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

The Tanglewood Music Center's triple-bill of 20th-century operas opened with a sneeze and ended with an unanswerable question and sustained high C.
This newsworthy evening of superb music-theater opened with Paul Hindemith's "There and Back" (1927), continued with Stravinsky's "Mavra" (1922) , and closed with the American stage premiere of Elliott Carter's "What's Next?" (1999). Each work paid tribute to operas past, while suggesting new directions for an old genre.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

The plays of Shakespeare may seem like the perfect sort of dramatic work for operatic adaptation, with memorable characters, moments of grand expression, and marvelous scope of setting. There are basically two models for past success: Verdi's late masterpieces, which are distant from their sources because the libretti are in Italian; and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the best example of a Shakespeare opera in English, which uses the original text almost verbatim. The main drawback in The Tempest, the 2004 opera by British composer Thomas Adès, is that it is in English, but the retelling of the story in simpler language reads and sounds sadly like Shakespeare's homespun cousin. After a few days before the first performance of the opera, now in its American premiere at Santa Fe Opera, spent reading and studying Shakespeare's play again, the lightly rhymed, short-lined libretto by Meredith Oakes was a disappointment.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

IN November 1779, two heating ovens designed for decoration but lighted by mistake exploded, burning Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy's private opera house to the ground. Joseph Haydn, the prince's director of music, lost a prized harpsichord, not to mention the scores to his marionette operas and the orchestra parts to symphonies written since 1761. This was at Esterhaza, his employer's home rising in the swamplands that separated Hungary and Austria.
— Read more at New York Times

Bayreuth, Germany - In designing the unusual covered orchestra pit for his opera house here at Bayreuth, Wagner was initially thinking about its visual impact. He wanted the orchestra to be hidden from the audience. He didn't want lights from the pit ruining the scenic images on stage. He wanted the audience to forget that an orchestra was there and just bask in sound that seemed to be coming from nowhere. His hunch was that the pit would also be acoustically marvellous. The acoustics turned out even better than he had hoped.
— Read more at New York Times

Saturday evening's world premiere of Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good" offered a taut, bittersweet comedy of manners informed with challenging but quite expressive music, moments of awkward staging, fine acting and well-performed ensemble singing by a large cast.
— Read more at The Ithaca Journal

ORCHESTRAS, opera companies, chamber groups and solo pianists have been celebrating Mozart's 250th birthday all year, but surprisingly few writers have aimed to capitalize on the surge of interest in the composer considered by many to be music's greatest genius. I'm reminded of the reaction I once got from an editor when I suggested writing a group biography of the Romantic trio Clara and Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms: "Books about musicians don't sell!"

Mercifully, this injunction doesn't seem to apply to the great composer's librettists. At least not in the case of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the man who provided the texts for "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Don Giovanni" and "Così Fan Tutte." Already two biographies have appeared in 2006: Anthony Holden's "Man Who Wrote Mozart," so far available only in a British edition, and Rodney Bolt's engaging "The Librettist of Venice," which found a publisher capable of peddling the book on both sides of the Atlantic. New York Times

On Wednesday, Boston Midsummer Opera makes its local debut with "The Marriages of Mozart," a staged production incorporating scenes from three operatic collaborations between Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte : "Così fan tutte," "Don Giovanni," and "Le Nozze di Figaro." The focus is on the highs and lows of romantic love, and the cast includes two married couples: Kelly Kaduce and Lee Gregory , and Jami Rogers and Kevin Anderson.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

In adapting "Our Town," Thornton Wilder's enduring classic of small-town America, librettist J.D. McClatchy had good reason to toe the line.
For one thing, Wilder was, at best, ambivalent about the prospects of his signature drama, which earned the 1938 Pulitzer Prize, being transformed into opera. An exasperated Aaron Copland moved on to other things while waiting for the green light that never came from Wilder. (Correcting what has become the conventional, but inaccurate wisdom, McClatchy says that Leonard Bernstein never attempted to make an opera of "Our Town"; he sought, also unsuccessfully, to do Wilder's "The Skin of Our Teeth.")
— Read more at Aspen Times News

It was an extraordinary notion: Turn a dusty hilltop outside a sleepy southwestern town into a destination for opera-lovers.
"Where's Santa Fe?" mezzo-soprano Regina Sarfaty Rickless remembers asking John Crosby when he invited her to join his fledgling company. "Why would you want to build an opera house in the desert?"
— Read more at ABC News

In this year of celebrations marking Mozart's 250th birthday, we take a few moments to remember the great composer's poet.
Lorenzo Da Ponte wrote the librettos for three of Mozart's operas: The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte.
— Read more at NPR

Genoveva, Robert Schumann's only opera, opens tonight at the Bard SummerScape festival in New York's Hudson River Valley. This is the opera's first staged production in the United States.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The National Opera Center, a pilot program at Brooklyn College, will crown its inaugural season this weekend with a program of popular American show tunes, followed in the first week of August by performances of Così Fan Tutti and The Magic Flute by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, featuring the forty-piece National Opera Center Orchestra
— Read more at BC News

Opera fans who crave something new have something else to sing about in Cooperstown on Saturday as Glimmerglass Opera presents "Jenufa" by 20th century composer Leos Janacek at the Alice Busch Opera Theater. This is the first opera by Janacek to be presented at Glimmerglass.
— Read more at pressconnects.com

The word from Glyndebourne has been fairly encouraging. This summer they are doing a couple revivals, playing it pretty safe, but then there is this Betrothal in a Monastery (more about that another time). One of the revivals was a tried and true production of an opera that should be performed more (especially on our side of the Atlantic), Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It has one of the great roles for countertenor, perfectly cast, in Oberon, sung this summer by Bejun Mehta. Warwick Thompson wrote a review (Glyndebourne's Magic 'Midsummer Night's Dream' Has Spry Puck, June 16) for Bloomberg News:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

James H. Schwabacher, 86, co-founder and chairman of San Francisco Opera's young-artist Merola Opera Program has died, the company annouced today.
Schwabacher passed away at California Pacific Medical Center on Tuesday, as a result of complications from pneumonia, a press release issued by San Francisco Opera reported.
In addition to the Merola Program, Schwabacher served on the board of the San Francisco Opera Association, was appointed life governor of the San Francisco Symphony, functioned as vice chairman of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and served as professor or music at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco.
— Read more at Opera News

[Julie Taymor surmounts The Wall with 'Grendel']
In the end, The Wall wasn't the temperamental diva it had been made out to be.
Before the new opera "Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad" arrived at the New York State Theater this month, the media was abuzz with speculation on whether The Wall, a gigantic set piece, would work. It had malfunctioned on a spectacular scale late in rehearsals and forced the postponement of the opening night of the opera in its initial run in Los Angeles last month.
— Read more at gaycitynews.com

Glimmerglass Opera's world premiere of Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good" last Saturday night at the Alice Busch Opera Theater was double-highlighted by exceptionally beautiful ensemble work and Hartke's confounding and attractive, rhythmically layered score.
Based on Guy de Maupassant's short story "Boule de Suif," the Franco-Prussian War-set opera focuses on a Le Havre-bound group-a merchant, a Count, a manufacturer and their wives and a socialist and two nuns-making a quick exit from Rouen, now occupied by the Prussians.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

I'm going to start eating those Sussex hats: The Guardian has only given 3 stars (out of 5) to 'Betrothal in a Monastery'. The objection is that the work itself isn't political enough. This opera commits the cardinal sin of being FUN. Come to think of it, with the Guardian one could perhaps predict this attitude.
— Read more at Jessica Duchen's classical music blog

[This review comes from guest contributor Richard K. Fitzgerald.]
When we think of Gounod, three works stand out: Faust (1859); Roméo et Juliette (1870); and Ave Maria (1853), adapted from the 1st prelude of Bach?s Well-tempered Clavier (its original version was Méditation sur le premier Prélude de Piano de J. S. Bach for violin and piano; the words were added later in 1859). Perhaps one might recall his Marche funèbre d?une marionnette that accompanied the credits of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Despite the endurance and fame of these works, most of Gounod?s music has fallen into obscurity. It is certainly no surprise that Roméo et Juliette has found a permanent place in the standard operatic repertoire.
— Read more at ionarts

At the legendary Bayreuth Festival, the curtain was scheduled to rise on "Das Rheingold" (The Rhinegold), the first instalment of Tankred Dorst's eagerly-anticipated new production of Richard Wagner's four-opera "Ring" cycle.
As this small town in Bavaria, like the rest of Germany, continued to swelter in a heatwave, last-minute preparations were being made for the premiere of the first part of the composer's 16-hour magnum opus.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

[IU Opera Theater will present 'The Mikado']
Once again this summer, Gilbert & Sullivan lovers will have a place to beat the heat and hear light opera.
Following last summer's "H.M.S. Pinafore," Indiana University Opera Theater will present "The Mikado" this weekend and next at the Musical Arts Center in Bloomington.
— Read more at IndyStar.com

Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music offers a landmark tonight, the U.S. stage premiere of What's Next?, the only opera (so far) by 97-year-old Elliott Carter, the éminence grise of American composers.
Carter's 40-minute opera, completed in 1998, is composed for six singers and features a libretto by music critic and author Paul Griffiths. James Levine conducts the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and Vocal Fellows; Doug Fitch provides stage direction and set design.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Joseph Volpe discovered opera at the age of 5 when his grandmother urged him to play Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana on the family Victrola. If anyone had predicted Volpe would become general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, even his opera-loving grandmother would probably have scoffed at the thought.
— Read more at courierpostonline.com

British composer Gavin Bryars, 63, who has written three full-length operas that have played at companies including Opéra National de Paris, English National Opera and the Staatstheater Mainz, intends to pen a new work about the life of Marilyn Monroe, the Vancouver Sun has reported.
— Read more at Opera News

They were two of the greatest playwrights ever to write in the English language. They were also both born in England in 1564, and it has been said that both men had relationships with other men. A new Swedish opera goes further, and speculates that William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe were lovers.
While a fair amount is known of Marlowe, many details of Shakespeare's life are sketchy, particularly in the seven years between 1585 and 1592, when all trace of him seems to disappear from the historical record. For Håkan Lindquist, who has written the text to Tommy Andersson's opera, William this has been a gift.
— Read more at The Local

Conductor Gianluigi Gelmetti has announced that he is stepping down in 2008 as music director at the Opera di Roma when his contract expires in 2008. The Italian capital's house is, after La Scala, the best-funded and most prestigious of Italy's 14 teatri lirici (fully chartered major opera houses).
— Read more at PlaybillArts

People sitting around doing nothing in a claustrophobic environment is not the typical recipe for good drama, but screenwriter Sofia Coppola managed to get away with it in her 2003 film "Lost in Translation." She even walked off with an Academy Award for her efforts.
The creators of "The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif," the new production at Glimmerglass Opera, might take heart from Coppola's success, but the film had a couple of big-name stars and the exotic location of modern Toyko. "The Greater Good," with music by Stephen Hartke and a libretto by Philip Littell, features a mostly anonymous, if talented, batch of singers who sit in the shadows talking about the weather and food.
— Read more at Times Union

[2006 YOUNG AMERICAN ARTISTS RECITALS]
Throughout the summer, the members of the Young American Artists Program present solo recitals, free of charge, in Cooperstown and Cherry Valley. The 2006 series, entitled Romantic Song: A Celebration of Heinrich Heine, begins on Thursday, July 27, at 4:15 p.m. at Cooperstown Presbyterian Church, and features Matthew Worth, baritone, and Peter Sovitzky, tenor. The series concludes on August 27. For more information, call 607-547-2255.
— Read more at glimmerglass.org

As if to lay the Mozart anniversary year to rest, James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra spent much of the weekend here at the Tanglewood Festival concerned with last things.
The Friday evening program juxtaposed Mozart?s final piano concerto (No. 27, the "Coronation") with his final symphony (No. 41, the "Jupiter"). The opera "Don Giovanni," presented in concert on Saturday night, dispatched its antihero to his just reward in hell very near the witching hour. And on Sunday afternoon the Tanglewood Festival Chorus joined the orchestra in sending off Mozart himself, to the strains of his own unfinished "Requiem."
— Read more at New York Times

James Levine is not just among the most acclaimed music directors of his time. His combined salaries from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and New York's Metropolitan Opera make him the highest-paid conductor in the country, according to the most recent Internal Revenue Service filings.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

It was Mozart's "Don Giovanni" in Spanish Harlem on Friday night, but this time the director Peter Sellars had nothing to do with it. The production at El Museo del Barrio's intimate Teatro Heckscher was the culmination of Prelude to Performance, a six-week training program for young singers sponsored by the Martina Arroyo Foundation.
— Read more at New York Times

[Renée Fleming offers recital performance this week]
When soprano Renée Fleming first came to the Aspen Music Festival and School as a student, she was already embarking on the career that has become the stuff of legend.
— Read more at Aspen Times News

[Grendel's visual pleasures can't overcome a blah score that's all pastiche.]
A great many hands helped bring Grendel to this summer's Lincoln Center Festival, so it was generous of all concerned to let the composer, Elliot Goldenthal, represent the entire creative team in a solo bow at the end of the second performance. Or maybe it was just force of habit?opera, after all, is still generally considered a musically driven form in which the basic tone, mood, and direction of the whole piece are determined by the composer. That said, the score of Grendel strikes me as the least distinctive ingredient of this monster opera.
— Read more at New York Magazine [Related news items]

The prospect of a world premiere opera by a major composing voice is an event to be savored.
Stephen Hartke, with three symphonies, several concertos and much distinctive chamber music to his credit, has produced his first opera [The Greater Good].
The good news is that the work is filled with interesting orchestration and compositional ideas, and as such falls into line with other Hartke works.
— Read more at syracuse.com [Related news items]

[A classical jewel shines brightly in Santa Fe and celebrates its 50th anniversary.]
In a list of the places on Earth that require no extended rationalization for a visit, Santa Fe, N.M., 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.
— Read more at Kansas City Star

So I'm sitting in a Metchosin backyard with one of Britain's leading post-minimalist composers. We're talking about his plan to compose an opera about Marilyn Monroe. And then Gavin Bryars, perched on a lawn-chair, notices his marmalade cat is up to its old feral tricks. "We saw Blue just wandering up there with a mouse in his mouth," he tells his wife, Russian-born filmmaker Anna Tchernakova. "It will eventually appear with a head somewhere out here. I'll deal with it later."
— Read more at canada.com

Opera lovers were wringing their hands in the spring, fretting about the future of Opera Columbus, the city's only purveyor of professional operatic performances.
Or were they?
While a dedicated group of Opera Columbus die-hards worked frantically to keep their 25-year-old organization afloat, many patrons and community leaders kept strangely quiet. Their inactivity was in stark contrast to the groundswell of support that helped revive the opera company after its first near-death experience in 1991.
— Read more at The Columbus Dispatch

"La Boheme" is understandably popular, as Puccini's opera has everything and does it all well: comedy, drama, great music and a well-structured plot. It's possible to mess it up. But if the house full of wet eyes in the Eccles Theatre is any indication, the Utah Festival Opera has nothing to worry about. "La Boheme," of course, is the story of young poet Rodolfo, who lives in a shabby garret with three fellow artists. He meets a young neighbor, Mimi, and the pair immediately fall in love. But what starts as a comedy takes a steep descent into drama, as Mimi's consumption threatens to drive a wedge between them. In the meantime, another couple, the painter Marcello and singer Musetta, have their own ups and downs.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

Critics frequently called the first two Godfather movies "operatic." In the third movie, director Francis Ford Coppola made the connection to opera explicit: Michael, an American Mafia don, goes to the opera housein Palermo, Sicily, to watch his son's operatic debut.
That scene is irresistible to musicologists, who only in the quarter century have turned their attention to opera and movies. This spring, a Rice University symposium on film and opera ranged from Franco Zeffirelli's 2004 Callas Forever to the cinematic nature of Leonard Bernstein's 1983 opera A Quiet Place (premiered in Houston and subsequently revised to incorporate his early one-act Trouble in Tahiti).
— Read more at Chron.com

Once Broadway's ingenue of choice in stellar revivals of My Fair Lady (1976), Oklahoma! (1979), and On Your Toes (1983), Christine Andreas has now taken on the plum role of Margaret Johnson in The Light in the Piazza. She heads the first national touring company of the glorious Adam Guettel-Craig Lucas musical based on Elizabeth Spencer's beloved novella of the same title, with Elena Shaddow playing her "special" child, Clara, and David Burnham as the lovestruck Fabrizio Nacarelli.
— Read more at TheaterMania.com

When opera stands in for narrative fiction, one means of transmission is substituted for another. Think of Guy de Maupassant's "Boule de Suif" as an e-mail message. Every picture, every gesture and every word is laid out in the writer?s fixed space. Readers take the materials and imagine them as they will. Think of "The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif" - Stephen Hartke's resetting of 19th-century French storytelling onto the 21st-century opera stage - more as a telephone call. What holds our attention is the emotional tone of the caller, the resonance of the voice, the smoothness of the delivery and the quality of the reception. Opera is both concrete (directors, lighting people and costumers tell us what to see) and ephemeral (there is no narrator, no paternal voice to sort out what we are seeing).
— Read more at New York Times [Related news items]

AT Bard College, some 90 miles up the Hudson from New York, it may be time for a quick prayer to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Bard SummerScape, an outgrowth of the unabashedly academic Bard Music Festival, has exhumed the perennial flop "Genoveva," Robert Schumann's only opera, for what is billed as its American stage premiere.
— Read more at New York Times

We'd like to take a minute and wish the folks at ionarts a very happy Birthday!
— Read more at ionarts.com [Related news items]

Santa Fe Opera audiences have experienced a lot during the company's first 50 years. Along with a lot of first-rate opera, they've seen fire and they've seen rain. Fire destroyed the original theater in July 1967. But the shows went on (in Sweeney Gymnasium) until a new theater could be built.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

Evan Mirageas marked his first anniversary as Cincinnati Opera's artistic director by announcing to Thursday's "Tales of Hoffmann" audience plans for as far ahead as the 2011 season.
Repertoire for the 2008 summer festival follows the opera's successful "3+1" programming formula - three well-known staples and a less known or new piece (like this season's "L'Etoile" or John Adams' "Nixon in China" in 2007). Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" and Verdi's "La Traviata" will offer big helpings of mainstream Italian repertoire. Acclaimed tenor Richard Leech will sing Alfredo in "Traviata."
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

If Matthew Peterson becomes famous in the opera world, credit his pecs -- not his pitch.
The local bodybuilder this weekend will draw on the same attributes he uses in muscle competitions when he takes the stage as the blade-wielding executioner in the Santa Fe Opera's new production of Salome.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

From a handful of students in her first class in 2001 to her current 200, Mary Ann Cashman has raised interest in opera among Anne Arundel County retirees.
Her opera appreciation courses are offered through Anne Arundel Community College at various senior centers.
Classes consist of watching an opera on video as Cashman explains the plot and discusses interpretation, style, design, stage movement, costumes and sets.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Los Angeles Opera will produce and film a revival of the 1999 Marta Domingo production of Verdi's "La Traviata" to open the season in September after all.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Long before Sergio Leone was born, Puccini helped create the spaghetti Western with his 1910 opera "The Girl of the Golden West." In spite of its musical virtues, this tale of love and frontier justice during the Gold Rush has struggled to establish a place in the operatic repertoire -- not least because of the spectacle of Sierra prospectors and desperados warbling away in Italian. The Berkeley Opera's wonderful new version at the Julia Morgan Theatre returns the piece to its American roots, with a canny new English libretto by David Scott Marley that draws on both the opera and the David Belasco play that was its source.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Dallas Opera has ended the 2005-06 fiscal year with an accumulated surplus of $166,950, according to a statement released today. This represents a happy turnaround for the company, which only three years ago posted an $850,000 deficit.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[This review comes from guest contributor Richard K. Fitzgerald.]
This evening I attended Le Comte Ory -- composed by Gioacchino Rossini, libretto by E. Scribe and C. G. Delestre-Poirson, after their own play -- at the Barns at Wolf Trap. Upon entering the theater (the first time for me, incidentally), I was immediately impressed with the intimacy and warmth of the room. Its rustic and monochromatic qualities were a welcome juxtaposition to the colorful, cartoon-like set before my eyes. The stage was bursting with brilliant colors, all of which were adroitly fused by light shed on an abstract backdrop, curiously modern in contrast
— Read more at ionarts

The Los Angeles Opera and Lincoln Center Festival-commissioned "Grendel," which had its New York premiere at the Lincoln Center Festival last week, is about the life and times of Grendel, the misshapen monster that chows down on Danes in the epic Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" and the central character of John Gardner's 1971 novel, "Grendel," on which the Elliot Goldenthal-composed opera is based.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

Opera is about superlatives. Opera is meant to combine the best of many artistic forms -- music, theater and design -- and produce something extraordinary.
The Duluth Festival Opera's production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" was indeed extraordinary. No patron, and there were many, hesitated to stand in ovation at Thursday's opening night in the Duluth Entertainment Convention Center Auditorium.
— Read more at Duluth News Tribune

To write about Ewa Podles is to wrestle with contradictions. Dwelling on the Polish contralto's huge, one-of-a-kind sound - which rises from inky depths to a steely brilliance on high - means slighting the selflessness of her art, her ability to disappear into the works she brings to life. Emphasizing the wild thrill of her singing means overlooking its finesse, her pinpoint control of dynamics and unflappable mastery of the vocal intricacies that make the music of Vivaldi, Handel and Rossini so fearsome.
— Read more at Time Out New York [thanks viliane fille]

On July 22nd, Glimmerglass Opera will host the world premiere of Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good". The staff at Glimmerglass Opera has created a blog that follows the development of "The Greater Good" from first rehearsal to opening night. This week we will highlight the creative process behind the production.
— Today's feature is: Orchestra Rehearsals [Related news items]

Every now and then history seems to slip a gear and lurch forward in time-machine fashion. How else to account for the fact that Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's collaborator and the librettist for "The Marriage of Figaro," "Don Giovanni" and "Così Fan Tutte," wound up in New York, running a grocery store on the Bowery?
Da Ponte, the subject of Rodney Bolt's biography "The Librettist of Venice," took himself very seriously, and yet he led a life that was itself a kind of lengthy comic opera.
— Read more at New York Times

[Great Falls resident participates in intense Washington National Opera 'Camp for Kids.']
Caroline Dunigan comes from a family that is musically inclined. Her mother sang in school, her father played in a band when he was in college, her older brother is a drummer, and both Caroline and her younger brother sing in the chorus of their schools. So when Caroline's voice teacher Peggy McNulty suggested that she try out for opera camp, she jumped at the idea.
— Read more at connectionnewspapers.com

For centuries people have wondered: What is Grendel? Readers of the Old English poem "Beowulf" know him as some kind of shaggy man-beast with a thirst for human blood. Grendel's powers are extraordinary. He can carry off 30 Danish warriors and snack on them at one go. But his rage is so peculiarly human. He hates with focus, determination and strategy. This is a being that seems to straddle categories. Audiences who saw recent productions of the new opera "Grendel" will wonder again: What is Grendel? They saw a big shaggy thing that also straddles categories.
— Read more at The Register-Guard

The Théâtre du Châtelet has been having quite a summer opera season, with a new opera for children and blockbuster appearances by Jessye Norman. Last week, there were two performances of Beethoven's Fidelio with another killer cast, including Karita Mattila and Ben Heppner. Christian Merlin was there (Ivresse vocale, déception orchestrale, June 28) for Le Figaro (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Greater Binghamton opera aficionados will see yet another familiar face at Glimmerglass Opera as "The Greater Good or The Passion of Boule de Suif" makes its world premiere at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Alice Busch Opera Theater in Cooperstown. (More shows are scheduled throughout the summer festival season.)
— Read more at pressconnects.com [Related news items]

In coming seasons, Cincinnati Opera will present groundbreaking company premieres, an entire season of opera on Spanish themes and a return of Wagner for the company's 90th anniversary season in 2010. And in 2011, the company is planning to commission its second mainstage opera, after the success of last year's "Margaret Garner."
Cincinnati Opera artistic director Evans Mirageas has unveiled the repertoire and some of the stars for the 2008 summer festival - the first entirely planned under his leadership - as well as elements of seasons through 2011. Among the plans: The stunning American soprano Dawn Upshaw will make her Cincinnati Opera debut in 2009.
— Read more at The Enquirer

It was an extraordinary notion: Turn this dusty hilltop outside a sleepy southwestern town into a destination for opera-lovers.
"Where's Santa Fe?" mezzo-soprano Regina Sarfaty Rickless remembers asking John Crosby when he invited her to join his fledgling company. "Why would you want to build an opera house in the desert?"
On opening night in July 1957, the 22-year-old New Yorker, making her professional debut as the servant Suzuki in Puccini's "Madame Butterfly," got her answer.
— Read more at casperstartribune.net

It has been a dozen years since Glimmerglass Opera mounted "The Barber of Seville." The wait for a new production proves worthwhile.
The warhorse, yet ever popular in the flimsiest productions because of its memorable music, has been given a fresh spin by stage director Leon Major and is energized by sparkling performances by Aaron St. Clair Nicholson as Figaro, the title figure, and Katherine Goeldner as Rosina.
— Read more at syracuse.com

Three opera singers - one from Ottawa and two from Nova Scotia - and a Winnipeg pianist have won awards given to young musicians, the Canada Council of the Arts announced Wednesday. The winners are:...
— Read more at Yahoo!

Try to imagine the effect when two writers, back in 1928, combined opera with leftist politics and set it all to the rhythms of German cabaret music and jazz.
The result was The Threepenny Opera, and audiences went wild. In the first year after Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill premiered their bleakly comic musical, the show was produced around Europe 46 times.
— Read more at Orlando Sentinel

[Like its set, Grendel's big and rocky, with an empty core]
George Tsypin's set for Grendel (which worked perfectly on the opera's opening night in the Lincoln Center Festival, despite its overpublicized L.A. breakdown) is a giant, jagged rock wall, the central chunk of which lowers like a Murphy bed to make an upper stage, leaving a large gaping hole in the middle of the wall. Tsypin may have hit unconsciously on the new opera's basic problem: Musically, dramatically, and theatrically, it has no center.
— Read more at villagevoice.com

In 1957, John Crosby realized what must have seemed like a nutty idea, to build a major American cutting-edge opera company, not in New York but in the New Mexico desert. To this day, Santa Fe Opera remains the premiere summer opera destination in the United States: the oldest is Central City in Colorado, and the best newcomer is probably Opera Theater of St. Louis (founded by Richard Gaddes, one-time Artistic Administrator under John Crosby at Santa Fe, and now back in Santa Fe as General Director). It certainly does not hurt that Santa Fe is such a desirable place to visit, steeped in the multifaceted history of the southwestern United States, amid numerous sites treasured as holy by members of the Pueblo tribes. Even now, in spite of the kitschy shops and the casinos, the place feels close to the gods.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Saturday is the fifth annual Opera in the Park, a free outdoor concert at 8 p.m. in Garner Park.
The event is put on by the Madison Opera, with four guest soloists, players from the Madison Symphony Orchestra and the Madison Opera Chorus, all under the baton of MSO maestro John DeMain.
— Read more at The Capital Times

The Metropolitan Opera has named countertenor David Daniels to sing the role of Orfeo in its 2007 performances of Gluck's "Orfeo ed Euridice" - a production that was to have starred the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.
The Met announced Tuesday that it will dedicate the performances to the memory of Hunt Lieberson, who died of breast cancer July 3 at age 52.
— Read more at sfgate.com

[The Albert Hall was practically full - on the hottest night of the year - for Glyndebourne Festival Opera's annual visit to the Proms.]
After last year's knock-out performance of Giulio Cesare, this season's transfer of Nick Hytner's production of Mozart's Così fan tutte had a lot to live up to. It certainly didn't provide quite the same magic, in the end, but it was nevertheless an enjoyable and entertaining occasion.
— Read more at musicomh.com

Continuing our vacation through the Midwest, we drove by Cleveland yesterday and along Lake Erie, where we were able to pick up a southern outpost of CBC Radio (CBE 89.9, also known as CBC Radio Two, from Windsor, Ontario). As fate would have it, we were driving by at precisely the right time to hear a program called Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, which was broadcasting a recorded performance of Kaija Saariaho's latest opera, Adriana Mater, from the Opéra national de Paris. (Looking at the CBC's schedule of operas from around the world, I realized yet again that NPR is cheating us out of our tax dollars.) It was a very good signal that we picked up as clear as day from the start of the opera and that did not break up until the end. I was delighted, although I don't think the music helped the children to nap at all.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Pierre Elliott Trudeau has been the subject of biographies, essays and TV specials -- and coming soon, an opera.
"He has a life full of incidents, not to mention a prime ministership that was full of events and surprises,'' said Canadian author George Elliott Clarke, who's putting the finishing touches on a five-act opera about the late prime minister.
— Read more at CTV.ca

Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelung" is one of the monuments of Western civilization. In its original form, its four operas last 18 hours, performed over a period of several days and requiring a large cast of singers with huge voices, an orchestra of 100 and expensive sets. "Ring" cycles are special events.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

Loghan Bazan tightly clasped her hands in front of her and eased into Franz Schubert's ode to love "Du Bist Die Ruh" while standing in a ballroom-style classroom at Catholic University.
A few minutes later, the 16-year-old from Millersville sang it again, but this time with her arms cradling an imaginary baby, at the suggestion of master class teacher Elizabeth Bishop.
— Read more at HometownAnnapolis.com

It's a great year for the Utah Festival Opera. The operas this season, Puccini's "La Boheme" and Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," are high-watermark productions for this company, not to mention tried-and-true favorites for newcomers and opera buffs alike.
If you're not sure about opera, this is a great season to give it a try. And if you're an opera lover, it's a great year to relish what you love about opera.
— Read more at deseretnews.com

Budget problems have forced the Atlanta Opera to cancel a production of Handel's Orlando scheduled for the 2006-07 season, reports The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Orlando, which was scheduled for May 3, 5 and 6 at the Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, will be replaced by a one-night concert of operatic highlights. The five singers contracted to sing Orlando, including mezzo Vivica Genaux, will sing various arias instead.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Is it possible for Harry Potter fans to see an opera version of the series in the near future? Well if Tiffany Moon has her way The Harry Potter Opera Cycle may become a reality.
Moon, who is a composer, has completed one Potter opera solo of a seven-part opera cycle based on the books. So far she has been denied permission from Rowling as well as Warner Bros. to conduct the opera, but is holding out hope that permission may be eventually given.
— Read more at hpana.com

[Catching up with famed opera singer]
There's always excitement surrounding a Denyce Graves appearance, whether she's singing with our Opera Company, in recital or with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
The famed diva will appear Wednesday at the Mann, where she's no stranger. Graves sang a concert version of "Samson and Delilah" at the facility in 1993 and created a PBS special there with Patti LaBelle three years ago. This time, she's lavishing her lush mezzo-soprano voice on songs with an Iberian and Brazilian flavor, two from her languorous RCA disc, "The Lost Days."
— Read more at Philadelphia Daily News

Have you ever wondered what happens to the characters after the curtain comes down? Well, New Jersey Opera Theater is giving opera fans the chance to find out how Gianni Schicchi could continue after Puccini's comic opera comes to an end.
Michael Ching's Buoso's Ghost picks up the story just after Schicchi has tricked the Donati family out of their inheritance by impersonating their wealthy uncle and writing a new will.
— Read more at courierpostonline.com

The classic fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers and their colleagues are set in the spooky forests of medieval Europe, but they can plausibly play out anywhere. The poet Anne Sexton found a likely home for them in midcentury American suburbia, the landscape of alcohol and Freud.
"Transformations," her darkly witty 1971 collection of retold tales, soon underwent its own metamorphosis, becoming a lithe little chamber opera with a score by San Francisco composer Conrad Susa. And on Friday night at the Cowell Theater, the young singers of the Merola Opera Program guided the audience nimbly through these familiar but newly shadowy stories.
— Read more at sfgate.com

There is probably more opera being performed in Boston now than at any previous point in the city's history.
There are two principal opera companies, Boston Lyric Opera and Opera Boston. The Handel and Haydn Society and the Boston Early Music Festival bring us staged baroque opera, and the most recent "semi-staging" by Boston Baroque, Handel's "Agrippina," turned out to be the most exciting operatic event of this season.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

New operas don't often come in packages the size of Aida, but Grendel did on Tuesday at its Lincoln Center Festival opening. Huge numbers of choristers and dancers, plus a monumental revolving set and some of the best opera singers alive, told the Beowulf legend in images and music - from the viewpoint of the enemy, Grendel.
In comparison to so many well-made, well-mannered operas that have crossed the stage of late, Grendel is a fearlessly R-rated pageant with so much to say and so many imaginative ways of saying it that you're willing to wait until the two-act piece finds its footing somewhere near the end of Act I, particularly with the presence of Eric Owens. In the title role, he is consistently charismatic, theatrically and vocally.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer [Related news items]

Elliot Goldenthal's opera "Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad," to a libretto by Julie Taymor and J.D. McClatchy, has been as menaced by expensive staging mishaps, personal injury and mixed reviews as the Danes of "Beowulf" were by the opera's titular ogre.
— Read more at nj.com [Related news items]

"The reason we decided to do this issue now", says Opera News Editor-in-Chief F. Paul Driscoll about the August 2006 "Power Issue", featuring the magazine's list of the 25 most powerful people in opera in the United States, "is that August 1 is when Peter Gelb takes the general manager's job officially at the Metropolitan Opera. While that represents a changing of the guard at the biggest job in the classical music industry, there are lots of other big changes going on. There's new management in many other houses, including major companies in Houston and San Francisco as well as dynamic smaller companies such as Atlanta Opera and Madison Opera. And everyone's talking about the same thing and asking the same questions: What's the future of the art-form? Where are new audiences going to come from? How are we going to maintain the cultural relevance of opera in the United States? In response to this compelling scenario we made a list of 25 names that represent power in the industry now as the industry looks forward."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[In addition to some old favorites, Glimmerglass' lineup includes a new opera starring a gifted young soprano]
It's every opera company's worst nightmare, losing its star singer before a historic performance.
That's what Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown faced recently when soprano Christina Pier bowed out of The Greater Good, the Stephen Hartke and Philip Littell opera that receives its world premiere at Glimmerglass on Saturday.
— Read more at Democrat & Chronicle [Related news items]

The Santa Fe Opera production of Jules Massenet's 1899 Cinderella that opened Saturday is one of the few professional U.S. mountings this opera has ever gotten. Given how gloriously sung and magically played the performance under conductor Kenneth Montgomery was, and what a well-balanced mix of comedy and pathos director Laurent Pelly provided, it's hard to fathom that neglect - especially when you can find someone like the truly magical Joyce DiDonato to take on the title role, and when you have such a vociferous and positive audience reception as this received.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

FOR a comically suspenseful moment midway into Act I of his new opera, "The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif," the composer Stephen Hartke struck on a clever musical idea. "It's quite a kick," Mr. Hartke said during a rehearsal break the other day from Cooperstown, N.Y., where the work will have its much-anticipated premiere on Saturday at the Glimmerglass Opera. "It really works nicely."
— Read more at New York Times [Related news items]

Major productions of Wagner's Ring cycle are almost always newsworthy. The fact that the Festival d'Aix-en-Provence has enlisted Simon Rattle to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic for their new staging, at the rate of one opera per summer beginning with Das Rheingold earlier this month, is extraordinary. Fortunately, for those of us who could not make it to southern France, it drew major press attention. While hopefully on her vacation, Marie-Aude Roux was there (Belle première pour le Ring à Aix, July 4) for Le Monde (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

On November 11-19, 2006, the Sonoma City Opera will debut a newly commissioned, full-length opera on the life of legendary author Jack London. Written by noted librettist Philip Littell, with music by Grammy award-winning composer Libby Larsen, Every Man Jack will premiere during the Green Music Festival at Sonoma State University, with financial support from Kenwood Vineyards, its exclusive wine sponsor.
— Read more at Yahoo! Finance

he same creative team responsible for the Canadian opera Filumena is at work this summer creating another made-in-Canada opera.
Librettist John Murrell and composer John Estacio are testing their new work, Frobisher, before audiences at the Banff Centre near Calgary.
— Read more at CBC

Oh, those lists ... We love them, we love to hate them, we love to pass them around and argue with them ...
Opera News magazine has a new one, ripe for discussion, in its August 2006 issue - "The 25 Most Powerful Names in U.S. Opera" - two dozen plus one influential individuals (well, mostly individuals) divided into categories: The Executives, The Image-Makers, The Maestros, The Media and so on.
So, who are these people?
— Read more at PlaybillArts

It hasn't been performed here in 15 years. But Cincinnati Opera's production of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" Thursday night in Music Hall was a complete triumph that made one wonder why it's been absent so long.
— Read more at The Enquirer

When the Vermont International Opera Festival production of Gounod's "Faust" begins tonight in Waitsfield, it will be unlike any "Faust" - or any opera - that has been seen in Vermont. And, what's more, it's free.
"It's a very modern production," explained Carmen Or, the the festival's founder and director.
"The lighting engineer of the Cirque du Soleil is coming to us from Las Vegas, and he is going to create - with me - special visual effects."
— Read more at Times Argus

"It's all of a piece, isn't it - Music, movement, designs ..." The nice lady sitting down the row grasped the basic wonder of "Grendel," Elliot Goldenthal's new opera, better than some of the nation's top newspapers.
Ever since one Los Angeles performance had to be postponed in May, coverage of "Grendel" has been dominated by the story of George Tyspin's 18-ton set, which got briefly stuck. Never mind that such situations arise frequently in the theater world, or that opera performances in Europe are often pushed back because of strikes. The scandal almost seemed to be that there was a set at all. Indeed, given the ornamental, park-and-bark stagecraft that reigns at many of this country's opera companies, it can be easy to forget that opera's founders and greatest practitioners conceived of the form as "all of a piece," a fusion of all the arts. This is just what Goldenthal and his team delivered Tuesday at Lincoln Center.
— Read more at Newsday.com [Related news items]

Monsters and humans share the stage in Grendel, a new opera that opens in New York Tuesday night. Based on the novel by John Gardner, the show tells the classic medieval tale of Beowulf, but from the monster's perspective.
Julie Taymor, the show's Tony-winning director, also co-wrote Grendel with J.D. McClatchy. In order to get the audience to identify with the monster, rather than the humans, Taymor and McClatchy opted to have Grendel sing in contemporary English while the humans sing in the Old English of Beowulf. "It forces the audience to identify with the outsider, with the monster," Taymor says.
— Read more at NPR [Related news items]

The May 27 premiere of the opera "Grendel," composed by Elliot Goldenthal and directed by Julie Taymor, was postponed by the Los Angeles Opera, you may recall, because the 18-ton, 48-foot-tall rotating wall that dominates the elaborate staging failed to function. Weeks of anxiety followed at the Lincoln Center Festival, the opera?s co-commissioner and co-producer. Would the wall operate on the stage of the New York State Theater?
— Read more at New York Times [Related news items]

The other half of the Jessye Norman diptych at the Théâtre du Châtelet (see my post on July 12) was a concert performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, an Ionarts favorite, with Les Musiciens du Louvre -- Grenoble, conducted by Marc Minkowski. We have a rematch of the two music critics whose reviews I compared yesterday. First, Marie-Aude Roux wrote a review (Les hauts et les bas de Jessye Norman [The highs and lows of Jessye Norman], June 30) for Le Monde (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Still another delay to say 'Good-bye'to the stages here in Washington from Luciano Pavorotti.
The opera star was slated to perform at the Verizon Center in June but shortly before the June appearance, released a statement that the concert would be postponed until Halloween. The Pavarotti Worldwide Farewell Tour, consisting of 40 concerts celebrating the career of the great tenor, began in 2005 and is produced by impresario Harvey Goldsmith CBE. The remaining concerts are on hold again.
— Read more at WUSA9.com

There are no elaborate Corinthian backdrops, and no orchestra pit with dozens of black tuxes, but the legendary Donald Pippin's Pocket Opera delivers some good things in small packages. Last Sunday, it closed the last production of its 29th season, "Rigoletto" by Guiseppe Verdi, at Florence Gould Theater, located in the Legion of Honor museum building in San Francisco.
As is always the case with Pocket Opera, Pippin's famous English setting made the original Italian libretto easily digested by the audience, complemented by the Maestro's own narration.
— Read more at East Bay Publishing

The Canadian Opera Company has officially announced final casting for its first complete production of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Suddenly it's raining Donizettis, and productions of Don Pasquale in particular. Last month at Garsington, we got it transposed to turn-of-the-century Paris, with Norina as a charismatic café portraitist. Tonight, Jonathan Miller's production comes back into the Covent Garden repertoire; here, the 18th-century characters inhabit a vast doll's house, with Norina sleeping illicitly with her lover Ernesto in an up- stairs bedroom.
If this proves as joyful a riot as it did on its first outing, that will be thanks to the young Polish soprano who now incarnates the merry widow. This isn't Aleksandra Kurzak's Royal Opera debut - she made a shining appearance there last year in Mozart's Mitridate, Re di Ponto - but it is her big coming-out.
— Read more at Independent Online

The Metropolitan Opera, one of the world's leading opera companies, has received a $1 million gift from Marie Schwartz, an advisory director on its board, to fund a contemporary visual arts gallery.
The gallery, to be located in the opera house's south side lobby, will open Sept. 22, the start of the 2006-07 season, the organization said in a press release today. The Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, named after Schwartz and her late husband, will be free and open to the public, the release said.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Will Seattle Opera balance its books for this season, after posting a $280,000 shortfall for 2004-05.
Those at Tuesday's annual meeting didn't get an answer, because results for fiscal year 2005-06 are "too close to call," according to Tina Ryker, the company's communications and public-relations director. She said the news will come when the books close later this month.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

As the curtain goes up on the lavish $2.8 million production of Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" at the New York State Theater, we are immediately awestruck by the sight of a pentagonal cliff wall. Its rough texture and motley colors glow under a moonlight studded by glittering stars.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com [Related news items]

Michael Nyman's opera, 'Love Counts', will receive its British premiere at London's Almeida Theatre this week. The work, which has a libretto by Michael Hastings, tells the story of an unlikely romantic union between a mathematics teacher and a boxer. The premiere performance takes place tomorrow evening (July 14th), with further performances throughout July (17th, 19th, 21st and 23rd respectively). The project sees the reunion of the same group of artists behind Nyman's previous opera, 'Man and Boy: Dada'.
— Read more at musicfromthemovies.com

["Our Town" premieres in Saratoga Springs, on 4th of July no less]
If your idea of "Now Voyager" is a camp Bette Davis smoker about a uni-browed spinster, a fashion make-over, and not asking for the moon (when you've got the stars), with a lush Max Steiner soundtrack, lend me your ear and I'll clue you in on that score. The score of the "Now,Voyager" I refer to here is one section of a monumental choral work, based on the Great White Queer Poet Walt Whitman's epic "Goodbye, My Fancy," set to music by Gotham's premiere candidly queer composer and living landmark, Ned Rorem.
— Read more at gaycitynews.com [Related news items]

The Canadian Opera Company deposed the king of the gods and shifted a major Canadian soprano away from the spotlight yesterday, as it confirmed two major casting changes for its production of Wagner's Ring cycle at Toronto's new Four Seasons Centre in September.
Bass-baritone Peteris Eglitis, who held the key role of Wotan/the Wanderer with the COC during recent Ring-opera performances, has been taken off the bill, and soprano Frances Ginzer has been moved into second-cast position as Brunnhilde, the god's favourite daughter.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

[With the world premiere of an Eastman-backed production, Glimmerglass Opera shows how it all comes down to sex and food]
If Elizabeth Rousset (known as Boule de Suif) had read her horoscope that morning, she wouldn't have left the house. But she does leave, meeting up with nine other people trying to get from one French town to another during the Franco-Prussian war. They all board a stagecoach (it's 1870) and start their journey across a snowy landscape. That's when the trouble starts. First, it's really snowy and they get stuck in a drift. Second, it didn't occur to them to bring food. They get hungry.
So begins the new opera The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif by composer Stephen Hartke and writer Philip Littell, who based their American opera on a short story by Guy de Maupassant. The same story, "Boule de Suif" ("The Good Whore"), may have also inspired the film Stagecoach.
— Read more at City Newspaper

["Arrrgghhhh! Where's me Cavallli?" ]
Unless they were Gilbert and Sullivan fans, that might have been the reaction of some Glimmerglass Opera subscribers dismayed and disappointed at the opera company's sudden substitution last fall of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 operetta "The Pirates of Penzance" for Cavalli's 1649 Baroque opera "Giasone," a satire of the Jason and the Golden Fleece myth.
Just a glance at any Glimmerglass Opera season over the last few years reveals an opera company unlike any other American opera company in that rare and underperformed works almost always dominated a Glimmerglass season.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

The Théâtre du Châtelet has been having quite a summer opera season, beginning with the performance of the opera they commissioned from Patrick Burgan, Peter Pan, all to celebrate the final season of departing director Jean-Pierre Brossmann. Then, on June 10, 13, and 16, Pierre Boulez led an incredible performance, pairing Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé. The star of the night was legendary soprano Jessye Norman. Marie-Aude Roux wrote a review (Jessye Norman, des moments de magie pure, June 15) for Le Monde (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Evil is so good. For more than two hours, Eric Owens stalked the stage as a slimy beast in the New York premiere of Oscar-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal's opera "Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bang."
Besides slaying one hero and attacking the king's wife in her bedroom, the bass-baritone stole the show Tuesday night at the New York State Theater in the centerpiece of the two-week Lincoln Center Festival.
— Read more at sfgate.com [Related news items]

AN American soprano who was sacked from a Royal Opera House production because she was too fat is to return in the same role after losing nearly 10 stone.
Deborah Voigt was fired before performances of Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos because she could not fit into the tight black dress worn by the title character.
— Read more at Scotsman.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

This time of year, grand finales should be marked with fireworks, at least figuratively, and that's what Paul Kellogg and Stewart Robertson seem to have in mind for the Glimmerglass Opera.
When this summer's festival ends in August, the two men wind up their tenure as artistic and music director, respectively, and they clearly mean to provide plenty of dazzle and din before they do.
— Read more at CoopersTown Crier

The First International Jesús López Cobos Opera Conducting Competition, held in Madrid last week, has announced its first winner: 22-year-old Philippe Bach.
According to Europa Press, the young Swiss conductor won $12,000 and a two-season engagement as assistant music director at Madrid's Teatro Real. Jesús López Cobos, the house's music director and the competition's namesake, was on hand to give out the prize, alongside general director Miguel Muñiz.
Runners-up were Ryuichiro Sonoda of Japan and Seungup Yoon of South Korea.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

A new Canadian opera will focus on an iconic figure in Canadian politics and history - Pierre Elliott Trudeau.
Trudeau: Long March/Shining Path is being written by librettist George Elliott Clarke and jazz composer D.D. Jackson.
Clarke, a poet acclaimed for his Whylah Falls and author of the novel George and Rue, has written two earlier operas: Beatrice Chancy, about slaves in Nova Scotia, and Québécité, which is the story of interracial lovers.
— Read more at CBC

Not so long ago, the Royal Opera House in London caused a worldwide uproar when it released soprano Deborah Voigt from her contract to sing the title role in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos. But news broke over the weekend that the company has changed its mind - now that Voigt has changed her figure.
The Times of London, BBC News and Scotland on Sunday reported yesterday that the ROH has engaged the now-slimmer Voigt to sing Ariadne in the 2007-08 season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Canadian opera singers will mix with international colleagues to perform the first Canadian production of Richard Wagner's complete Ring Cycle this fall.
The Canadian Opera Company released on Tuesday its final cast list for September's three consecutive cycles of the massive Der Ring des Nibelungen series. CBC Arts

Most music fans are free to have a drink while they listen to live performances. Jazz-clubbers routinely have to buy - though not necessarily drink - two cocktails as part of the price of entry. Indie rockers don't feel dressed without a can of Pabst in one hand. But classical music fans can't so much as bring a bottle of water with them to their seats.
Not so at Opera on Tap, a raucous and sublime opera recital held each month in the back room of the Park Slope bar Freddy's. Its next performance - themed "Hot and Steamy" in honor of the season - is this Thursday.
— Read more at The New York Sun

[Old legend meets new music in the opera "Grendel" at Lincoln Center, wherein Philadelphia's Eric Owens gets a beastly makeover, and Beowulf gets a behemoth production.]
The music sounds like the end of the world, though actually it portrays the beginning - of civilization, war, heroism, random bloodshed and blame.
Here at the rehearsal for the new opera Grendel, which opens at the Lincoln Center Festival on Tuesday, Oscar-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal is telling the chorus members how he wants them to lament. "I've seen death close up," he says, "and there's a strange hovering right before they go. I know that's a little esoteric and not very cheerful, but... . "
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer [Related news items]

Having successfully reintroduced its strayed music director into the flock on Friday, the Boston Symphony Orchestra spent the rest of the weekend greeting its longtime friend Bernard Haitink. James Levine, not heard from in four months while recuperating from a fall, provided the could-he-or-couldn't-he drama when he conducted the Tanglewood Festival's opening night. Mr. Haitink led the orchestra on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon at the Shed.
— Read more at New York Times

Like the characters in Cincinnati Opera's "Un Ballo in Maschera" (A Masked Ball), who perform on a shiny black floor where they can never escape their own images, director Sandra Bernhard hopes members of the audience will see themselves in the drama unfolding onstage.
To be performed at 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday at Music Hall, Verdi's opera about political and romantic entanglements in 18th-century Sweden "is the kind of event that happens all the time," she said.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

[Slimming down its stars could weigh on opera]
Firing an opera singer for being too big sounds like firing a frog for being too green.
"Big" is the size opera singers come in. Gymnasts are small, opera singers are big. You want an opera singer, you want Luciano Pavarotti. Traditionally, that's what an opera singer looks like.
— Read more at New York Daily News

Wendy Steiner, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, will present her pilot preview of "The Loathly Lady" at screenings in Philadelphia and New York July 19 and 28.
'The Loathly Lady" is the first-ever animated opera. Based on a Chaucerian tale, the plot follows the adventures of an Arthurian knight, condemned to death unless he can find the answer to the question, "What do women want most?"
— Read more at upenn.edu

When Will Crutchfield began directing his Bel Canto at Caramoor series at the Caramoor International Music Festival here in 1992, he insisted on the flexibility offered in the series title. He mainly wanted to give new life to the bel canto repertory, a distinct body of Italian opera defined historically by the careers of Rossini and Verdi, at either end, and stylistically by a focus on the beauty and the virtuosic potential of the voice, to the virtual exclusion of other theatrical and operatic values, like sensible librettos and deeply considered orchestral writing.
— Read more at New York Times

Opera Theater of St. Louis also had a U.S. premiere on its schedule this summer. Last month, they presented Michael Berkeley's recent opera adapting the novel by Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (2000), directed by OTSL Artistic Director Colin Graham. Sarah Bryan Miller reviewed it (Opera Theatre of St. Louis: Jane Eyre, June 6) for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

An American soprano fired by the Royal Opera House because of her weight has been rehired after undergoing stomach surgery and losing 135 pounds, her spokeswoman and the prestigious theater said Sunday.
Deborah Voigt, one of the world's top opera singers, lost her part in Richard Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 2004 because the Royal Opera House decided a slimmer singer would be better.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Two hours and 29 minutes into the opening night of "Tosca" on Saturday at the Dean Lesher Regional Center for the Arts, something beautiful happened. Singing the role of Mario Cavaradossi, the embattled political prisoner who loves the title character of Puccini's melodrama, tenor Robert Breault delivered an impassioned, beautifully shaped performance of the opera's Act III aria, "E Lucevan le stelle."
It was surprising. It was also too little, too late. Until then, the rest of Saturday's opening had shaped up as a fairly lackluster effort.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Even monsters have mothers. That message is at the heart of John Gardner's 1971 novel "Grendel," a reshaping of the 10th-century Danish tale, "Beowulf." While that epic is named for the warrior-hero who slays a murderous beast, Mr. Gardner's story is told from the point of view of the beast, Grendel. And in his novel, the repulsive, Dane-eating monster appears more recognizably human than any of the stiff-necked, blinkered men who seek his demise.
— Read more at The New York Sun [Related news items]

Monsters are no strangers to the modern arts. Consider the long history of horror movies, which always have in common a non-human or transformed human who, turned evil by some past misdeed or sin, now preys on the virtuous living.
There's the vampire craze in immensely popular books (Anne Rice) and television ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") and Wagner's perennial dwarves, giants and dragons in the "Ring" cycle. Darth Vader, George Lucas' big screen idea of good talent gone terribly bad, would certainly qualify.
— Read more at nj.com [Related news items]

The Portland Opera has posted its first deficit in nine years.
The Oregonian reports that the $1 million shortfall came despite strong ticket sales for the 2005-06 season, which included Tosca, Nixon in China and Macbeth. Spokesman Jim Fullan told the paper he attributes the deficit, in part, to the fact the company was missing a development director for much of the season.
The deficit won't affect plans for the upcoming season, which includes Faust, Norma, The Flying Dutchman, and The Magic Flute, according to the paper.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

A Mozart tribute with no music by Mozart and West Coast premieres of operas by Philip Glass and Grigori Frid will fill Long Beach Opera's 2006-2007 season.
The schedule, which will be performed in different venues in September and November of this year and in April of 2007, was announced last week by LBO's General and Artistic Director Andreas Mitisek and will begin with a program called "No Mozart," which will take place Sept. 29 and 30 at the Vault 350 nightclub in downtown Long Beach.
— Read more at Press-Telegram

[The Flute failed to beguile and Rheingold fell flat in Provence.]
Although he has been dipping his toes into Wagner's great music dramas for some time now - in fact, he jumped in at the deep end, first with Parsifal, then with Tristan - Simon Rattle launched his first assault on the mighty, four-part Ring only two years ago. He gave a concert performance of Das Rheingold at the Proms, with the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment on the podium. Last month, he conducted concert performances with his Berlin Philharmonic as a prelude to a stage production of the entire tetralogy, which will be seen at the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Easter festivals over the next five years.
— Read more at Times Online

[A non-profit foundation is helping train the opera singers of tomorrow, led by one of the great sopranos of our time. NY1's Roger Clark stopped by on Monday and found that he won't be singing for his supper anytime soon.]
They are warming up to do a little Don Giovanni - students in an opera workshop learning all the ins and outs of the Mozart classic.
The workshop is called Prelude to Performance, presented by the Martina Arroyo Foundation. The now retired soprano and native New Yorker was one of the top opera singers of her era. Now she helps guide young performers with lessons like, when not to sing.
— Read more at NY1.com

[Hartke's 'The Greater Good' and Janacek's 'Jenufa' highlight the Cooperstown company's festival season]
The world premiere of a new opera and a Janácek masterpiece - sung in its original Czech - will be highlights of Glimmerglass Opera's 2006 season when the curtain goes up here at the Alice Busch Opera Theater Friday evening.
New productions of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Pirates of Penzance" and Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" will round out the company's two-month repertory, which runs through August.
— Read more at The Ithaca Journal See also: Behind the Scenes of "The Greater Good"