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

On Friday, September 22 and Saturday, September 23, 2006 at 7:30pm AMERICAN OPERA PROJECTS' Composers & the Voice Series presents SIX SCENES, concert readings from six operas-in-development. Performances will be held in the Great Room at South Oxford Space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, the home of American Opera Projects (AOP).
Six emerging composers were chosen in 2005 by American Opera Projects to spend a year writing for the operatic voice. The SIX SCENES program, for voice(s) and piano, represent the final compositions created during these "Composers & the Voice" workshops - "Christmas Day" by James Borchers, "Annamalai" by David Claman, "The Golden Gate" by Conrad Cummings, "The Train Ride" by Jeff Grace, "Shutter" by Hannah Lash, and "The Walled-Up Wife" by Gilda Lyons. At the conclusion of Saturday's performance, one of the scenes will be selected for continued AOP development. A live panel of judges will announce the scene to be produced as a staged reading in March 2007 at Manhattan School of Music's Greenfield Hall.
— Learn more at operaprojects.org

Anna Moffo, who died on March 9 of this year, was one of the Metropolitan Opera's best-loved sopranos during the 1960s. The Metropolitan Opera Guild will pay homage to her life and work next month with "Anna Moffo - A Celebration," a gala set for Wednesday, September 20 at 7:30 pm at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall in New York.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Glimmerglass Opera closed its 2006 season Tuesday with what this reviewer considers its finest of the four operas on its schedule. It cannot be faulted on any score - production, music, cast or direction.
Dramatically, "Jenufa" seems a slice of Eugene O'Neill. Yet, musically, Leos Janacek's score is full of lush, romantic music, as well as piercing emotional arias.
— Read more at syracuse.com

Director Kenneth Branagh is set to startle audiences at the Venice Film Festival in Italy next week, when he unveils his new movie adaptation of famous opera The Magic Flute.
— Read more at Yahoo! News UK

Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced that English baritone Simon Keenlyside has withdrawn from the company's upcoming new production of Iphigénie en Tauride citing severe back problems.
— Read more at Opera News

For its third season, Intermezzo: The New England Chamber Opera Series, returns to the Hackmatack Playhouse Barn on Sept. 1 and 2 with Gian-Carlo Menotti's comedic opera "The Old Maid and the Thief."
— Read more at seacoastonline.com

Before Emily Everson of Fanwood gets up on stage and prepares to sing an opera solo, she tries to get into character.
"If you are in character, you won't get nervous," Emily said before she rehearsed a scene from the opera "Hansel & Gretel" by Humperdinck. "Your character is thinking about what is going on in the scene and not thinking about messing up notes."
— Read more at nj.com

For 30 years, the Metropolitan Opera has wrinkled its elegant nose at advertising campaigns, preferring discreet sales tactics like direct mail and phone solicitations.
But next week, it is entering the mass marketing fray with ads in the most conventional places: telephone kiosks, lamp posts, subway entrances and the sides of city buses.
— Read more at New York Times

The post-Volpe era at the Metropolitan Opera begins with a populist bang: They're slapping ads on any surface to which they'll stick. The Times reports that with opera's natural audience now noisily unwrapping its sour candies in that great hall in the sky, a new generation of people willing to spend $300 to watch carb-fuelled grotesques belt out "Ernani involami - all'abborrito amplesso" must be found, and soon. Will the strategy work? The Times trots out high-culture expert Leon Wieseltier, who seems skeptical:...
— Read more at Gawker.com

"So I'm almost raped, and have to kill my husband! It makes a person think about how to express all that." These are the thoughts of Soprano Karita Mattila who performs the title role of Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca for the first time on Friday.
— Read more at Helsingin Sanomat

As the curtain falls on this year's Bayreuth festival, intense speculation again surrounds who will succeed Richard Wagner's octogenarian grandson at the helm one of Europe's most famous operatic events.
Thousands of Wagner fans have descended on the sleepy Bavarian town to honor one of Germany's greatest composers at a festival directed by Wagner's grandson Wolfgang, now aged 86, for more than half a century.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Opera audiences are accustomed to ignoring a singer's physical attributes in order to concentrate on the character. How else to believe that a mature performer is actually a spunky adolescent? But in the New York Grand Opera's performance of Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" at the Naumberg Band Shell in Central Park on Friday night, the casting suggested a provocative spin that the composer might not have envisioned.
— Read more at New York Times

[This article about the San Francisco Opera's first performance appeared in The Chronicle on Sept. 27, 1923.]
The grand opera addicts were there all the way from the haute monde to the hoc genus omne.
There were fully 7,000 of them, 6,000 of whom sat; the remaining 1,000 stood first on one foot and then on the other. All regular standees will recognize the action.
— Read more at sfgate.com

It's always the best deal in the theater season - the free Cohen Studio Series at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. The edgy 10-show lineup for 2006-2007 features rarely performed classics - and reinventions of classics - that promise sold-out shows.
— Read more at The Enquirer

Léopold Simoneau, the Canadian lyric tenor who dominated international Mozart performance in the 1950?s, died on Thursday night in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 90 and lived in Victoria.
— Read more at New York Times

Peter Gelb is camping out in his new office at the Metropolitan Opera. The furniture is temporary and the walls bare, except for a large, flat-screen television.
As Gelb, who officially began his job as general manager of the Met this month, talks to a visitor, he keeps an eye on the television screen. There the Great Wall of China is being erected on the stage of the Met, a practice run to see how the sets will work when "The First Emperor," one of six new productions this season, makes its world debut here on Dec. 21. Its director, Zhang Yimou, and its composer and conductor, Tan Dun, are well- known to film buffs for their work on Ang Lee's prizewinning movie "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

When you flip through the "New Productions" pages of The Metropolitan Opera's 2006-2007 Season brochure, you'll think you're seeing stars. They're actually asterisks -- practically a galaxy of them. They're there because, as is customary, they denote Met debuts. What's particularly noticeable is that some of the asterisks signal the debuts of such artists as Anthony Minghella, Jack O'Brien, Zhang Yimou, and Bartlett Sher -- directors who are better known for their work in film and theater than in opera.
— Read more at TheaterMania.com

[New York City Opera walks on the wild side of the 18th century this fall with Handel's Semele.]
"The women think he has exposed their Bitchery too much; and the Gentlemen, are offended with him, for the discovery of their follyes."
So wrote John Dryden, in defense of "The Double Dealer" by his protégé William Congreve, librettist of Semele and one of the imposing figures of the great age of English satire. Drawing on ancient Greek and Roman examples, satires could be gently playful, following Horace, or scathingly vicious, after Juvenal. They exposed the foibles of society, and attacked the hypocrisy or misrule of leading public figures, as in The Beggars' Opera. In all cases, the aim was to use laughter to bring audiences to a greater understanding of themselves, their leading citizens, and the society they lived in.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

THERE are singers, and there are Wagnerian singers. That daunting difference became increasingly clear on Aug. 19 in the course of the First International Wagner Competition at the Seattle Opera. As the eight finalists sang excerpts that covered the entire Wagner canon from "Rienzi" to "Parsifal," the peculiar demands of the repertory crystallized into a single word: torment.
— Read more at New York Times

One of the opera world's most beloved and glamorous divas takes on one of opera's most beloved and glamorous diva roles. (The role is, of course, that of a diva.)
Karita Mattila sings the eponymous prima donna in Puccini's Tosca for the first time onstage tonight at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

When Brian McMaster, outgoing director of the Edinburgh International Festival, looked to commission an opera for his last season in the Festival City, he turned to a Scot for the music. But not to James MacMillan, currently the best-known of Caledonian composers. Instead McMaster settled on Stuart MacRae, a relative youngster (now only 30) whose Violin Concerto had a big success in 2001 when Tasmin Little premiered it at the BBC Proms and another when Christian Tetzlaff played it in Edinburgh the following summer. (The Sunday Telegraph's critic called it "one of the best pieces of new music I have heard.")
— Read more at PlaybillArts

THIS weekend's offerings from the EIF saw the world premier of a new Scottish opera and the European premier of an American ballet, first produced in the 1960s.
If the opera had anything to learn from the ballet, it was that whatever the medium, and whatever the plot, if you can't tell the story then you will fail.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Filmmaker Atom Egoyan, renowned for award-winning movies that explore the dark sides of human behavior, is taking a turn at helming a grand opera with similar brooding features.
Egoyan, 46, the Egyptian-born son of Armenian parents who migrated to Canada, has examined incest, the horrors of war and the mysteries of fate in such deeply psychological films as "Exotica," "The Sweet Hereafter," "Felicia's Journey" and "Ararat." He will revisit some of those themes for an upcoming Canadian Opera Company production of Richard Wagner's 19th century opera "Die Walkure."
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Houston Ebony Opera Guild production of Carmen offered charms for both the neophyte opera-goer and the veteran.
Plenty of fresh ears seemed present at Friday's first performance at Miller Outdoor Theater (the second is tonight). Laughs of surprise and pleasure greeted several turns of plot in the story about a cigarette girl who seduces a soldier but then dumps him for a bullfighter.
— Read more at chron.com

[Every August Bank Holiday, thousands of Bryn Terfel fans gather in North Wales for his annual Faenol Festival. But it's not just Welsh music lovers who are waving their flags - people travel from all over the world for the event. Karen Price catches up with some of the globe trotters.]
John and Aileen Sullivan from Maryland, USA DURING a concert recital at the Washington Performing Arts Centre in 2000, John and Aileen Sullivan fell under Bryn Terfel's spell.
— Read more at icWales

I thought that the quixotic plan of the organizers of this summer's Salzburg Festival -- Mozart 22, productions of all of the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in honor of the year of the composer's 250th birthday -- was both crazy and wonderful. It was also apparently very expensive (Shirley Apthorp, Salzburg Festival Sparks Queries Over Sponsors' Investment, Bloomberg News, August 4). Anthony Tommasini was there (among other places) for the New York Times, and he even wrote something like a blog, a Salzburg Festival Journal (all of four days long), about the experience.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

[Talent nurtured in upstate N.Y.]
There are many ways of defining luxury. One of them involves building a summertime-only opera house in the middle of a 17-hectare meadow.
That is what happened 19 years ago outside Cooperstown in upstate New York with the construction of the Alice Busch Opera Theatre, home of Glimmerglass Opera.
— Read more at TheStar.com

[This magnificent production of Tchaikovsky's epic confirms Peter Stein as a master craftsman ]
A French company directed by a German brings Russian opera to Scotland: the mix may be decidedly cross-cultural, but it fuses into an evening as authentically Slavonic as lovers of epic-scale grand opera could dare to hope. Peter Stein's magnificent staging of Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa for the Opera National de Lyon has proved the operatic highlight thus far of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, and an appropriate beginning to the end of Brian McMaster's 15 years as its artistic director.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited Arts

Better bring a wad of Kleenex to the Richmond County Bank Ballpark on Tuesday for the Metropolitan Opera's free-opera-in-the-park visit. This summer's selection, "La Traviata," is Giuseppe Verdi's blockbuster about a whore with a heart of a gold -- and a voice like an angel. The sophisticated libretto or story, so true-to-life it makes "La Boheme" seem like sitcom schmaltz, begins innocently enough:...
— Read more at silive.com

The curtain had come down. The applause had died out. And Pamela Stein, having just sung her first principal operatic role, had one thought.
"I want to do this again."
The 24-year-old lyric soprano from Rockaway Township had taken on the challenging title role of Puccini's one-act opera "Suor Angelica" at the Opera Festival di Roma in Rome on July 20.
— Read more at Daily Record

The world premiere of a classical opera written by Roger Waters, ex-frontman of the Pink Floyd rock group, opened in Poland on, realising the musician's long held ambition to stage a spectacle inspired by the French revolution.
"I dedicate (the opera) to those who fought for human rights," 62-year-old British musician told the 12,000-strong crowd in Polish at the opening of "Ca Ira" in French, and subtitled "There is Hope" in English.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

"Yeah, summer festivals. We get the point." My brother Dave and sister-in-law Gloria have heard me extol the virtues of off-season musical events about a thousand times. With the end of the summer festival season in sight, it was high time I took my own advice and joined them in Santa Fe.
— Read more at thevillager.com

Leopold Simoneau, one of Canada's most acclaimed opera singers, has died at age 90.
Simoneau died peacefully Thursday night in the Victoria home where he had lived for the past 20 years with his wife, soprano Pierrette Alaire.
Simoneau was born near Quebec City in 1916, but left as a young man to study music in Montreal.
— Read more at CTV.ca

Before the Metropolitan Opera's performance of Verdi's "Traviata" on the Great Lawn of Central Park on Tuesday night, Peter Gelb, the company's new general manager, welcomed the audience to the 40th season of free summer performances. He seized the opportunity to promote several new initiatives: a free dress rehearsal of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" on Sept. 22, television broadcasts and Internet downloads, and a family-friendly condensation of Mozart's "Magic Flute" during the Met's winter break.
— Read more at New York Times

"Are you ready for some opera?" bellowed Metropolitan Opera radio host Margaret Juntwait into the sea of picnickers on Central Park's Great Lawn.
A roar usually reserved for stadium rock bands and SEC football rolled from the back of the lawn to the edge of the stage, infecting all -- from brown-baggers to caviar connoisseurs -- with giddy enthusiasm. Clear skies and a cool evening set the scene as the sun set slowly behind the park. It was time to get your opera on.
— Read more at nj.com

In its two opera productions this summer, Mostly Mozart focused on the protracted moment when Mozart found his operatic voice. Passing over his nine early-stage works, from "Apollo et Hyacinthus" through "Il Re Pastore," the festival first looked at "Zaide," an incomplete score that was fleshed out here with orchestral interludes from "Thamos." It didn't work particularly well: a listener more taken with the "Thamos" borrowings than with "Zaide" might have wished that the pit band, Concerto Köln, had played a symphonic concert instead.
— Read more at New York Times

There was a single concert performance of Strauss's Elektra last month at the Tanglewood Festival. I would have liked to have heard it, not least because of the casting: Lisa Gasteen (Elektra), Christine Brewer (Chrysothemis), Felicity Palmer (Klytemnestra), Alan Held (Orest), and Siegfried Jerusalem (Aegist). Having James Levine back at the podium didn't hurt either. Richard Dyer was there (Levine marshals the ferocity of 'Elektra', July 18) for the Boston Globe:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

English baritone Simon Keenlyside has withdrawn from Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride due to back problems, the company has announced.
American baritone Lucas Meachem will instead sing the role of Oreste in the production, scheduled to run eight performances between September 29 and October 27.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

World-renowned opera star Jose Carreras has spoken of his delight that he is to perform amid the beautiful surroundings of Holkham Hall next month.
Mr Carreras, regarded as one of the world's greatest tenors, has selected the grounds of Holkham Hall as the venue for his only UK show this year.
"Having been spoilt by the beauty of Catalonia landscape, my home, for so long, it is rare that I discover beauty that takes my breath away."
— Read more at Fakenham Times

Schumann's incidental music to Byron's Manfred impressed many sensible people in its day. Unfortunately, the poet's febrile Romanticism now seems merely foolish. Most of the text is spoken rather than sung, which meant that the excellent soloists in this performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra were wasted, singing a few lines and then lapsing into schoolroom German. Even the Edinburgh Festival Chorus had only a few bars.
— Read more at Independent Online

In its first year of eligibility, Princeton-based New Jersey Opera Theater (NJOT) has received one of the prestigious Citations of Excellence awarded by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (NJSCA). The citation, the NJCSA?s highest honor, was presented to NJOT and 27 other New Jersey arts organizations at the Council?s recent annual meeting in Trenton. Of the 20 new organizations receiving funding from NJSCA for the first time this year, New Jersey Opera Theater is the only organization to also receive the Citation of Excellence.
— Learn more at NJOT

Glimmerglass Opera has announced the appointment of Andrea Lyons as the company's Director of Administration and Operations, effective September 2006. Ms. Lyons is currently Executive Director of the Charles R. Wood Theater in Glens Falls, New York, and accepts this post at Glimmerglass following the tenure of Jeryl Dropp.
— Learn more at Glimmerglass.org

Cynics scoffed when a crusty impresario named John Crosby founded what he hoped would become a thriving summer opera festival in the unlikeliest of settings -- an open-sided theater perched atop a scrub-dotted mesa in the northern New Mexico desert.
Nobody is scoffing anymore.
This week, the Santa Fe Opera is lowering the curtain on its 50th anniversary season and doing so with the high standards and resolute faith in its original vision that have made the company an operatic oasis in the American southwest.
— Read more at Chicago Tribune

Typically, when a great American play is turned into a potentially great American opera, the news is trumpeted from the skies, or at least from one of the big-city opera houses. Not with Our Town - Ned Rorem's opera version of the classic Thornton Wilder play - whose quieter, more gradual birth is taking place on a circuit of theaters that may bring it to a university near you.
Yes, university.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

It is a tricky business to dedicate a music festival to a single composer. Bayreuth, the oldest of modern festivals, manages quite well with the 10 mature operas of Richard Wagner, even if critics routinely urge new repertoire as a source of fresh blood. Festivals emphasizing one composer are more likely to follow the example of Salzburg, where Mozart remains the favorite son, but offerings vary widely.
In the city of Pesaro on the Adriatic Sea, Gioachino Rossini, born there in 1792, is king. The city's beachfront restaurants and hotels are surely an asset, but the Rossini Opera Festival here has a formula that attracts audiences with Rossini and Rossini alone. The festival's three annual opera productions and most of its supplementary events are devoted to the Swan of Pesaro, as the composer was known, though a departure was made this year for the 250th birthday of Mozart (a composer Rossini revered) when the one-act "Die Schuldigkeit des Ersten Gebots," composed when the Austrian was 11, was offered in a double bill.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

For its third season, Intermezzo: The New England Chamber Opera Series, returns to the Hackmatack Playhouse Barn on Sept. 1 and 2 with Gian-Carlo Menotti?s comedic opera "The Old Maid and the Thief."
— Read more at keepMEcurrent.com

[Opera singer Deborah Voigt was humiliated in March 2004 when, weighing an estimated 20st, she was sacked by Covent Garden bosses for being too fat. But it spurred her into action and she had gastric bypass surgery three months later. Two years on, the U.S.-born singer has lost more than 10st and recently sang Tosca at New York's Metropolitan Opera House. Here Deborah, 46, who is divorced and lives in Florida, tells TESSA CUNNINGHAM why she chose surgery and how it has changed her life.]
The McDonald's sign caught my eye as I was driving home from an exhausting rehearsal.
Before I knew what I was doing, I'd pulled in, grabbed a bag of chips and was mindlessly stuffing them into my mouth. I've been doing the same virtually every day of my adult life. But this time was different. Within minutes I was doubled up in agony.
— Read more at Daily Mail

Broadway singer-actor Jason Graae, who was recently seen in the Cape Playhouse's new staging of Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls, has been cast in the San Francisco Opera's upcoming production of Die Fledermaus.
Graae will play drunken jailer Frosch in the company's production of Johann Strauss Jr.'s opera, which is scheduled to play the War Memorial Opera House Sept. 9-Oct. 13. Graae follows a long line of comic actors who have previously played that role, including Jack Gilford, Victor Borge, Dom DeLuise and Bill Irwin.
— Read more at Playbill News

[Third-grader's vacation fun includes role in "Madama Butterfly" production]
Third-grader Lila Cheny-Fabio will have plenty to tell her teachers at Taconic Hills Elementary School if they ask for a "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" report.
There was the trip to Canada with her family, days spent playing with her friends and, oh yeah, her role as Trouble in Berkshire Opera Company's production of "Madama Butterfly."
— Read more at Times Union

Craig Rutenberg has been appointed Director of Music Administration at the Metropolitan Opera, the company announced today.
Rutenberg, a seasoned pianist and vocal coach, was made an assistant conductor at the company in 1986, and served served as head of the Met's music staff from 1989 until 1992. He has likewise worked with the San Francisco Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Glyndebourne Festival, the Aix-en-Provence festival and Paris' Opéra Comique.
— Read more at Opera News

San Francisco Opera has announced plans to present a condensed family-friendly version of The Barber of Seville in a performance at the War Memorial Opera House on Sunday, November 5 at 3 p.m.
The opera's abridged edition, featuring a running time of two-hours with one twenty-minute intermission, will be performed in the original Italian, with English supertitles. In lieu of Italian recitatives, the character of Figaro will narrate the opera's story. A cast has yet to be annouced.
Fully costumed and staged on a rotating set, the production will also feature the company's full chorus. San Francisco Opera has recommended the production for families with children over the age of twelve.
— Read more at Opera News

Minnesota-born soprano Audrey Stottler remembers the moment she decided to become an opera singer. While studying architecture, chemistry and history as a freshman at Moorhead State, she listened to records in the university's music library.
"During one of those sessions I heard 'La Gioconda' sung by Maria Callas. It got my attention and I thought to myself, I can do that," she laughs. "I was just a kid. So I decided that I would start to study and did. And that was the very beginning."
— Read more at Duluth News Tribune

The Seattle Opera says soprano Miriam Murphy and baritone James Rutherford are the winners of the world's first International Wagner Competition.
— Read more at United Press International

[Elektra had its highs, but the Weill double bill really took flight, says Hugh Canning]
Brian McMaster's final Edinburgh International Festival took off with a fearsome noise last Sunday: the three peremptory chords that open Richard Strauss's Elektra, signifying the murdered Agamemnon. In a little less than two weeks' time, the curtain will come down on the McMaster era with the celebratory closing chorus of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
— Read more at timesonline.co.uk

Chicago Opera Vanguard, as part of the 2006 Around the Coyote Fall Festival, presents a cabaret evening showcasing selections from Reagan's Children: An Opera-Oratorio by local composer Eric Reda, September 8-10 at Davenport's Piano Bar and Cabaret, 1383 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood.
"So what's it like to be Reagan's kid?" asks Tony Kushner in his epic Angels in America, later answering "I think we all know what that's like." Regardless of one's political leanings, it is hard to escape the cult of personality surrounding late President Ronald Reagan. Reagan's Children: An Opera-Oratorio draws on Reagan's domestic life as a catalyst for examining the complexities of family dynamics and the questions that we are all left with after the death of a father.
— Read more at reagan.4ringcircus.net

One of the highlights of Santa Fe Opera's 50th anniversary season has been the American debut of Thomas Adès's first full-scale opera, The Tempest, whose world premiere with the Royal Opera in London two years ago won lavish acclaim.
Adès "uses Shakespeare's play as a pretext and makes what he will of the characters and plot, single-mindedly following the thread of Prospero's vengeance and, ultimately, grudging mercy," wrote James R. Oestreich in The New York Times. The libretto by Meredith Oakes, he observed, streamlines the original Shakespearean plot, using newly-written rhyming couplets while avoiding most of the best-known lines from its model.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Concert at CCM's Grandin Festival to feature work of 'Dead Man Walking' writer]
For Jake Heggie, composer of the operas "Dead Man Walking" and "The End of the Affair," singing involves much more than just a pretty voice.
It's about finding "where the human connections are between the words and music," says Heggie, in town this week for the Grandin Festival, a vocal event at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. The festival presents a concert of Heggie's songs, Sunday in Werner Recital Hall.
— Read more at The Enquirer

As its main contribution to the Mozart-at-250 year, the Salzburg Festival is putting on all 22 of Mozart's stage works, from pre-teen fragments to the last opera, "La Clemenza di Tito." Mozart ended far too soon, of course, but "Tito" was a fine one to end on - an unqualified masterpiece. It is an opera seria, using a text by the poetic master of that form, Pietro Metastasio.
Metastasio is somewhat laughed at today, as formulaic and stodgy. But we learn something interesting from Rodney Bolt's new biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of "Don Giovanni" and so on: Da Ponte revered Metastasio. And he wasn't wrong.
— Read more at The New York Sun

Opera fans love the works of Richard Wagner. But finding singers who are up to the vocal demands of the music is a challenge.
Seattle Opera hopes to fill the gap Saturday night with the first-ever International Wagner Competition, an event that will bring eight young singers to the stage of McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. The singers, who come from around the world, will be competing for two $15,000 prizes.
— Read more at HeraldNet

In this summer of opera, a concert performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera "Cosi fan tutte" raptly held the attention of a small audience Wednesday evening in UMD's Weber Music Hall.
In this story, two couples are prepared to marry. At the instigation of two schemers, both men attempt to seduce the other's betrothed. After some success, the farce is exposed, and a large wedding is proposed.
— Read more at DuluthSuperior.com

Central City Opera has reported record revenues for its just-completed summer season, with ticket sales totaling $1.16 million - an increase of nearly $40,000 over the 2005 season.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News: Business

You might have thought it would have happened by now, but mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux is finally making her New York City Opera debut this fall. She will sing the role of Juno in Handel's "Semele," itself a premiere for the company.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

Members of Glimmerglass Opera's Young American Artists Program will present a concert of operatic favorites on Tuesday, August 22, at 6:00 p.m. at Cherry Valley-Springfield Central School to thank the community for its continued support of the company. Admission is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.
The concert will feature staged ensembles from works by Gilbert & Sullivan, Beethoven, Britten, Donizetti, Hartke, Mozart, Puccini, and Verdi, and will be performed by the 26 members of Glimmerglass's renowned Young American Artists Program, accompanied at the piano by members of the Opera's music staff. The ensembles will be staged by Glimmerglass Opera's resident directors.
— Learn more at Glimmerglass.org

The New York City Opera is taking seriously the business of finding new audiences. Last year it opened its season with Opera-for-All, an inexpensive series of performances meant to lure the uninitiated or the impecunious, and this season it is expanding the program to four nights (Sept. 7 to 10) from two, including a concert of excerpts, two full performances of "La Bohème" and one of "Carmen," at $25 a ticket. And as a way of drawing attention to Opera-for-All the company is presenting Afternoon Arias, a series of free lunchtime concerts at Bryant Park this week.
— Read more at New York Times

The Metropolitan Opera will host its first-ever open house on September 22 with a free dress rehearsal of Anthony Minghella's new staging of Puccini's Madama Butterfly.
The production, conducted by James Levine, opens the Met's 2006-07 season on September 25 with soprano Cristina Gallardo-Domâs in the title role, Marcello Giordani as Pinkerton, Dwayne Croft as Sharpless and Maria Zifchak as Suzuki.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Seattle Opera has announced the creation of a new "Audience-Favorite" award category for its first International Wagner Competition, which is scheduled to take place this Saturday, August 19 at 7:30 P.M. in Seattle's Marion Oliver McCaw Hall.
The new category will allow the audience to take part in the Competition's outcome, along with the panel of five judges charged with choosing two first-place winners from eight nominees. After the singing portion of the event, audience members will have the chance to vote for their favorite singer in the lobby of McCaw Hall, while the judges deliberate on the official selections.
— Read more at Opera News

San Diego Opera announced its blockbuster season for 2007. The lineup promises something for everybody.
There will be two operas never performed in San Diego; two epic historical
dramas done up in grand opera style; two diverse tragedies with grisly murders; one situation comedy for relief. The repertory ranges from 18th century classical Mozart to 20th century avant-garde Berg wrapped around romantic Verdi, Mussorgsky, and Saint-Saens.
— Read more at voiceofsandiego.org

The great Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer directs a cast of movie stars and a famous punk rocker in "Die Dreigroschenoper" ("The Threepenny Opera") at the newly renovated Admiralspalast on Friedrichstrasse. The theater, closed for several years, was part of an entertainment complex that served as a den of pleasure and vice in the decadent and dangerous Berlin of the 1920s.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[Bruce Beresford likes directing opera. He was just waiting to be asked, writes Bryce Hallett.]
BRUCE BERESFORD'S waterfront house in Balmain is suitably roomy and shadowy, yet there's more evidence of a man in love with opera than of a man in love with the movies. High ceilings make the walls an ideal showcase for posters, memorabilia and photographs, and they are here in abundance: framed pictures of composers, signed lithographs and opera posters, including one for a production of Rigoletto Beresford staged in Los Angeles and another for Elektra - the first and last opera he directed in Australia. That was in 1991, for the State Opera of South Australia.
— Read more at smh.com.au

Opera-goers attend international festivals in the hopes of witnessing stagings like Laurent Pelly's brilliant production of Massenet's enchanting "Cendrillon" (August 9), centered around Joyce DiDonato's vocally and theatrically incandescent heroine. Or the first North American staging of Thomas Adès' 2004 "The Tempest" (August 11), thanks to a strong cast, director Jonathan Kent, and designer Paul Brown. Many factors make any Santa Fe Opera's summer season memorable, not least the phenomenal beauty of the open-at-the-sides opera house?breathtakingly sited, truly invigorating. Not every opera presented is on this level; Tim Albery's doggedly unmagical "Magic Flute" (August 8) offered some good performances, but scarcely attained festival standard.
— Read more at gaycitynews.com

World premieres in the opera arena are trumpeted from the rooftops. They deserve it, since risking the heavy finances and resources of a company on an unknown work that might find disfavor with the public becomes an increasingly major problem.
The last time Glimmerglass Opera took the risk was in 1999 when it launched "Central Park," a three-part work, each with different composers and an equal number of playwrights creating original stories set in the New York City landmark.
Now comes "The Greater Good" from Stephen Hartke and based on a short story by Guy de Maupassant. What were they thinking?
— Read more at syracuse.com

Former Cincinnati Opera Artistic Director Nicholas Muni will join the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music beginning in September.
Muni, who led the opera from 1996 to 2004, will hold the position of distinguished artist in residence in opera at CCM and will direct productions at CCM, including Jules Massenet's "Werther" in May and a March Opera Studio production. He will also direct musical theater projects to be announced.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Lyric Opera San Diego has hopped on the property ladder, reports the San Diego Union Tribune, and has purchased the renovated 1928 Stephen and Mary Birch North Park Theatre, where it is based.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Viva La Revolution! But beware the pitfalls of careless love.
Many of Our Town's finest singers participated in bringing a modern version of Georges Bizet's 'Carmen' to life. Located at the Hermitage Mansion, near Daisy Field, The Delaware Valley Opera Company ended its summer season with this famously tragic opera.
— Read more at zwire.com

The Metropolitan Opera has commissioned a new opera from composer/jazz powerhouse Wynton Marsalis and award-winning playwright John Guare. The project was revealed during an interview Met general manager Peter Gelb gave to Playbill.com yesterday.
The venture is in its earliest stages, so no subject or working title has yet been chosen and no anticipated completion date has yet been set, according to a Met spokesperson.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Migenes irreverently, affectionately skewers her profession from every angle]
No one ever said that opera was logical. As even seasoned aficionados will tell you, the world's greatest art form raises as many questions as it answers. How, for example, do all those consumptive heroines find the strength to sing as they're dying? Why do all operas -- even those in English -- seem to be in a foreign language? And what really happens when the fat lady sings?
Julia Migenes addresses these issues -- and more -- in "Diva on the Verge." The hilarious one-woman show, which opened last weekend at the Plush Room, features plenty of singing by the acclaimed soprano. But the real surprise is how funny -- and insightful -- this diva can be when she steps out of character.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Central City Opera is the oldest summer opera festival in the United States. Fifty years ago, CCO commissioned a new opera from composer Douglas Moore, The Ballad of Baby Doe, which they revived for this season. Marc Shulgold wrote a detailed review (Even after 50 years, 'Baby Doe' remains a charmer, June 27) for the Rocky Mountain News:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

I hadn't been to the Santa Fe Opera in 35 years. In 1971, I spent the entire summer there, hanging out, painting sets, "acting" (I got to play the inquisition guard who arrests Verdi's Don Carlo), and even writing my very first professional music review (for the Boston Globe) - about the posthumous world premiere of Villa-Lobos's opera version of García Lorca's Yerma. I learned a lot about how operas get produced, how careers get made (and unmade). I was all ears, and no threat. I listened to singers and musicians joke about their experiences and worry about their precarious futures.
— Read more at The Phoenix

KURT Weill's cantata The Lindbergh Flight/The Flight over the Ocean (originally conceived for radio) and his sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins - both epitomising different aspects of the American dream and both to dryly effective texts by Bertolt Brecht - make a stunning double bill.
Francois Girard's production for Lyon Opera, which opened on Monday night, makes that point in the most forceful and inspirational of ways.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

This week, the City Opera has its Afternoon Arias program where different City Opera singers serenade those in Bryant Park. The programs start at 12:30PM, and another bonus is that you can buy the $25 seat tickets for Opera For All, which the City Opera has brought back for another year (tickets officially go on sale next Monday).
— Read more at Gothamist

Last December, I mentioned that Kenneth Branagh has undertaken a film version of The Magic Flute. At that point, I knew that René Pape was going to sing Sarastro and that Lyubov Petrova would portray the Queen of the Night. I also knew that Branagh was using an English translation of the German text of the opera, made by actor and comedian Stephen Fry. Now all opera fans know the magical movie of The Magic Flute made by Ingmar Bergman, which makes me wonder at Branagh's foolhardiness in trying to compete with it, especially for his first attempt to adapt an opera to film. His plan was to transpose the story to the era of World War I -- the quote at the time was that "the three ladies who accompany the Queen of the Night will be recast as field nurses, and the feathered man, Papageno, will become the custodian of canaries used to detect lethal gas." Well, Branagh is not the first director to try to make a WWI film as a whimsical comedy.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Nicholas Muni, former artistic director for the Cincinnati Opera, will join the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music this fall.
Muni will be the Distinguished Artist in Residence in Opera for the 2006-07 academic year, UC said in a news release. He will teach graduate-level courses in opera acting and directing, and direct several CCM stage productions, including the opera "Werther" in May 2007.
— Read more at Cincinnati Business Courier

July was New American Opera Month in the purple hills of upstate New York and western Massachusetts. You could hardly drive your Smart car from the lesbian bed-and-breakfast to the organic farm stand without running over an adaptation of a literary property. Stephen Hartke's "The Greater Good" made its début at the Glimmerglass Opera, in Cooperstown. The Lake George Opera, in Saratoga Springs, presented Ned Rorem's "Our Town," which had its première in Indiana earlier this year. Elliott Carter's opera "What Next?" (1999) belatedly had its first American staging, at Tanglewood. Back in New York, Elliot Goldenthal's "Grendel" was the centerpiece of the Lincoln Center Festival, in a Julie Taymor extravaganza. These performances, all well attended, came at the end of a musical season that brought John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" to the San Francisco Opera, Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" to the Met, and Lowell Liebermann's "Miss Lonelyhearts" to Juilliard.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

Four-time Tony-winner Audra McDonald is being sought to star in the upcoming New York premiere of the John Adams opera Doctor Atomic at the Metroplitan Opera
The Met will present the opera - which had its premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Oct. 1, 2005 - during the 2008-09 season. The piece has a libretto by Peter Sellars. McDonald would play the lead role of Kitty Oppenheimer, wife of "father of the atomic bomb" Robert Oppenheimer, the Met's new general manager Peter Gelb told Playbill.com.
— Read more at Playbill News

New York City Opera will expand its successful Opera-For-All program with additional $25 performances, the company announced today.
The company launched Opera-For-All last year with three special performances - one of highlights from the City Opera season and two of Puccini's Madama Butterfly - for which all tickets were $25. All three of the shows were sold out, and, according to the company, 71 percent of the audience had never been to a City Opera event before.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Julia Migenes offers a consumer advisory at the top of her one-woman show, "Diva on the Verge," at the Empire Plush Room. "Opera extremists," she warns, "are in the wrong theater." Anyone expecting a night of refined vocal delights from a soprano who has sung in major opera houses around the world has been misled. This is a show, as its creator puts it, for "those who have successfully avoided opera."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Verdi's "Il trovatore" has one of those silly melodramatic plots that people are always making fun of in grand opera. It is also the opera people flock to for its great music and singing, and Opera North's production delivers it all. Opera North, the area's professional regional opera company, opened a production of "Il trovatore," Saturday at the Lebanon Opera House, that had all the trappings of grand opera - great singing, a good orchestra, lavish set and costumes and, of course, a silly plot.
— Read more at Times Argus

Air travel for classical musicians has never been easy.
Those husky cellos need an extra ticket. Hey, security! Watch that priceless Stradivarius. Double-reed players? They have long given up on carrying aboard those valuable knives and shaping tools used to mold the cane that transforms their breath into lyrical sounds.
— Read more at New York Times

For the first time since Enrico Caruso sang into a recording horn in 1902, the consumption of opera at home is shifting.
Once heard but only occasionally seen on the home front, opera can now roar out of laptops and widescreen TV sets in surround sound and high-definition pictures via DVDs, which are no longer an afterthought to compact discs and are quickly becoming the ruling format.
"Studio recordings of opera have become prohibitively expensive. The likelihood of seeing many more is pretty much nil," says Mark Forlow, vice president of EMI and Virgin Classics in New York. "We?ve begun reaching out to opera houses to see what exactly is available . . . for DVD format."
— Read more at The Columbus Dispatch

[New takes on "the tempest" and "cinderella," and a solid "salome" put the crowning touch on 50 years]
Thomas Ades has concocted a dark, seething stew of magic, malevolence and mayhem in a gripping new operatic adaptation of "The Tempest," which is making its American debut this summer at the Santa Fe Opera.
A supercharged score, a striking, sophisticated libretto by Meredith Oakes and astonishing performances by the principal cast combine for an extraordinary evening of daring contemporary opera.
— Read more at DenverPost.com

Sir Andrew Davis, Lyric Opera of Chicago's music director and principal conductor, will undergo leg surgery next week that will cause him to miss more than a month of performances, the Lyric announced Friday.
Davis, 62, has had pain in his left leg for some time and the surgery, a femoral popliteal artery bypass, is intended to "increase his comfort and mobility," Lyric spokeswoman Magda Krance said.
— Read more at cbs2chicago.com

When teenager Aleesa Baakko performed on stage with The 3 Royal Tenors last year, she did not think she could beat the experience.
Last month, however, she had what she described as "the greatest experience of my life." The 17-year-old was lucky enough to land a place at a weeklong singing school at the prestigious Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J.
— Read more at Sierra Vista Herald

An unfinished Mozart opera about slavery that opened in New York this week shows the 18th century composer was no "airhead" but rather a passionate human rights activist, director Peter Sellars said on Friday.
"Zaide" is the story of a love affair between two slaves and their efforts to escape. Sellars has set his production in a modern-day sweatshop, inspired by one in Los Angeles.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

[Hugh Canning feels patriotic about brilliant productions of Thomas Adès's The Tempest and Mozart's The Magic Flute]
There is something magical about the summer opera season in Santa Fe that derives not just from the unique construction of the John Crosby Theater - a fan-shaped, canopied stage and auditorium, open at the sides and the back so that you see the New Mexico desert, mountains and sky as "backdrops". No, what makes it so special is the conjunction of art and the weather: the latter is unpredictable, of course, but it miraculously performed on cue for the American premiere production of Thomas Adès's The Tempest, which opened to a mighty electric storm on the night I saw it, and Tim Albery's production of The Magic Flute, at which we had real lightning flashes, albeit some time after the (recorded) thunderclaps for the Queen of the Night's dramatic entrance.
— Read more at Sunday Times

This summer at the Santa Fe Opera, second-year apprentice singer Anya Matanovic has three jobs.
Matanovic, a light lyric soprano, is one of the sprites in "Cinderella," she's covering a role in "Cinderella" that has one line -- "Et moi?" and she's singing the part of Papagena in "The Magic Flute."
"(Papagena) is a small part, about three minutes on stage. But it's fun to be making my debut at the Santa Fe Opera in this part," she said.
— Read more at redorbit.com

Scottish Opera is celebrating an unprecedented surge in public donations ahead of its flagship autumn production, sparking optimism that philanthropy will play an increasingly important financial role for the company.
On launching the Play A Supporting Role scheme in March for its forth coming production of Richard Strauss's comic opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier Of The Rose), the company had hoped to raise around £12,000 through individual sponsorship for each of the show?s 60 roles. In return, donors receive accreditation in the opera's programme next to their chosen characters and are invited to one of two exclusive on-stage parties in October and November.
— Read more at Sunday Herald

Klaus Maria Brandauer's much-awaited production of"Threepenny Opera"got a mixed reception, with cheers for German rock star Campino as Mack the Knife but scattered boos for the conventional staging.
Actor-director Brandauer, who starred in"Mephisto"and was nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role in"Out of Africa,"had resisted questions about how his production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's musical comedy about the criminal MacHeath would differ from earlier versions.
— Read more at FOXNews.com

It's time for a brief holiday here at AllAboutOpera.com. We'll be back online August 14th.

Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the renowned German-born soprano and one of the most intelligent and dazzling artists of her time, died today at her home in western Austria. She was 90.

Her death was reported by Austrian state television, The Associated Press said.

To her many admirers, Miss Schwarzkopf was a peerless interpreter of Strauss's Marschallin, Mozart's Donna Elvira, and other operatic roles. But her luster was tainted in her later years by revelations that she had lied about the extent of her association with the Nazis during World War II.
— Read more at New York Times

With some operatic roles, it is difficult to enjoy watching an opera in a live performance if the singer does not embody the character's physical qualities. In the new Carmen now at Santa Fe Opera, Anne Sofie von Otter has created one of the most alluring performances of the title role, but mostly for the ears. When she first assayed this role, at Glyndebourne -- a performance that was almost immediately released on DVD -- most were amazed that the normally cool, Nordic von Otter had created one of the most sensual Carmens to date. Little of the sexual frankness -- crassness, perhaps -- admired and occasionally criticized in the Glyndebourne production was evident here, in her debut performance at Santa Fe.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809) hasn't gone down in history as an opera composer. He was a masterful musical engineer who left a rich legacy of chamber and choral music, especially - music that is as much loved for its compositional genius as for Haydn's sense of how to interweave humour and drama.
But he did apply these traits to the opera stage, as well. Here, we get a fabulous new concert-performance of his most popular opera, Orlando Paladino, which begs a staged production.
— Read more at TheStar.com

[Deborah Voigt Was Fired for Being Too Fat]
You don't think of weight discrimination when it comes to the opera, but it happened to renowned soprano Deborah Voigt back in 2003. She was fired by London's famed Royal Opera House because it decided a thinner singer would be better.
— Read more at ABC News

IN A ROOM on the sixth floor of the War Memorial Opera House, the singers of the Merola Opera Program are rehearsing a scene from "Il Matrimonio Segreto." Director Nicola Bowie watches carefully as soprano Caryn Marlowe, singing the role of Elisetta in Cimarosa's comic opera, rises from a low leather sofa, throws a long chartreuse scarf around her neck and makes a dramatic exit.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

With the conclusion of the new production of Wagner's epic "Ring des Nibelungen" here on Monday night, you might think that the directors of the Bayreuth Festival would have given everyone a day off to recuperate. But that is not the way this place works. So on Tuesday it was "Tristan und Isolde," a modern-dress production by Christoph Marthaler that was introduced last summer and is still provoking strong reactions.
— Read more at New York Times

[JUSTIN DAVIDSON looks at some of the challenges facing the Met's new general manager [Peter Gelb], who officially takes office this month.]
For decades, the Metropolitan Opera has been theater's version of IBM, marching backward with great aplomb into a shadowy future, dazzled by visions of its history.
Opera-lovers adore the past, of course, which is why when Karita Mattila blazes through Lohengrin, the lobby at intermission still hums with mutterings about Eleanor Steber (who last sang the role there in 1956). In such a temple, precedent is an honorable burden, while innovation is both crucial and suspect.
— Read more at Opera News

If you've ever seen the news footage of resolute but good-humored opera fans camped out in front of the old Met in 1965, not for hours but for days, hoping to secure a standing-room ticket to see one of Callas's two performances of Tosca, you know that plenty has changed in New York?s opera scene during the past forty-one years.
— Read more at Opera News

[For more than thirty years, Matthew Epstein has been a dominant force in the world of opera. TIM PAGE speaks to the self-proclaimed guru about the state of the art today and where it may be going tomorrow.]
"When something bothers me, I speak up. Not always loudly but certainly clearly, intensely - and some people don't want to hear it. I'm not afraid to say no, you can't do that opera with so little time to prepare - no, you can't throw that on a stage in your old, tatty production - no, that's not a good enough vocal performance to let pass. Maybe I'm too assertive, and maybe that's a fault of mine - but if we lose our standards, what do we have left?"
— Read more at Opera News

On August 6 Opera del West will make that happen at The Center for Arts in Natick, with the new company's inaugural performance, featuring staged and semi-staged selections from some of opera's most beloved works. The concert will feature scenes from Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro", Puccini's "Madame Butterfly", and Strauss's "Die Fledermaus", among others. All works will be performed in original languages with English supertitles.
— Learn more at natickarts.org

['Mozart's greatest opera' gets modern-day treatment]
As a mezzo-soprano, Lunenburg's Nina Scott-Stoddart never got a chance to sing her favourite Mozart opera. Don Giovanni is full of sopranos.
"There wasn't a mezzo role in it for me," she said over coffee on Monday morning. "I passed them by. But now, as a director I get to participate."
Scott-Stoddart and pianist Tara Scott have teamed up this month for the second season of the Halifax Summer Opera Workshop, to stage Don Giovanni in Dalhousie's Sir James Dunn Theatre Thursday to Sunday.
— Read more at The ChronicleHerald.ca

Earlier today, Jens reviewed an excellent new recording of The Magic Flute, one that I have been listening to as well lately. It is an opera that we find ourselves writing about frequently at Ionarts, and it is one that is near and dear to my heart. So here we are again, with Mozart's masterful Singspiel in a production at Santa Fe Opera. Normally, I am happy to have the chance to hear it, but this summer I was particularly thrilled because it featured French soprano Natalie Dessay. Having recovered from devastating vocal problems in recent years, including operations on her throat, Dessay has returned to the stage in excellent voice, singing a Juliette at the Met and now taking on her first Pamina in Santa Fe. German is not her best language and this may not become a signature role, but she made a fragile, tender, ravishing, and well-acted Pamina. Ach, ich fühl's was full of pain, but not weepy, and the voice still has the power to transport me. Singing across from her, Toby Spence as Tamino was right to collapse at the thought of losing her.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Imagine a musical version of Gustav Klimt's art, lush, sensuous, a swirl of rich textures and finishes, and you'll have some idea of Franz Schreker's 1915 opera Die Gezeichneten (The Marked Ones).
The opera had quite a tour of major European opera houses, but by the early 1930s, the Austrian composer's partly Jewish heritage and decadent operas had doomed him in Nazi-ruled lands. Performances were canceled, and Schreker was banished from academia; his operas disappeared from the repertory.
— Read more at KING5 Seattle News

Glimmerglass Opera will present a musical tribute in honor of Music Director and Principal Conductor Stewart Robertson's final season with the company on Sunday, August 6 at 4:45 pm in the Alice Busch Opera Theater. This poignant tribute will feature the world premiere of a piece by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett, whose opera The Mines of Sulphur, was the critically acclaimed surprise hit of Glimmerglass' 2004 Festival Season, as well as performances by guest artists and members of the company's Young American Artists Program. The tribute is free and the public is invited.
— Learn more at glimmerglass.org

Long Leaf Opera, Chapel Hill, NC announces a One-Act Opera Competition. There is no entry fee. The winning entry will receive a $1,000 prize and a performance at the Long Leaf Opera Festival in July 2007.
The piece must be written in English and no more than one hour in length. The number of major roles should not exceed six plus a small chorus if necessary. The orchestra (any combination of orchestral instruments) is limited to sixteen players. If the cast is larger than this, a letter of inquiry and explanation should be directed to LLO before submission.
The piece must not have been premiered or presented in any form other than informal readings. If the piece is adapted from another copyrighted work not in the public domain, permission in writing must be obtained for the adaptation and public performance of the work.
For more detailed information and an application, please visit www.longleafopera.org or contact Jim Schaeffer, Executive Director: 919-338-2642 or js@longleafopera.org

During its annual date at the Stern Grove Festival on Sunday afternoon, the San Francisco Opera went crazy with significant company debuts. Two singers of distinction, ably accompanied by members of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra conducted by Robert Wood, bowed under the organization's aegis in a sophisticated program of 18th century and Romantic fare.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The other day, in my journal from the Wagner Festival here, which has been running on nytimes.com, I wrote of the demand for tickets at this most exclusive of international music festivals. Waits of seven years to purchase a seat are not uncommon.
— Read more at New York Times

Russian diva Anna Netrebko officially became an Austrian citizen in Salzburg, a few days after giving a glorious performance at the city's famous Music Festival.
The Austrian council of ministers decided last week to give the 34-year-old soprano Austrian citizenship without requiring her to pass a test like most common mortals, because of her "particular merits."
— Read more at Yahoo! News

For the first time in its 33-year-history, the New York Grand Opera has cancelled a performance due to hot weather.
The company was scheduled to perform Puccini's Tosca at 7:30 this evening in Central Park. But with temperatures in Manhattan this afternoon forecast to reach 100 degrees - and even after dark unlikely to fall below the mid-90s amid the concrete on and in front of the park's Naumburg Bandshell, the performance venue - the show will not go on.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Scottish Opera is set to be sued for breach of promise, after allegedly failing to honour an agreement to re-employ singers sacked as part of last year's controversial scrapping of the company?s chorus.
Equity claims that 20 choristers who did not take voluntary redundancy when 88 employees were laid off last year as part of the deal with the Scottish Executive were told they would get first refusal for jobs on Don Giovanni, Carmen and Der Rosenkavalier.
— Read more at The Stage

Some summer vacations, the high point will be a rerun of the Bugs Bunny classic "What's Opera, Doc?"
And other summer vacations, you get to write and star in an opera.
On Monday at First Presbyterian Church, 11 elementary and middle school students began the latter process. Their pile of musical instruments, vocal exercises and plot brainstorming will conclude with a free noon performance Friday at the church about 19th century cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving.
— Read more at Roswell Daily Record News

An opera house in Berlin is likely to against the country's constitution, as it plans to encourage the audience to smoke cannabis joints while viewing its latest production.
The Neuköllner Opera House says it wants to enhance the psychedelic experience of Camille Saint-Saens' drug opera 'The Oriental Princess,' and hence has come up with the idea of letting the audience mellow out in the stalls alongwith the actors, who'll also smoke pot onstage.
— Read more at NewKerala Online

Grand opera is like Hollywood: Nearly all the great roles for women favor the young and nubile. Despite the fact that the operatic voice doesn't usually reach its prime until the singer's 40s, many of the leading roles call for much younger priestesses, princesses and ingénues.
— Read more at The Seattle Times

The American premiere of English composer Thomas Adès' The Tempest on Saturday at the Santa Fe Opera was a perfect elemental typhoon -- the kind of work SFO should always try to be known for. Earth, air and water defined the moody, functional production led by director Jonathan Kent, while music director Alan Gilbert drew sheets of inspirational fire from the singers and orchestra. It was an evening of high-quality music theater indeed.
— Read more at freenewmexican.com

"Genoveva," despite what you might have heard, is not the worst opera ever written. In the race for worst libretto it is competitive, but given the kind of graceful and modestly handsome production provided at Bard College on Friday night, onlookers can comfortably wrap themselves in urgent, lyrical and, yes, theatrical music while accepting the opera?s frailties with a minimum of pain.
— Read more at New York Times

'IT WAS an opera, and of course the story greatly mangled and the dialogue in a great part nonsense. Yet it was strange to hear anything like the words which I dictated to William Laidlaw at Abbotsford, now recited in a foreign tongue, and for the amusement of a strange people."
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Any performance of "Siegfried," the third opera in Richard Wagner's "Ring" cycle, rests squarely on the shoulders of its young title character, who is on stage throughout most of a long evening.
In the new production that premiered Saturday at the annual Wagner Festival, tenor Stephen Gould has both the broad shoulders of a football player and a voice that appears equal to the challenges of the role. His is a powerful sound, capable of rising to the dramatic climaxes, but always bright and lyrical. He is also a naturally engaging performer, unusually athletic and youthful as befits the teenage hero.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

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

New York City Opera will return to the Bryant Park stage this summer for "Afternoon Arias," its free lunchtime concert series, between August 15-18.
The program, which was inaugurated last year, features young singers from the company performing favorites from such operas as Bizet's Carmen, Puccini's La Bohème, Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, Gilbert & Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance, and Verdi's La traviata and Rigoletto.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

"Through all the employments of life / each neighbour abuses his brother," the lovable scoundrel Peachum remarks in the opening song of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.
This delightful 18th-century musical satire, reprised at the Thousand Islands Playhouse in its 25th year, seems on the surface to celebrate this universality of abuse.
It is an orgy of malice and double-dealing, creating seeming joy from a London underworld where money is all that matters and the only hint of loyalty is to be found among a gang of highwaymen.
— Read more at newsfeed.recorder.ca