniversary, Leon Botstein's program with the American Symphony Orchestra on Sunday afternoon at Avery Fisher Hall is going to be hard to top. And not a single Mozart work was played.
Titled "From Russia With Mozart," the program presented concert performances of two short and seldom-heard 19th-century Russian operas, both adapted from Pushkin and conducted by Mr. Botstein. Rimsky-Korsakov's "Mozart and Salieri" (1897) seriously explores the preposterous legend that Antonio Salieri, the powerful court composer in Vienna during the reign of Emperor Joseph II, was so jealous of the upstart Mozart, whose staggering genius seemed to him a capricious gift of God, that he poisoned him. This operatic version of Pushkin's "little tragedy," as the poet called it, surely influenced Peter Shaffer's Tony Award-winning play "Amadeus" and its Oscar-winning film adaptation.
— Read more at New York Times

The Royal Opera House in London is mounting a new production of Tosca for the first time in 40 years. Star Angela Gheorghiu and director Jonathan Kent explain why the time is right to re-evaluate Puccini's classic.
For four decades, Franco Zeffirelli's production of Tosca was a mainstay of the Royal Opera House repertoire.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Violetta Valery as the Traviata ("the woman who lost her way") finds her way into the 1920s Paris flapper scene in the Marta Domingo-directed "La Traviata" at the Los Angeles Opera.
The well-loved opera -- No. 4 on the list of the classics most widely produced -- was written by Verdi for the 1853 Carnival Season at Teatro La Fenice in Venice.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

[Tenor Andrea Bocelli makes room for movie and romance standards and even 'Idol's' McPhee at the Bowl.]
"That's one of the most famous operas in the world - 'Carmen,' " a middle-aged gentleman explained to a couple of companions during intermission at Andrea Bocelli's Hollywood Bowl concert Sunday.
OK, so maybe this wasn't the most opera-savvy audience in the world. But a wide variety of people embraced the Verdi, Puccini and Bizet selections that made up the bulk of the evening's first half, in which the Italian tenor was joined by baritone Luis Ledesma and soprano Ana Maria Martinez with Steven Mercurio conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and Cal State Fullerton choir.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

The stage at the Canadian Opera Company has been dark since April, but behind the scenes and at the box office, staff are feverishly preparing for the largest production ever undertaken by the Toronto-based company.
Tickets for Wagner's Ring cycle are just over 85 per cent sold just months before Das Rheingold, the first of the four operas, opens in September at the COC's new home, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

The first mainstage opera presentations by the fiscally embattled Scottish Opera in nearly a year have encountered yet another hitch, with some thirty-five members of the company's backstage staff planning to begin striking tonight, after union officials reported that negotiations with the company over its attempts to "derecognize" the union have broken down.
The strike, which was scheduled to begin at 5 PM, will ostensibly affect tonight's performance of Carmen at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre, and - if lasting more than twenty-four hours - could affect the company's scheduled performances of Don Giovanni as well.
— Read more at Opera News

Grendel, one of the most ambitious new U.S. operas mounted in years, received diametrically opposed reviews over the weekend after the $2.8 million production also sharply divided its opening-night audience.
A retelling of the medieval Beowulf epic from the monster Grendel's point of view, the widely anticipated work had some audience members at the Los Angeles Opera puzzled over what it was about while others hailed it as a work of genius and grand spectacle.
— Read more at Chron.com [Related news items]

The nailbiting may almost become audible at the Royal Opera House as the company awaits the critics' verdicts tomorrow morning on one of its greatest gambles for years.
Tonight, before a gala audience at Covent Garden, a glamorous cast including the Romanian diva Angela Gheorghiu and Wales's Bryn Terfel will roll out the Royal Opera's first new production of Puccini's Tosca in 40 years.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Operas do not come thinner than Giordano's slip of a romantic Russian thriller, Fedora. One gust of wind at Holland Park's semi-open-air theatre and there was a danger that this powder-puff of political intrigue and wispy music might be blown away.
Opera Holland Park, ambitiously run by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, is celebrating its 10th birthday. The 2006 programme includes the usual mix of popular favourites - The Merry Widow and Rigoletto - with a verismo contingent that has become the festival's calling-card.
— Read more at FT.com

If Friday's San Francisco Symphony performance of "A Florentine Tragedy" was any indication, it's going to be a very exciting month at Davies Hall. Alexander Zemlinsky's one-act opera, which was written in 1916 but had never been performed in San Francisco before this month, made its local debut at Davies over the weekend as part of the orchestra's June festival. It was sensational.
With music by Liszt, Verdi and Tchaikovsky still to come, this year's installment of the three-week summer festival -- titled "Romantic Visions: From Paradise to the Abyss" -- may be holding its best-known works in reserve. For sheer thrills, though, it will be hard to top Zemlinsky's potent hour-long score.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

FROM tomorrow, Scottish Opera returns to Edinburgh with a spectacular double-bill boasting two of the most popular operatic works of all time, Bizet's Carmen and Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Both see Scottish Opera tour their first mainscale productions in almost a year.
Carmen, which opens tomorrow and will be sung in French with English supertitles, is one of the most familiar tales of the classical world.
— Read more at Edinburgh Evening News

Opera fans, residents and regular summer visitors alike will be saddened to learn that the Metro Lyric Opera will not mount its usual three-opera season at Asbury Park's Paramount Theater.
In its place, the group is planning a less ambitious program of operatic favorites. The Metro Lyric plans a full operatic production for October, but the missing summer productions will be a conspicuous absence in the Shore's social and cultural calendars.
— Read more at Asbury Park Press Online

[As the stages are set for Cincinnati's summer season, the emphasis is on beautiful illusion]
Scenic designers are those masters
of illusion who inspire the viewers' sense of imagination to create an effect. And if a good production combines with great singing, a night at the opera can be magical.
"For me, real stage magic is what deceives you for about a second," says Robert Dahlstrom, scenic designer for Cincinnati Opera's July 20 and 22 staging of "The Tales of Hoffmann."
— Read more at The Enquirer

Acclaimed soprano Amy Burton will give a masterclass for members of Glimmerglass Opera's acclaimed Young American Artists Program on Friday, June 16, at 2 p.m. in the Fenimore Art Museum Auditorium. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.
Ms. Burton has enjoyed an incredibly diverse career on both the opera and concert stage, and her performances have been hailed by audiences and critics alike. She received international acclaim for her compelling portrayal of Elle in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine during Glimmerglass Opera's 2005 Festival Season, and in past seasons has performed Alice Ford in Falstaff and Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni with the company.
— Read more at glimmerglass.com

Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who survived the Holocaust and fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution, then won acclaim for his opera ''Le Grand Macabre'' and his work on the soundtrack for "2001: A Space Odyssey," died Monday. He was 83.
— Read more at New York Times

[The ambitious Elliot Goldenthal production directed by Julie Taymor turns evil inside out in spectacular fashion.]
Art isn't easy. Opera isn't easy. And new opera is practically impossible. But the long and winding road to Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" has been one for the books.
Nearly two decades in the making, this opera conceived by Goldenthal and director Julie Taymor finally - after a 12-day delay due to finicky computer technology - had its premiere Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And this much can be said without qualification: It is the most ambitious, spectacular and successful new opera yet from Los Angeles Opera.
— Read more at calendarlive.com [Related news items]

Elliot Goldenthal's first opera, "Grendel," made its much-anticipated official debut yesterday in a lavish staging at the Los Angeles Opera directed by Julie Taymor.
The three-hour performance had both moments of excitement and longueurs -- and none of the mechanical glitches that pushed back the planned May 27 opening.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com [Related news items]

In "Grendel," John Gardner's 1971 retelling of the "Beowulf" story, the title character's view of the world is shaken by his first encounter with art, a bard's song with the miraculous ability to transform the mud and degradation of human existence into a gleaming, beautiful lie.
The brilliant operatic "Grendel" that had its world premiere at the Los Angeles Opera on Thursday night, with music by Elliot Goldenthal and a libretto by director Julie Taymor and poet J.D. McClatchy, has something of the same breath-stealing quality.
— Read more at sfgate.com [Related news items]

After a troubled gestation period that included the composer banging his head, a computer failure that shut down a central set, cost overruns, last- minute tinkering, wild rumors and, as if confirming those rumors, the cancellation of opening night just two days before it was scheduled, Elliot Goldenthal's Grendel had its official world premiere Thursday night at Los Angeles Opera.
A debacle in the making, you would think, but what emerged instead proved a brilliant night of theater, a sophisticated, thought-provoking story with a compelling, sympathetic central character, music that was well up to the task of telling the story, and a visual style that served the narrative even as it made the eyes pop.
— Read more at ocregister.com [Related news items]

Des Moines Metro Opera has appointed Thomas Smith executive director. He will replace Jerilee M. Mace, who is retiring.
Smith brings more than a decade's experience in opera management. He was finance director at Cincinnati Opera for eight seasons, where he managed a budget of over $6.5 million and an endowment of over $15 million. Previously, Smith was director of administration at the Baltimore Opera Company.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Utah Opera will perform the first act of Ricky Ian Gordon's new opera based on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath at the Utah Arts Festival later this month, the company announced.
The opera, which was commissioned by Minnesota Opera and Utah Opera, will get its world premiere in St. Paul in February 2007 before coming to Salt Lake City in May 2007. Salt Lake City audiences have already had multiple previews, however: Gordon discussed his progress at the Utah Arts Festival in 2004, and several selections were performed at the city's library last year.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Turning 80 isn't the only thing lauded composer Carlisle Floyd is celebrating]
Today, as Carlisle Floyd celebrates his 80th birthday, the composer long associated with Houston Grand Opera can savor a career like few other Americans'.
Floyd's influence has been vast, says Francesca Zambello, an esteemed American director of opera and musicals. "He has written operas people love to perform, work on and see," she says via e-mail.
— Read more at Chron.com

Some of us will tailor our home to our needs by spending thousands on a renovation - not by building a $150 million structure modelled after the world's gold standards.
But that was the now-realized dream of Canadian Opera Company general director Richard Bradshaw.
Seated overlooking the clear-glass panorama of Queen St. W. and Osgoode Hall in the members' lounge of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts earlier this week, Bradshaw is the happiest kid in the sandbox.
— Read more at thestar.com

[The ambitious Elliot Goldenthal production directed by Julie Taymor turns evil inside out in spectacular fashion.]
Art isn't easy. Opera isn't easy. And new opera is practically impossible. But the long and winding road to Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" has been one for the books. Nearly two decades in the making, this opera conceived by Goldenthal and director Julie Taymor finally ? after a 12-day delay due to finicky computer technology ? had its premiere Thursday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And this much can be said without qualification: It is the most ambitious, spectacular and successful new opera yet from Los Angeles Opera.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Michel van der Aa is the hottest property in Dutch music at the moment. The premiere of the 36-year-old composer's first full-length stage work, After Life, opens this year's Holland festival. Staged in the new Muziekgebouw built on the site of the city's eastern dockyard, After Life is an ambitious mix of live performance, video and electronics, with a libretto adapted from the screenplay to Hirokazu Kore-Eda's film of the same name.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Opera Bel Cantanti is doing all the things that a small local opera company should. I was sad to miss their winter production, Rachmaninov's Aleko (reprised from the previous summer), because it is an opera that I may never have another chance to hear live (although OBC may bring it back). That is what local and collegiate opera companies should do, operas that bigger mainstream companies are just too staid and predictable to touch: Maryland Opera Studio's choice of Cimarosa this year and Gluck's Armide and Conrad Susa's Transformations next year, Catholic University's premiere of The Furies, Washington Concert Opera's performance of Rossini's Tancredi, Opera Lafayette's Sacchini and Idomeneo, Ignoti Dei's upcoming La Didone. The 13,000th production of Don Giovanni, Magic Flute or Il Trovatore usually bores me to tears, unless it has truly superlative singing (unlikely for this kind of company) or an unusual directorial concept.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Daniel Rodriguez will probably always be known as "the singing cop." Mr. Rodriguez, then an officer with the New York City Police Department, comforted an anguished nation in the aftermath of 9/11 with his robustly operatic singing of "God Bless America" during an interfaith service held at Yankee Stadium and televised worldwide. He also appeared at many public memorial services and funerals in the weeks that followed.
The classical music and entertainment worlds took notice. He has since sung with the Boston Pops and with orchestras in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere. He has made the rounds on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and the "Late Show With David Letterman." The tenor Plácido Domingo arranged a short period of intensive study for him in the young artists program of the Washington National Opera, which Mr. Domingo directs.
— Read more at New York Times

Canadian Opera Company has received sixteen nominations in total for the 27th Annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards, which honor theater, opera and dance productions in Canada.
The company received six Dora nominations in the General Theatre category and ten nominations in the Opera Division, where five of its seasonal offerings - Götterdämmerung, MacBeth, Norma, Rodelinda, and Wozzeck - were shortlisted for Outstanding Production along with Opera Atelier's Orfeo.
— Read more at Opera News

Lake Mohawk Friends of New Jersey State Opera will host a concert to commemorate the life and legacy of Alfredo Silipigni at 7:30 p.m. on Monday June 12, at Prudential Hall, N.J. Performing Arts Center, in Newark. The concert will feature the N.J. State Opera Orchestra and Chorus with invited soloists and guests, conducted by Joseph Colaneri.
— Read more at strausnews.com

The first track on the East Village Opera Company's self-titled CD opens with a string quartet playing the familiar melody of the overture to Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro.
Then the driving drum set kicks in, followed by electric guitar and, in the mix, the organ part from the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."
The three-year-old EVOC is earning a reputation for turning highbrow into hybrid with its rock-inspired rewrites of opera's greatest hits.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Thomas Smith, director of finance at the Cincinnati Opera, has been hired as executive director for the Des Moines Metro Opera after a national search.
Smith will replace Jerilee M. Mace, who is retiring.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

New Jersey Opera Theater (NJOT) is proud to announce their exciting masterclass schedule for the upcoming SummerFest 2006 season, which runs from June 20 through July 23. The dazzling array of world-class presenters includes Michael Ching, composer of Buoso's Ghost and Artistic Director of Opera Memphis; Sharon Sweet, international soprano; Allan Glassman, international tenor and Jim Caraher, Artistic Director of Indianapolis Opera. Below is a complete schedule of masterclass presenters, dates, times and locations; all masterclasses are free, open to the public and no reservations are necessary.
— Learn more at www.NJOT.org

Bernard Labadie, the artistic director of the Opéra de Montréal since 2003, will step down at the end of August, the company announced.
In a statement, the company said that "the current financial constraints of the Opéra de Montréal and more specifically their impact on the artistic project that attracted him to the Opéra de Montréal were important factors leading to his decision."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

We've added a new page to our site - Music Blog Digest. See what some of the web's most literate people have to say on a variety of music-related topics. We'll update the page on a daily basis so be sure to bookmark it for future reference.
— Learn more at AllAboutOpera.com - Music Blog Digest

Grendel had its final dress rehearsal on May 27 and, after two successful previews, the highly anticipated world premiere production is set to open Thursday, June 8.
— Read more at laopera.com

Having spent more than a decade dwelling on a monster and a dragon, Elliot Goldenthal gained some insight into the audience for "Grendel," which will have its delayed world premiere Thursday night.
"It's has the potential to appeal to a lot of weirdoes," he said, with the slightest hint of humor. "It's quirky, basically a 2 1/2-hour internal monologue."
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Roundabout's new production of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera is by far the most shocking and innovative theatre event of this, the 1967-68 Broadway season. Men using cocaine! Women in S&M gear! Genitals exposed! Filthy language! Inexplicable make-up and hairstyles! No curtain calls! Broadway audiences are forced to face the immorality they themselves practice in their everyday lives! Yes, dear readers, this 1967-68 Broadway season will go down in history as the year director Scott Elliott and playwright Wallace Shawn reinvented one of the stage's great classics in a production that speaks in a manner so contemporary, so brutally honest about the world we live in right now, that? What? Excuse me? This is 2006? Oh? Well then, I guess this production is kinda sad, isn't it? I mean, we?ve gotten to the point where Mick Jagger is considered family-friendly entertainment for halftime at the Super Bowl. Is Alan Cumming kissing a guy really supposed to make us do anything other than yawn?
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

There is a significant difference between the artistically right and the ideologically righteous. Anthony Davis' 1986 opera, "Malcolm X," is more righteous than it is right.
As heard at Oakland Opera Theater on Sunday, with an enthusiastic audience that included the composer, this was the first staged production of "Malcolm X" since its New York City Opera premiere 20 years ago; there have been a number of concert and college performances around the country.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Torontoist was recently invited to take a peek inside at the soon-to-be-opened Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, better known as Toronto's opera house. Being one of the most highly anticipated buildings in Toronto history, we have to say we were more than a little curious to a look inside.
The "city room space", or lobby, is well named. The open concept interior has the feeling of transparency, made mostly of steel, wood and a lot of glass, an "indoor piazza" as our host (and architect) Gary McCluskie described. Those glass walls are undoubtedly the coolest thing about the place--not only does it look as if all five floors are floating but it causes Toronto's buildings and busy streets to be a backdrop, like large pieces of moving city art. A massive translucent glass staircase runs down the middle of the space and we're cursing the fact that we left our ballgowns at home.
— Read more at Torontoist.com

I'm still trying to get caught up on some of this spring's interesting opera productions. De Vlaamse Opera staged Giorgio Battistelli's Prova d'Orchestra (1995) in March, which uses a libretto based on Federico Fellini's film. I read a review by Nicolas Blanmont (Scènes d'orchestres parallèles, March 24) for La Libre Belgique (my translation and links added): ...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

The Canadian Opera Company has received 16 nominations for Toronto's Dora Mavor Moore Awards, including five of the six nominations for outstanding opera production.
The awards, which honor theater, dance, and opera, will be presented on June 26 at the Winter Garden Theatre. The nominations were announced yesterday at the offices of BMO Financial.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

At first blush, a new opera meditating on the life and death of Spanish poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca seems an unlikely choice to be a chart hit. But Osvaldo Golijov's "Ainadamar" is precisely that.
Released last month by Deutsche Grammophon (DG), the opera's world-premiere recording features soprano Dawn Upshaw, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor and soprano Jessica Rivera alongside the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and conductor Robert Spano, a longtime Golijov champion. Its sales success mirrors that of DG's first Golijov release last year of the song cycle "Ayre," which also put Upshaw front and center.
— Read more at Yahoo! News