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

Stung by harsh public criticism, the German opera house that canceled a Mozart opera for fear of provoking a violent reaction from Muslims said today that it was considering reinstating the production, provided it could obtain adequate security from the police.
"We're discussing what we can do," a spokesman for the Deutsche Oper in Berlin, Alexander Busche, said in an interview. "There has to be a new statement on security from the police."
— Read more at New York Times

Let the news ring out from Lincoln Center. Send word by satellite radio. Trumpet it in Times Square. An exciting new era was born at the staid old Metropolitan Opera on Monday night.
Peter Gelb, the master showman who has just taken over as the company's general manager, put on a season opener like no other in recent memory _ a stunning production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" directed by Oscar-winning film director Anthony Minghella.
— Read more at CBS News

Houston Grand Opera music director Patrick Summers has signed a five-year contract extension.
Summers became HGO's music director in 1998 and his previous contract ran through 2009. His new contract, announced Wednesday, will keep him as music director until at least 2014.
"Houston is my home, and as a citizen interested in the cultural life of our city, I am honored to play a role in its future," Summers said.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

With huge screens recording her tiniest tear and smallest bead of sweat, "Madama Butterfly" opened the Metropolitan Opera season last night in a gala transmitted live to Lincoln Center Plaza and Times Square as the curtain rose on Peter Gelb's first season as general manager.
Seating was free in both outside venues. At Times Square, the chairs eventually held 1,000 visitors who watched the show on three screens, including Nasdaq's. There was plenty to compete with Puccini's 1904 opera, including the NBC peacock and a Budweiser neon sign.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

We are supposed to have a new Metropolitan Opera, with the coming of Peter Gelb as general manager, and a huge public relations push. But, amazingly, there is still opera to judge: singers, a conductor, an orchestra, a production. No amount of PR can change the basic question: How did it go?
The Met opened its 2006?07 season Monday night with Puccini's "Madama Butterfly." In the recent past the Met has opened with galas consisting of selected acts from various operas. Such galas are apparently déclassé now. I always liked them, frankly, and the Met did them well. Moreover, you rarely have the chance to hear and see excerpts in an opera house.
— Read more at The New York Sun

The Metropolitan Opera's new regime will be credited with and accused of many things in the coming weeks - but "demure" won't be among them.
The Monday opening of the 2006-07 season looked more like the Oscars than the opera, with a red carpet for pop star Rufus Wainwright and movie actor Jude Law, seen on giant video screens both in Lincoln Center Plaza and in Times Square. Rock star Lou Reed was seen lining up at the bar at intermission. Retired mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne merrily greeted fans. Pop chameleon David Bowie took in the opera from the Gold Coast seats.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

For anyone curious about Anthony Minghella's new staging of Madama Butterfly, which transfixed audiences at the Metropolitan Opera House, at Lincoln Center Plaza, and in Times Square, the Met is presenting an exciting behind-the-scenes look at the complex process of bringing this new opera production to life.
The half-hour documentary "In Rehearsal: A New Butterfly for the Met," a Susan Froemke Production, will air on Thirteen/WNET New York Sunday at 11PM.

Renee Fleming is at the peak of her career. The American soprano is adored by opera audiences around the world, and when she's hailed as possessing the most beautiful voice in the world - well, for once it's really not just hype. And in this media-soaked age, it doesn't hurt that Fleming is both a savvy businesswoman and a stunningly beautiful woman made for the glamorous costumes she wears on the stages of the world's great opera houses and the elaborate designer gowns she favors for her international recital tours.
— Read more at TownOnline.com

[IU Opera opens new season with 'Don Giovanni']
Indiana University Opera Theater has opened its new season with "Don Giovanni," featuring a notorious insatiable lover inspired by the legends of Don Juan.
With its third production of the beloved romantic tragedy in a decade, IU Opera Theater pays tribute to the 250th anniversary of the birth of Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
— Read more at IndyStar.com

With all the issues dividing Muslims and Germans, there was one point on which all 30 participants in a landmark Islamic conference agreed here today, its German organizer said.
They would like to see the Deutsche Oper of Berlin reinstate the Mozart opera it canceled earlier this week for fear that the production - which features a scene with the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad - would offend Muslims and put the opera house at risk.
— Read more at New York Times

In the aisles and lobbies during the second intermission of the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," which opened the season on Monday night before a star-studded audience, patrons could be overheard heatedly debating the puppet used to portray Butterfly's little boy.
— Read more at New York Times

Things were supposed to quiet down at the Metropolitan Opera after the multimedia season opener for "Madama Butterfly" on Monday, but the Met was just as busy a day later with "La Gioconda."
Ponchielli's four-act extravaganza is no place for the faint of heart. The house has not put it on in 16 years, perhaps with an eye to giving patrons time to rest up. Beni Montresor's sets and costumes must have moldered in storage. Both have been spruced up to give 17th-century Venice and Venetians an appropriately upscale look.
— Read more at New York Times

In the 1930's the Austrian-born composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, working in Hollywood, essentially invented the symphonic film score, thrilling audiences with his music for "Captain Blood," "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and other swashbuckling favorites.
You could say that it all started in Germany in 1920. Korngold, then 24, enjoyed an enormous success with his mystery opera "Die Tote Stadt." In recent decades this once-popular work has become something of a rarity. The New York City Opera, though, believes in it. On Sunday afternoon the company revived its 1975 production by the director Frank Corsaro and the film and slide designer Ronald Chase, which uses scrims, projections and filmed scenes to convey the dreamlike story.
— Read more at New York Times

A new director, a new production, a new season - all of these stirred emotions last night at the Metropolitan Opera, but none as much as the presence of large screens that were set up on the plaza of Lincoln Center and in Times Square for a live simulcast of the premiere of Anthony Minghella's "Madama Butterfly." That was exactly the point for the impresario of the event, the Metropolitan Opera's new director, Peter Gelb.
— Read more at The New York Sun

An opera company's decision to pull a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" featuring the severed heads of Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad triggered a furious debate Tuesday over Islam and the role of art in a world made painfully aware of religious sensitivities after protests over the Prophet Muhammad cartoons.
Kirsten Harms, director of Berlin's Deutsche Oper, announced "with great regret" that she had decided to cancel the 225-year-old opera after state security officials warned it could provoke dangerous reactions in the current politically charged climate.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

For reasons that I understand but dislike, new operas are the hardest tickets for most American companies to sell. For Washington National Opera, whose audience is largely allergic to anything outside the familiar repertory, it must be difficult to reconcile what a major American opera company should be doing - performing recent operas and commissioning new ones - with the overwhelming concern for the bottom line. All the more reason, then, to praise WNO for mounting the American premiere of Nicholas Maw's 2002 opera, Sophie's Choice. Let us hope that the performances will make the company enough money not to discourage further experimentation with new operas, but the number of empty seats in the Kennedy Center Opera House on Sunday afternoon, while not scandalous, was enough to make me worry. If you wish the WNO were not always producing the same old operas, you are obligated to see one of the four remaining performances.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - DCist

Thomas Stewart, one of the great bass-baritones of the last half century just died at the age of 79. There will be many in Washington D.C. who knew him and his wife, Evelyn Lear. I did not, but just like anyone else even remotely interested in Opera - and particular Wagner - I have cherished many of his recordings.
— Read more at ionarts

Sophie's Choice, first a book by William Styron, then a film with and Maryl Streep and Kevin Kline, is now an opera ... and a most welcome American premiere by the Washington National Opera who is taking a fair amount of risk whenever it mounts productions of challenging and modern work.
Fortunately Nicholas Maw is a fairly well known and much liked composer (and neighbor) here in the Washington region; Sophie's Choice a well known - though perhaps too disturbing to say: popular - sujet and the cost of the new production frayed by the partnership with the Berlin and Vienna opera houses that staged it before Washington did. It premiered at Covent Garden under Simon Rattle in a Trevor Nunn staging in late 2002 to rather mixed reviews.
— Read more at ionarts

Bicyclists and passers-by stopped, seemingly mesmerized by the giant images of "Madama Butterfly" glaring through the night sky over Times Square. About 900 people sat in red-cushioned chairs behind red velvet ropes on Broadway. Neon advertisements for beer and the Internet competed with a tenor and a soprano singing out their passion.
The Metropolitan Opera embarked on a new era with a season-opening gala last night that dripped wealth and celebrity but also included an unprecedented dose of populism: a simulcast in Times Square, where the giant Panasonic, Nasdaq and Reuters screens beamed Puccini's tale of love and abandonment north to a blocked-off section of Broadway.
— Read more at New York Times

Maybe I missed the memo - the policy directive stating that the most effective strategy to achieve new English-language opera is to base it on a classic play or novel, preferably one that has already acquired a definitive film version. Composers received the message, though, and the American Lit school of opera has developed a syllabus of its own: Tobias Picker's "American Tragedy," John Harbison's "The Great Gatsby," Andre Previn's "A Streetcar Named Desire," William Bolcom's "A View From the Bridge," Mark Adamo's "Little Women," Ned Rorem's "Our Town."
— Read more at Newsday.com

New York City Opera has announced the latest addition to its highly popular 'Opera-For-All' program. On Friday, October 6, the company will present an extra performance of its production of Puccini's La Bohème - and every seat in the house will cost $25.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The 2006 season from Washington National Opera finally opened Saturday night with an opera that I was thrilled to see and hear live, Béla Bartók's A Kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard's Castle, premiered at the Budapest Opera in 1918). The Ambassador of Hungary, András Simonyi - fresh from a hilarious appearance on the Colbert Report - was so happy that he helped host the opening night WNO gala in honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the 125th anniversary of Bartók's birth.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - DCist

Whenever Becky Lee Hinton joins an Opera Quad-Cities production, she knows her involvement will mean evenings and weekends spent in rehearsals and performances as opposed to with her husband and three daughters.
"Most of the time, when mommies and daddies perform, it's time away from the family," Hinton said.
— Read more at QCTimes.com

Opera people are used to multitasking, but Peter Kozma, newly appointed director of the opera/ music-theater program at Ohio State University, stretches the concept.
After he completed his summer tenure as resident artist and stage director at the Minnesota Opera, he moved to Columbus. He is auditioning singers for productions, continuing work on a doctorate and building hours toward a pilot's license.
— Read more at The Columbus Dispatch

People with disabilities "can achieve much more than they believe is possible" is the message that composer Thomas Stanghelle would like to convey in his new opera-musical, "Some Sunny Night."
The work, to make its American premiere Thursday at the Sorg Opera House in Middletown, is based upon a true story. Almost too incredible to believe, it depicts how a Norwegian marathon hero with cystic fibrosis and a Chinese man who was paralyzed after a plane crash met at a rehabilitation hospital. Together, they founded a marathon in Beijing for people with disabilities.
The opera-musical had its world premiere in Norway, home of the 29-year-old composer. Last year, it premiered in Beijing at the Great Hall of the People.
— Read more at The Enquirer

Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," a comedy of errors, was more notable for the errors than the comedy during the Amato Opera's performance on Saturday at its beguilingly tiny home on the Bowery. The appealing period sets made the most of the small stage. Many New Yorkers could sympathize with Figaro in Act I as he tries to figure out how to fit his bed into cramped living quarters.
— Read more at New York Times

Thomas Stewart, an American baritone who was renowned for his portrayals of Wotan, Amfortas and other central Wagnerian roles and who was heard frequently at Bayreuth and the Metropolitan Opera, died on Sunday in Rockville, Md. He was 78.
— Read more at New York Times

LAST Monday afternoon Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of "The English Patient," was back where he has been happiest lately: within inches of the action. For several weeks before, work on his production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" had been unfolding on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, where the production opens Monday evening, raising the curtain on the regime of Peter Gelb, the company's new general manager. But for one last day rehearsals were back in a basement studio, where Mr. Minghella could study nuances in close-up.
— Read more at New York Times

[Annalena Persson is one of a trio of Swedish sopranos causing a stir in operatic circles]
While preparing to sing opera's most demanding soprano role - Wagner's Isolde - Annalena Persson will probably pump herself up with either the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen or a favourite band from her native Sweden, Ebba Gron.
— Read more at The Observer

For several minutes, the Opera in the Heights production of Verdi's Rigoletto gave hopes the company was kicking off its 11th season at a new level of vocal polish.
Like his character, the handsome tenor for the Duke of Mantua was young and cocky. If he didn't have a particularly pure sound, he sang with self-assurance and excellent diction.
— Read more at chron.com

That the Washington National Opera opens its 2006/2007 season with a double bill of two 20th-century operas followed by an American premiere of a 21st-century work might be hard to believe but it is very easy to accept. Given the restrictions that a company with only seven different productions in a season faces in a conservative town, the inclusion of Béla Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle - part of a double bill with Puccini's Gianni Schicchi (both premiered in 1918) - and the American premiere of Nicholas Maw's Sophie's Choice (premiered in 2002 at Covent Garden) is gutsy and laudable.
— Read more at ionarts

Playing Friday at the Metropolitan Opera: "Madame Anomaly."
Operagoers sat cross-legged on the red-carpeted floor of the grand tier, eating bag lunches. Patrons nestled into $375 seats free. People wandered across the stage, snapping pictures.
It was open house at the Met, when the hoary and staid home of grand opera allowed the unwashed rabble (actually, many seemed to be opera lovers) through its doors, free, to wander the house, view exhibits and listen to a question-and-answer session.
— Read more at New York Times

Toronto is very much in the grip of Wagnermania these days, with the Ring of the Nibelung packing the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
But Mozart's Cosi fan tutte will follow Wagner's Ring onto the new stage in November and operas by Gounod, Shostakovich, Verdi and Strauss promise to round out the Canadian Opera Company's first season in its new home.
— Read more at TheStar.com

New operas are the stuff of rumors. Relatively few people attend the first performance of one, and many works never have a second production. So a new opera's reputation rests on what other people have said about it.
In the case of Nicholas Maw's "Sophie's Choice," which had its premiere at Covent Garden in London in 2002, the response was sharply divided. But this opera subsequently traveled to Berlin and Vienna, making it to the United States on Thursday night, courtesy of the Washington National Opera, which deserves kudos for allowing Americans, at last, to make up their own minds.
— Read more at New York Times

Throughout a celebrated career spanning nearly 40 years, opera singer Jessye Norman has performed for presidents and royalty. She has hopped from continent to continent, singing in grand palaces and storied concert halls.
But Friday, the dramatic soprano played a venue that had thus far eluded her - a high school auditorium.
"This is my dream come true - to be at Blair High School," she told the crowd of more than 1,500 middle and high school students assembled in the school's gymnasium.
— Read more at Pasadena Star-News

[Join today's most exciting young performers as they lift their voices for healing in SING FOR HOPE: A Juilliard Vocal Arts Alumni Gala]
WHAT: Highlights from the operatic and musical theater repertoire are performed by prominent alumni of the Juilliard Vocal Arts Department in celebration of the Sing for Hope Prize for Arts Activism and Community Outreach. The Prize, made possible by a gift from the Sing for Hope Foundation, supports Juilliard Vocal Arts students and alumni who use music for humanitarian causes.
WHO: Performers include Jennifer Aylmer (Bella Griffiths in the world premiere of An American Tragedy at The Metropolitan Opera), Michael Maniaci (Nireno in Giulio Cesare at The Metropolitan Opera), Simon O'Neill (Title role in Lohengrin at Royal Opera Covent Garden), Keith Phares (Fritz in Die Tote Stadt at New York City Opera), Michael Slattery (Title role in Orfeo at Thèâtre du Châtelet), and over forty more of Juilliard's most prominent recent Vocal Arts graduates.
WHERE: Peter Jay Sharp Theater at The Juilliard School/Lincoln Center. The School is located on the northwest corner of Broadway and West 65th Street. New York City.
WHEN: Friday, October 6, 2006 at 8:00 PM
— Learn more at singforhope.org

Anthony Minghella, black baseball cap on his bald head, ran down the aisle.
"Lovely geishas," he said in his lilting English accent. "Be together. Think together as a unit."
The Academy Award-winning director of "The English Patient" jogged back and forth between the dark auditorium and his actors on stage instead of stationing himself behind a camera, the most visible sign of the regime change that's swept the Metropolitan Opera, known more for stubborn tradition than innovation.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Natalie Dessay has finally returned, to the stage of the Opéra national de Paris, in a puzzling production of Lucia that opened on September 9. It was certainly one of the highlights of my fall opera preview. Marie-Aude Roux was there (A Bastille, le grand retour de Natalie Dessay, September 12) for Le Monde (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Galas like the New York City Opera's "Night at the Opera" on Tuesday night are part music, part self-celebration and part sales pitch. The targets and the beneficiaries were dressed-up patrons who, the company hoped, would enjoy the talent both young and older and leave behind some money afterward.
— Read more at New York Times

I suppose I wouldn't be much of an American classical music commentator if I didn't have something to say about the changes Peter Gelb is hoping to bring to the Metropolitan Opera.
The grand dame of American opera houses gets moving Friday with free tickets for its final dress rehearsal of Anthony Minghella's production of Madama Butterfly, and then opens Monday. Gelb has added two new broadcasts: One into the plaza outside Lincoln Center and another into Times Square, where 650 seats will be set up for an outdoor audience.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

THIS WEEKEND'S classical musical calendar is packed, beginning with the duo recital by soprano Kiri Te Kanawa and mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade tonight on the UC Berkeley campus. Since their acclaimed performance together in Mozart's "Le Nozze di Figaro" at Santa Fe Opera in 1971, these opera legends have enjoyed stellar -- but only occasionally intersecting -- careers. Their appearance together at Zellerbach Hall should be one of the season's most memorable events.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

The element of surprise may have diminished, but the shock hasn't. The Act V ballet is still the dramatic highlight of David McVicar's staging of Gounod's crowd-pleaser. Like so much of the evening it becomes another of Méphistophélès' side-shows, a diabolical deconstruction of what the Paris Opera of the late 1800s demanded of all operas staged there. But this is Walpurgis Night and balletic chastity morphs into balletic bestiality. Giselle this is not.
— Read more at Independent Online

Internationally renowned Glimmerglass Opera has announced that it will present an Orpheus-inspired concert as one of the inaugural performances in the new Gilder Lehrman Hall at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City on Friday, October 13, at 7:30 p.m.
As a preview of Glimmerglass Opera's upcoming 2007 Festival Season, which will feature Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, Philip Glass' Orphée, the Gluck/Berlioz Orphée et Eurydice, and Haydn's L'Anima del Filosofo, the Morgan concert will be an exploration of the story of Orpheus, the greatest musician and poet in Greek mythology. The evening will include musical excerpts from each of these operas in addition to Ralph Vaughan Williams' Orpheus with his Lute and Schubert's Lied des Orpheus.
Performers for the evening will be soprano Caroline Worra, who was critically acclaimed for her recent performance as Boule de Suif in Glimmerglass Opera's 2006 world premiere of Stephen Hartke's The Greater Good. Ms. Worra will return to Glimmerglass Opera for the 2007 Festival Season to sing Euridice in Philip Glass' Orphée. Also featured will be mezzo-soprano Sandra Piques Eddy who will sing the role of Dorabella in Mozart's Così Fan Tutte this fall at New York City Opera. Male soprano Michael Maniaci, who will sing Orphée in Glimmerglass Opera?s 2007 production of the Gluck/Berlioz Orphée et Eurydice, will also be featured. He will be joined by tenor Matthew Garrett, who will sing Apollo in Glimmerglass Opera's 2007 production of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, and baritone Matthew Worth.
— Learn more at glimmerglass.org

The Metropolitan Opera now has a home on satellite radio.
The opera company and Sirius Satellite Radio said yesterday that they would collaborate on a channel to broadcast four performances live from the Met each week. The channel, 85, will also carry 10 Met archival recordings weekly. It will run 24 hours, with 16 hours made up of programming from the Met and the rest provided by Sirius, a spokeswoman for the opera company, Sommer Hixson, said.
— Read more at New York Times

What a difference the new Toronto opera house makes. The experience of going to the opera here has been lifted to a new level: acoustically, visually, maybe even socially. The just-completed first Canadian production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was the achievement of a long-delayed milestone.
— Read more at canada.com

Live radio broadcast of performances from Lyric Opera of Chicago could resume as early as November under the terms of Lyric's new contract with the Chicago Federation of Musicians, opera and union officials announced late Wednesday.
Such broadcasts ceased at the conclusion of Lyric's 2001-2002 season because of insufficient funding to meet musicians' salary demands.
— Read more at Chicago Tribune

I had been reading about one of the "operas" in my fall Opera Preview for a while, Gaddafi, which had its premiere at English National Opera on September 6 to considerable critical befuddlement. Charlotte Higgins put it this way (Gaddafi: a living miss, September 12) in The Guardian:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Tony winning actress Judy Kaye will return to her Broadway Triumph, SOUVENIR, A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, by Stephen Temperley, for a limited engagement Thursday, October 12 to Sunday, November 12 at the Brentwood Theatre. Opening night is Wednesday, October 18. Ms. Kaye, who won the Tony Award for her performance in The Phantom of the Opera, was also nominated this year for Best Performance for a Leading Actress in a Play for her portrayal of the legendary musical sensation Florence Foster Jenkins. SOUVENIR is directed by Vivian Matalon.
— Learn more at www.BrentwoodTheatre.com

At a black-tie gala on Saturday celebrating the opening of the Washington National Opera season at the Kennedy Center, Plácido Domingo, the company's general director, lauded William Friedkin, who directed the evening?s productions of Bartok?s "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" and Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi."
— Read more at New York Times

To promote its first season under new General Manager Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera will give away 3,000 free tickets to Friday's dress rehearsal of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly."
The tickets will be given away on a first-come, first-served basis beginning at 10 a.m. Wednesday at the Met's box office in Lincoln Center.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

Stefan Heucke's "The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz," given its world premiere in the German city of Monchengladbach last weekend, is the 49-year-old composer's life work, a three-hour epic requiring vast performance forces and a sober approach.
The companies in Monchengladbach and Krefeld, where the piece travels in December, have come up with the goods, providing a sizeable symphony orchestra, an extra on-stage orchestra, a large cast and an unpretentious, literal staging.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[An ambitious version of the romantic saga "The Peony Pavilion" arrives, with help from scholar and writer Kenneth Pai.]
Four hundred years ago, the poet Tang Xianzu wrote the Chinese version of "Romeo and Juliet" ? except that for his Juliet, the power of love manages to overcome social censure, as well as death itself. Tang's epic opera, "The Peony Pavilion," is one of the most celebrated in Chinese drama, and the 19-hour, 55-scene work has been a lifelong fascination of Kenneth Pai, a noted Chinese American writer, retired University of California professor and, now, theater impresario.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

We're only five days into it, but already the Royal Opera's French-themed 2006-7 season has justified itself.
The first of two concert performances of Fromental Halévy's La Juive at the Barbican was a reminder of how entertaining and moving French opera can be.
— Read more at musicomh.com

David McVicar's production of Faust relocates Gounod's take on Goethe's great drama to Paris in the years before the Franco-Prussian war. It's a provocative, disturbing piece of music theatre that probes beneath the surface of a work once hugely popular, though now, more often than not, condemned as prurient.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The modest auditorium of La Maison Française (check out their snazzy new Web site) is one of the most civilized places to hear a concert in Washington, no small thanks to the glass of wine (and occasionally even cheese or other food) that you know awaits you after the music has ceased. So it was nice to be back at the Embassy of France last night for the first concert of their fall season, the latest program from Opera Bel Cantanti. It is a selection of arias and other pieces from your favorite French operas, going under the name Salut à la France. Literally, almost all of your favorite French operas: we could have done with a little less than a three-hour recital.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Tony Award winner Judy Kaye, who received another Tony nomination last season for her performance in Souvenir, will be part of A Night at the Opera, which celebrates the opening of New York City Opera's 63rd season.
Kaye, who made her City Opera debut as Babe Williams in a 1989 production of The Pajama Game, will sing Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns" at the Sept. 19 gala benefit concert, according to a City Opera spokesperson. Kaye's NYCO credits also include productions of Brigadoon and Candide.
— Read more at Playbill News

[Recently we received the following note from the good folks at the Royal Orchestra in Stockholm.]
Kungliga Hovkapellet in Stockholm, (the Royal Orchestra), one of the oldest orchestras in the world, has it's own webpage located at www.hovkapellet.com. A few days ago we put up a video showing one of our hornplayers playing the Long Call solo of "Siegfrieds" second act. The video is 2'45" and available in Windows Media and Apple Quicktime.
The site is (so far) only in swedish but the video might be of interest for a broader audience.
— Learn more at www.hovkapellet.com

On the day before the Fourth of July, the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson died of complications from breast cancer, at the age of fifty-two. News of her passing aroused little interest outside the classical-music world, since she was hardly a household name, and lacked even the intermittently twinkling,
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

The Metropolitan Opera lobby was a hive of activity recently, as an administrative assistant navigated the circuitous path from the stage door to the still halfway-furnished office of the new general manager, Peter Gelb. Workers were polishing the lowered chandeliers, and miles of blood-red carpeting and upholstery were getting a cleaning.
— Read more at The New York Sun

It's tragedy followed by comedy in the nation's capital, as Washington National Opera opens its 2006-07 season at the Kennedy Center with a double-bill of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. Samuel Ramey takes the title roles in both operas, with Denyce Graves as the ill-fated Judith in the Bartók. Film director William Friedkin, best known for The French Connection and The Exorcist, directs; Giovanni Reggioli conducts the seven performances from September 16 to October 7.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Royal Opera House in London opened its season last night with a revival of David McVicar's production of Gounod's Faust. Angela Gheorghiu stars as Marguérite, with Piotr Beczala in the title role, Orlin Anastassov as Méphistophélès and Russell Braun as Valentin. There are five additional performances through September 29; in the final two performances, Katie van Kooten sings Marguérite and Dalibor Jenis takes the role of Valentin.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The second edition of the Charles A. Lynam Vocal Competition will be held on Saturday and Sunday, Oct.14-15 at the School of Music at UNCG. The competition, which has drawn entries from 151 vocal students from 27 states, Canada and South Korea, is sponsored by the UNCG Opera Theatre.
— Read more at UNCG.edu

Lyric Opera of Chicago announced today that it has renamed its professional development program for young singers, the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists, The Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Alfie Boe used to work in a garage. Now his debut CD is out and he's going to sing at the Albert Hall ]
The teenage Alfie Boe was singing as he polished a sports car at the garage where he worked, when his life dramatically altered course. Chamois leather in hand, his remarkable voice drew the attention of a customer who worked in the recording industry.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

"The Exorcist." "The French Connection." Among the many pivotal films helmed by famed movie director William Friedkin, these two masterpieces earned him a permanent place in the Hollywood firmament as a master of the dark side. So, who possibly could have been a better choice to direct the double bill of sinister one-acts -- "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" and "Gianni Schicchi" -- that will open the Washington National Opera's 2006-07 season tonight at the Kennedy Center?
— Read more at The Washington Times

[A British hip-hop opera tells the life story of Libya's notorious leader in a most unconventional manner.]
Brian Green was stunned at what he saw when he opened the heavy oak doors at the English National Opera. The 44-year-old opera singer is no stranger to the high arts, but on this particular opening night he was agog at who he saw milling about in the ornate lobby: senior citizens in black tie, teenagers in cargo pants and a significant number of twentysomethings wearing flip-flops.
— Read more at Newsweek

[Ellie Caulkins Opera House sails into second year with a few tweaks]
Jack Finlaw strolled into the empty Ellie Caulkins Opera House and gazed around, smiling like a proud parent.
"I came to this job to build an opera house," said the director of Denver's Theatres and Arenas division. "This is a great accomplishment. People love the place."
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

[Norwegian runner Grete Waitz has played a starring role in countless marathons and sporting events. Now she has a major role n a new opera, at least figuratively.]
She won't actually be on stage, but says she's "overwhelmed" that she's been written into the new opera by young Norwegian composer Thomas Stanghelle.
An American opera singer will play her role. "I was last in line when singing talent was handed out," Waitz joked to newspaper Aftenposten.
— Read more at Aftenposten.no

Opening night at the Metropolitan Opera will be open to all this year -- in a live broadcast at New York's Times Square.
Traffic will be redirected and around 650 free seats will be set up for the public on the square, famous for New Year's Eve parties and television talk show studios.
— Read more at Reuters.com

Last week was a great one for local opera lovers.
A long-promised Los Angeles Opera production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle seems closer to reality than ever, thanks to a $6 million gift from Eli and Edythe Broad, announced last Wednesday.
And on Saturday night, James Conlon, for nine years chief conductor of the Paris Opera, led his first performance as the company's music director, Verdi's "La Traviata." That production a spruced-up version of Marta Domingo's old-fashioned and supposedly retired staging was notable for another L.A. Opera achievement, the stage debut of soprano Renee Fleming.
— Read more at LA Daily News

Conductor Donald Runnicles will not continue as music director of the San Francisco Opera after his contract expires in 2009, the company announced Friday. He will continue to appear with the company, however, most notably in the new production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle planned for the 2010-11 season.
— Read more at sfgate.com

In my Opera Preview for the fall, I mentioned a new Scottish chamber opera by Stuart MacRae, called The Assassin Tree, recently given its Covent Garden premiere. At earlier performances in Edinburgh, Raymond Monnelle gave a very positive review (The Assassin Tree, Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, August 29) in The Independent:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

Heinz Fricke, music director of the Washington National Opera, has withdrawn from the company's season-opening production, a double bill of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Puccini's Gianni Schicchi which begins its run tomorrow night.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

A Fond du Lac native introduced a number of local residents and students to opera this week.
Elizabeth Hillebrand, a soprano who often performs in New York City, did a 9/11 concert at the Windhover Center for the Arts.
"It's almost like she was acting," said Debra Bruflat, Windhover's director of finance and administration. "Her body language and expression were wonderful."
— Read more at Fond du Lac Reporter

Composer Leonard Bernstein considered Nancy Williams one of his favorite opera singers, and she performed with him several times, including at President Jimmy Carter's inaugural ball.
Earlier in her career, Williams proved to be a good-luck charm for Sarasota's Asolo Opera as one of the first divas to grace its stage when both were just starting out in the early 1960s. heraldtribune.com

Soprano Andrea Gruber, who starred in the title role of Puccini's "Turandot" as Lyric Opera of Chicago began its 2006-07 season, loves the part so much that she has the opening words and notes of her character's first aria tattooed on her lower back.
— Read more at nwsource.com

When the conductor Richard Bradshaw, who has been general director of the Canadian Opera Company since 1998, appeared in the pit here at the company's impressive new home on Tuesday night to conduct the premiere of a new production of Wagner's "Rheingold," the audience gave him a prolonged standing ovation before he conducted a note.
— Read more at New York Times

The diva has landed: Renee Fleming finally made her stage debut with the Los Angeles Opera on Sept. 9, as Violetta in Verdi's "La Traviata," the first production of the company's 21st season.
In fact, the most famous American soprano of her generation is in town for just three performances, all filmed for a DVD to be released by Decca, Fleming's record label. (The last performance is a Sept. 17 matinee.)
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

The one good thing about missing the opening night Gala -- and we'd have looked absolutely stunning in a tux -- is that we got to read the underwhelmed reports of the premiere of Verdi's Un Ballo en Maschera. We attended the performance last night with lowered expectation, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. We will not second guess our estimable colleagues, since we did not see the same performance, and since we came in having integrated their feedback. In order for all of us to converge, we would have to visit the opera house a couple times, and adopt the same ethical reviewing guidelines as a food critic. And still, we'd find ways to disagree.
— Read more at sfist.com

Once seen by Washington as "the most dangerous man on the planet" but considered a charismatic hero by others, Libya's Colonel Moamer Kadhafi is the main character in a dazzling modern opera in London.
It has everything to keep spectators on the edge of their seats: images of the desert covered in oil and blood, documentary footage on war and revolution, bombs, missiles, rap music and beautiful female bodyguards in red high heels.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

They might be considered to be cultured and sophisticated - but many classical music and opera lovers could be cannabis-smoking criminals, according to the largest ever academic survey of musical taste.
The report showed a quarter of them admitted having smoked cannabis, and one-in-eight opera fans had tried magic mushrooms.
— Read more at lse.co.uk

Boston Children's Opera, the only opera company in the Boston area where children sing opera for other children, is accepting singers in grades 2-9 for its fall opera production of "The Elves and the Shoemaker." Dueling divas and ladies exhaust the shoemaker and he needs help from the elves. The opera is set in the Hamburg Opera House in Germany, and includes music from "The Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart.
— Read more at TownOnline.com

[The orchestra adds more luster to its anniversary lineup with Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt.]
The Philadelphia Orchestra announced yesterday that two of opera's A-list stars would perform along with rocker-turned-crooner Rod Stewart at its January gala, and said it hoped to more than double the money grossed from the annual event.
Tenor Ben Heppner and soprano Deborah Voigt will join Stewart and jazz pianist Peter Nero on the program Jan. 27.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Building an opera house in the scrub of the northern New Mexico wilderness might have seemed like lunacy in 1956, but the Santa Fe Opera celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. It's a visceral experience; coyotes screech from dusty creeks, shafts of orange lightning crash into the mountains, the moon rises through the back of the open stage.
— Read more at Independent Online

[British director Kenneth Branagh talks about his movie version of Mozart's The Magic Flute during a recent visit to the Venice Film Festival.]
Actor and director Kenneth Branagh has given cinematic makeovers to Hamlet, Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

It didn't take long for soprano Talise Trevigne to bring down the house Sunday during her debut with Opera San Jose at the California Theatre. In the first act of Gounod's "Roméo et Juliette," Trevigne, as the famous Juliette (the one you know from Shakespeare), hit the stage with electric velocity and moved toward her first aria, known as the Waltz Song.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

[Springtime for Muammar. A British hip-hop opera tells the life story of Libya's notorious leader in a most unconventional manner.]
Brian Green was stunned at what he saw when he opened the heavy oak doors at the English National Opera. The 44-year-old opera singer is no stranger to the high arts, but on this particular opening night he was agog at who he saw milling about in the ornate lobby: senior citizens in black tie, teenagers in cargo pants and a significant number of twentysomethings wearing flip-flops.
— Read more at MSNBC.com

It is the tragic tale of an aging Southern Belle living in a perpetual state of panic about her fading lifestyle, a damaged woman who?s constructed fantasy life cannot overcome reality. It is a harsh tale of sex and death and brutal violence. This is Blanche?s world in A Streetcar Named Desire brought to life by Tennessee Williams, set to the compelling music of Andre Previn and performed by a cast who make the tensions of this drama sizzle.
— Read more at The Weekly Online!

[Company kicks off first Canadian showing of Wagner's Ring Cycle in new arts centre]
The Canadian Opera Company opened its new performance home for real last night, with a music drama about a real-estate deal gone horribly wrong.
The COC launched the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts with a thoughtful, elegant and ultimately satisfying new production of Das Rheingold, the opening part of the first-ever Canadian production of Wagner's epic tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

[From a conservative Christian upbringing to the stages of the world's greatest opera houses, tenor Marcus Haddock's journey has been anything but predictable - but his passion for music has never failed him. This month, he sings King Gustav in San Francisco Opera's revival of Un Ballo in Maschera. ROBERT WILDER BLUE reports.]
"From the time I sang my first solo in church in Beaumont, Texas, I wanted to be a singer," Marcus Haddock recalls. He got his wish: now he?s a busy working tenor, in a wide range of repertory. His lyric tenor voice possesses unique beauty and color, with a rich middle and a ringing, virile top. "The Italians use a term, lirico abbondante, that translates as 'abundant lyric tenor,'" says Haddock. "It's not a true spinto voice, but there are spinto roles that suit my voice very well."
— Read more at Opera News

To get the most important points made up front, let's just say that gorgeous singing - of the staggering sort - came courtesy of Renee Fleming, star of Los Angeles Opera's season opener, La Traviata. And that her physical beauty seconded the vocal enchantment. And that her full-out characterization of the glittery courtesan-turned-self-sacrificing-victim was something to behold.
— Read more at Los Angeles CityBeat

La Traviata was my first opera; wasn't it everybody's - Jan Peerce howled and wobbled; Jarmila Novotna sobbed. Nobody noticed whether the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra played in tune; from a vantage point in the standing room at the back of a Boston movie palace, it couldn't have mattered much. The distance between that glorious Saturday afternoon and last week's was measurable in more than miles.
— Read more at LA Weekly

"I didn't like Handel," said the mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux, her large dark eyes widening to share a scurrilous secret.
Talk about bucking a trend. In today?s opera world, where Handel productions are sprouting up right and left, such a statement verges on the politically incorrect. It is all the more incongruous coming from a singer who has built her reputation on the foundation of early music; who has sung and recorded a good number of Handel operas; whose new Virgin Classics CD features Handel and Johann Adolf Hasse; and who is to make her New York City Opera debut tonight in "Semele," a dramatic oratorio-cum-opera by, of course, Handel.
— Read more at New York Times

Geraint Talfan Davies has been appointed chairman of the Welsh National Opera, the company announced.
It's a repeat role for Davies, who was chairman from 2000 until 2003, when he left the company to chair the Arts Council of Wales. The Stage writes that Welsh culture minister Alun Pugh informed Davies that he would not have his ACW contract renewed earlier this year.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[At Glimmerglass, The Greater Good is lively and complex; Jonathan Miller's Jenufa is almost too dark and severe for its own good.]
Prostitutes with hearts of gold are plentiful in opera, but Boule de Suif, the Rubenesque heroine of Stephen Hartke's The Greater Good, is surely the noblest of them all. Recently given its world premiere at the Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown, Hartke's first opera takes a leisurely approach to Guy de Maupassant's classic short story, titled after its heroine, but the French writer's typically jaundiced view of community hypocrisy is devastatingly presented in music of acerbic relish, keen character observation, and real melodic sophistication. The tale is ideally tailored for opera. Boule, one of the most in-demand prostitutes of her day despite (or perhaps because) of her ripe proportions, is trapped in a horse-drawn coach filled with stolid bourgeois citizens in flight from German troops during the Franco-Prussian War. She is haughtily snubbed by them all until it becomes clear that their only means of escape from the enemy-occupied inn where they find themselves is for Boule to sleep with the Prussian commandant. This she reluctantly agrees to do for "the greater good," but having sacrificed much of her carefully maintained self-respect to serve the selfish purposes of her companions, Boule finds herself once again an ostracized nonperson.
— Read more at New York Magazine

Norman Kelley, a tenor who sang with the New York City Opera, the Metropolitan Opera and many other companies around the world, died last Monday in Rockland, Mass. He was 95.

— Read more at New York Times

Pavlo Hunka, the baritone cast as Wotan in Canadian Opera Company's Wagner Ring - which begins tonight - has fallen ill and had to withdraw from the first two performances.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Take some of the world's most revered arias, such as "Rigoletto," or "Habanera" from Georges Bizet's "Carmen," and add a little 20th-century technology in the form of a rock band, and what do you get? A bold experiment from New York City called the East Village Opera Company.
— Read more at mlive.com

[ Gounod's life paralleled that of his own Faust. As the Royal Opera stages a starry revival, Jessica Duchen discovers a man who sold out for fame and money]
Near Paris's Opéra Garnier stands a patisserie that offers the culinary equivalent of Charles Gounod's Faust. In a religieuse aux roses, a choux pastry cathedral dome topped with pink icing masks decadent fresh raspberries suggestively embedded in rose-scented crème Chantilly.
Faust, now being revived in David McVicar's spectacular production at the Royal Opera House with the superstar soprano Angela Gheorghiu as Marguerite and the exciting young Polish tenor Piotr Beczala as Faust, sprang from the climate of 19th-century France that likewise veiled a seething sexual undercurrent with a pudeur bordering on hypocrisy.
— Read more at Independent Online

HERE'S the bottom line about opera: Whatever the story, the music or the length, a performance rides on the quality of the singers in the principal roles. Verdi's "Don Carlo" is a large and ambitious piece involving love triangles, political intrigue, the Spanish Inquisition and even a mysterious ghost; but the main difficulty in staging it is that it has six lead parts, each requiring a major singer. So it is rare to see a truly satisfying "Don Carlo," yet this season the Metropolitan Opera is making a strong bid to provide one on Nov. 30.
— Read more at New York Times

It's la rentrée in Paris - the return to the city, the world of work and the regular season after August vacation. The Opéra National de Paris makes its rentrée tonight at the Opéra Bastille with Andrei Serban's production of Lucia di Lammermoor. Natalie Dessay stars as the unhinged heroine, a role in which she brought the house down last year in Chicago. Matthew Polenzani, Ludovic Tézier, Salvatore Cordella and Kwangchul Youn co-star and Evelino Pidò conducts in 12 performances through October 16.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

"Sophie's Choice": First as a bestseller and then as a highly admired film, William Styron's novel was an unusual success in that it was relentlessly downbeat -- a grim tale of Holocaust survivors and the searing memories that would not let them alone. Response to Nicholas Maw's operatic setting, which had its world premiere in 2002 at London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was mixed, but those who responded to it did so wholeheartedly. (Anthony Tommasini, who reviewed the premiere for the New York Times, called "Sophie's Choice" an "utterly admirable, affectingly conceived and beautifully realized work.") On Sept. 21, Washington National Opera will present the U.S. premiere of Maw's work at the Kennedy Center. Angelika Kirchschlager will repeat the title role she created in London, with Rod Gilfry (as Nathan Landau) and Gordon Gietz (as Stingo) other carry-overs from the original cast. Marin Alsop, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's music director-designate, will conduct.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

The New York City Opera lurched New York's musical season to a start Thursday evening with an untraditional approach. Instead of opening with a high-priced, star-studded event, it opened with a low-priced ($25), star-studded Opera-for-All festival.
— Read more at The New York Sun

[Ronald Reagan gets hymned in Eric Reda's new opera.]
Ronald Reagan, unlike Richard Nixon, isn't an obvious choice for the subject of an opera. Nixon had the ego and pathos of a great ruler, which inspired plenty of fear and loathing, not to mention the Vietnam War and Watergate, which added to his mythology. Reagan's warm, fatherly presence doesn?t rise to Nixon's operatic heights. But it's precisely that quality that attracted Eric Reda to Reagan as a subject for his first opera, Reagan's Children, an excerpt of which will be performed this weekend as part of the Around the Coyote arts festival. "Reagan was the president when I was a kid," Reda says. "He embodied that [office] and he embodied that Greatest Generation ideal." For Reda, the soft-spoken leader was a masculine symbol who stood for everything good with the world. "My grandfather was a Marine, and Reagan played a Marine on TV," Reda says, noting a connection made by many American voters.
— Read more at Time Out Chicago

It was a weekend of ups and downs, as the San Francisco Opera's new season -- the company's 84th, and the first full season under new general director David Gockley -- commenced with back-to-back openings Friday and Saturday at the War Memorial Opera House.
For a company that has given audiences thrilling premieres, debuts by major singers and genuine revelations in past seasons, the weekend was notably short on innovation or excitement; at times, it seemed to hit a new artistic low. Friday's static opening of Verdi's "Un Ballo in Maschera" started the season on one of the most lackluster notes in the company's recent history. Things improved considerably, however, with Saturday's sparkling, but ultimately flawed, revival of Johann Strauss Jr.'s "Die Fledermaus."
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

[ADAM WASSERMAN offers some tips on the new opera season's most eagerly awaited events.]
Perhaps it's a fortuitous consequence of the administrative changes at so many opera houses this season that the canon itself should be in a state of flux. Who among us ever thought the words "Gluck revival" might pass our lips six years into the twenty-first century? And even a few of the most ardent Strauss-lovers must be scratching their heads, wondering, "When's the last time I heard Ägyptische Helena?" Coupled with some particularly promising world premieres and a spate of truly enticing emerging talent, the new season looks like one to remember - if not necessarily one for the fainthearted revival-lover.
— Read more at Opera News

English National Opera open their new season with an evening of unclassifiable music theatre. Gaddafi: A Living Myth is part contemporary opera, part pop musical, and part cross-cultural dance track, with a score composed by Asian Dub Foundation, a libretto by Shan Khan and a production masterminded by director David Freeman.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

It's an epic of extraordinary scale and richly textured scope.
So complex, that Richard Wagner's gargantuan Ring Cycle is not often mounted in its entirety and has never been presented as a whole by a Canadian opera company.
But on Tuesday, the country's premiere opera house debuts the masterwork, a tale of lust, power, incest and love that takes four nights to tell.
— Read more at canada.com

WITH references to French footballer Zinedine Zidane, and a karaoke party at Orlovsky's "nightclub", you've guessed it - this isn't a Die Fledermaus with ball gowns and Straussian period charm. This is more Notting Hill than Vienna. Or do the feisty lifestyles among an energetic cast, deliberately strewn with Scottish accents, and a set branded with varying shades of muted Burberry-style tartan, suggest more New Town meets Leith?
Lee Blakeley's new small-scale travelling production of Strauss's good time opera for Scottish Opera certainly fulfils its requirement to address a wide and possibly virgin opera audience.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Welsh National Opera today announced the appointment of Geraint Talfan Davies as the company's new Chairman. He previously held the role from 2000 until 2003, prior to becoming Chairman of The Arts Council of Wales.
— Read more at News Wales

THERE is nothing more exciting than the premiere of a new work that seems destined to stick with you from the moment it starts.
I may forever associate the 2005-6 season with the premiere of Peter Lieberson's "Neruda Songs," commissioned by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and performed at Symphony Hall. That haunting, refined and emotionally revealing song cycle was like a love poem from Mr. Lieberson to his wife, the unforgettable mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who sang it sublimely in what would be one of her last performances before her death in July.
— Read more at New York Times

As the Los Angeles Opera opens its 21st season this weekend, it also welcomes James Conlon to the podium as the company's second music director. He follows Kent Nagano, now at the Munich Opera, who held the job from May 2003 to June 2006.
A native New Yorker, Conlon, 56, comes to L.A. by way of Europe, where for more than 20 years he held senior conducting jobs, primarily in Cologne and Paris. During his 13 years in Cologne (1989 to 2002), he led both the city's opera and symphony, for several years concurrently. His nine-year appointment as chief conductor of the Paris Opera (1995 to 2004) is reportedly the longest since World War II.
— Read more at San Bernardino County Sun

Los Angeles Opera begins its 2006-07 season in truly high style this evening with a special revival of Verdi's La traviata, conducted by James Conlon in his first appearance as the company's new music director. In the title role is Renée Fleming, whose singing and acting as Violetta have earned extravagant praise at Houston and the Met. Her Alfredo is the charismatic tenor Rolando Villazón, beloved of critics and audiences alike, and Germont père is sung by the admired veteran baritone Renato Bruson. There are only three performances ? tonight and September 12 and 17 ? but Decca is recording them for release on DVD.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Before even finishing the first week of rehearsals, director Christof Loy walked off the set of his latest production at London's Royal Opera House and disappeared.
The ROH posted a brief announcement on its website Monday (September 4) saying that Loy had withdrawn from the company's upcoming production of Mozart's La finta giardiniera "over a difference of opinion concerning the musical edition to be performed."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Women musicians were forced by the Nazis to provide a soothing soundtrack as prisoners arrived at Auschwitz or were marched to the gas chambers.
Stefan Heucke's "The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz" is an opera about what its composer calls the worst misuse of music in the history of the art form. What began as a marching band developed into a high-quality 50-member ensemble under Alma Rose, niece of the composer Gustav Mahler and a distinguished violinist in her own right. Rose is a central figure in Heucke's opera.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

A new opera about Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi blasted opera buffs out of their seats at its world premiere, but music critics asked: Where was the singing?
English National Opera (ENO), one of Britain's two main opera houses, won plaudits on Thursday night for trying to attract new audiences to an elitist art form.
— Read more at CNN.com

San Francisco Opera's 84th opening night gala may not have had the weather in its favor with blustery winds whipping carefully executed hairdos and elaborate gowns, but there were warm feelings all around from more than 3,000 attendees who ponied up hundreds, and in some cases, tens of thousands of dollars, to attend the dinner and show.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Boy, do they dump on Andrea Bocelli. They treat Angela Gheorghiu with the utmost respect, by comparison. Whom do I mean by "they"? Professional singers and others in the music biz, who bristle at Mr. Bocelli. A few years ago, I was interviewing a famous opera singer, and, totally unprompted, she brought up Mr. Bocelli, with passion: "They are marketing him as an opera singer, and he is not an opera singer, whatever he is!"
— Read more at The New York Sun

Eli Broad, the billionaire philanthropist and art collector, said today that he will help fund a new production of Wagner's four-part "Ring" cycle with a $6 million gift to the Los Angeles Opera.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com See also: New York Times

[The maiden operas of Carter and Hartke finally get their U.S. premieres.]
Elliott Carter's first, and thus far only, opera had its premiere in Berlin in 1999, just before the composer's 91st birthday. Now, finally, "What Next?" has been staged in America - at Tanglewood, the lushly green Berkshire summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its student-training program, with the chipper 97-year-old composer on hand to take a bow.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

For four August nights a field called Faenol in Snowdon's foothills becomes an oasis created by the local lad, Farmer Jones's boy Bryn. Here, they call it Brynfest.
— Read more at Independent Online

Opera San Jose has five new singers this season -- five new members of the resident company for its loyal audiences to enjoy, evaluate and, in a sense, live with over time. It's the company's biggest bumper crop of new talent ever, even bigger than in 2001 and 2002, when so many new singers joined Opera San Jose and began, in front of our eyes, to mature as artists and jell as a group. They're mostly all gone now -- baritone Joseph Wright, soprano Lori Decter and several other familiar faces -- and it's time to meet the new ones.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

A night at the opera can cost as much as a weekend in St. Maarten, which is why, when opera executives start talking about "attracting new audiences," it sometimes feels as if they really mean "hooking more rich people." But with financial pressures severe and many tickets going unsold, New York's two principal opera companies are working on their ordinary-folks appeal.
— Read more at Newsday.com

If Moammar Gadhafi dropped by to check out the English National Opera's latest production, he might well be pleased.
In "Gaddafi: A Living Myth," the Libyan leader bestrides the stage of London's Coliseum like - well, a colossus. Angry, powerful, charismatic, dangerous, he's an icon - of resistance or terrorism, depending on your view. In the words of the show itself, he's "Gadhafi Superstar."
— Read more at sfgate.com

[Renée Fleming puts her stamp on the role for a more traditional "La Traviata" at L.A. Opera.]
She sauntered onstage, moving coquettishly among her party guests, pale brown curls trailing onto her neck, sumptuous silk frock billowing. She locked eyes with her beloved.
Moments later, he was gone, along with the other revelers. So were her smiles. She leaned against a doorpost, lost in melancholy, ruminating on her life. Did she dare let love in? Could a glittery courtesan indulge such emotions?
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Be among the first to hear the hot young artists of Pittsburgh Opera Center, one of the nation's leading operatic training programs. These eight members, among the top international talent, have been chosen by competitive audition from approximately 600 applicants worldwide. During this event, the artists introduce themselves through a favorite aria and one which Artistic Director Christopher Hahn picks that night.
— Learn more at pittsburghopera.org

Edmonton Opera, in partnership with the Alberta Craft Council, presents The Opera Coat Project, a visual spectacle showcasing the world of opera through a series of wearable art coats. Using a variety of techniques and materials, a diverse group of 21 professional designers, visual artists, craftspersons and artisans from across Alberta have created 17 magnificent coats, each piece inspired by a different opera. The collection will be on exhibit October 7 - December 9 at the Alberta Craft Council Gallery (10186 -106 Street). During Edmonton Opera?s presentation of Don Giovanni, November 4 - 9, selected coats will be exhibited at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium.
— Learn more at www.albertacraft

The Metropolitan Opera said on Wednesday it would broadcast six live performances to movie theaters in North America and Europe starting on December 30 in a bid to broaden its audience.
The famed opera company also said more than 100 performances would be shown live on the Internet and on digital radio, and taped for broadcast later on television.
— Read more at Reuters.com See also: New York Times nwsource.com

A few years ago in these pages, I mocked a composer turned record producer who had presumption enough to bill himself equally with the musician he was recording. The people who set the microphones, twiddle the dials and generally stage-manage a recording command considerable musical sophistication and engineering skills, but the ones I know happily acknowledge that their jobs are to keep the path clear between musician and listener.
Listening to Wagner's "Parsifal" as presented on Deutsche Grammophon's recent four-CD release makes me wonder whether indeed electrical sound manipulation must somehow be added to the composer-title-performer credits stamped on the labels of compact discs.
— Read more at New York Times

When I win the lottery, I will travel around the world and review operas and concerts. Until that happens, I try to keep track of the most interesting operas being produced in the world's major theaters. Here is my list for the fall season, by no means exhaustive, of the productions I will be watching and trying to compile reviews of, when possible. I will put links to my press roundups as I put them together.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

When I review CDs for Seattle Opera, the local Tower Records calls the opera company to complain that they have a dozen customers demanding those "weird" von Buchau CD choices, and couldn't I recommend something from the major labels? Please. Let us lay to rest the spurious idea that I recommend obscure recordings for the fun of it. No, I recommend them because they give me the most delight, which I naturally want to share. Use the Internet to find them if Tower won't help.
— Read more at ebar.com

Bryn Terfel's seventh Faenol Festival has already sold more tickets than any previous festival and that's with over 24 hours to go before the start.
The opera superstar said last night he expected this year's festival to be the most successful ever.
— Read more at icnorthwales.icnetwork.co.uk

Opera has a distinguished history of strops, hissy fits, temper tantrums - a whole spectrum of diva-ish behaviours and hostility covered by the wonderfully euphemistic phrase "artistic differences".
It remains unusual, however, for a director to walk out on the first day of rehearsals and go to ground - which is what has happened at the Royal Opera House.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

THE passionate arts lover and wealthy eastern suburbs widow Melva Thompson was so keen a patron of the Victorian State Opera she left the company $2 million when she died four years ago at age 95.
But after years of legal battles involving four opera companies, more than $800,000 of Thompson's bequest has been spent on legal fees - an outcome described by people who knew the generous benefactor as outrageous.
— Read more at The Australian

The Orlando Opera's Orlando Youth Opera has been expanded into an encompassing Youth Opera Program.
The expanded program, available to Central Florida students ages 7 to 18, is designed to explore all facets of opera in a broadened format that will enrich the musical education of local young performers.
— Read more at Orlando Business Journal

Jonas Kaufmann, the German 'rock star' of opera who's set to take the Edinburgh stage by storm, is a man who refuses to be pinned down.
It's an unusually warm, though typically windy Edinburgh summer's day, and in the square in front of the Sheraton Hotel the star German tenor of the moment is discussing his career over a coffee.
— Read more at The Herald

One of Bryn Terfel's long-term ambitions came true last night when Dame Shirley Bassey finally performed at his Faenol Festival.
The Welsh diva was greeted by huge cheers as she walked onto the stage at the Faenol Estate, near Bangor. Terfel's festival is now in its seventh year and he has been hoping for fellow Welsh stars Dame Shirley and Sir Tom Jones to put in appearances since he launched 'Brynfest'.
— Read more at icwales.icnetwork.co.uk

Mac Wellman is one of the reasons I'm a playwright. His play A Murder of Crows was the first thing we read (after Fornes) in my undergraduate playwriting class lead by then-grad student Nilo Cruz. The fact that plays could be like this - a weird girl conjuring up the weather with words that made your mouth water - just made me want to write them.
— Read more at The Brooklyn Rail

I am elated that Handel discs (or at least recitals that have at least some Handel arias) from major opera singers continue to cross my desk. Some have been astounding (Bartoli, Hunt Lieberson, Piau), and all have been good listening. Perhaps it is my baroqueux bias showing, but the best ones have paired singers with historically informed performance (HIP) experience -- LHL and Piau -- with HIP instrumental ensembles. So I was not expecting total perfection with this disc, which pairs a fine French HIP ensemble, Le Concert d'Astrée, and its talented conductor, Emmanuelle Haïm, with Natalie Dessay. The beloved French soprano has long been one of my favorite voices, but she is much more a mainstream opera singer than a Baroque specialist, and her methods in learning new music would seem to make stylistic changes difficult.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts [Related news items]

[Season finale delivers tragedy, then comedy]
The final weekend of the Santa Fe Opera presented two of the season's most challenging works. The first, "The Magic Flute," was marred by poor directorial decisions, but still managed to entertain. The second, "Carmen," was memorable.
— Read more at Durango Herald Online

Astrid Varnay, the internationally renowned Swedish-American soprano who made her Metropolitan Opera debut when she was thrown into a performance of Richard Wagner's Die Walkure at the last moment, died Monday. She was 88.
— Read more at CBC Arts See also: New York Times

Helsinki - A squirrel scampered into the bicycle wheel of an unlucky Finnish opera singer, causing him to fall, knock himself out and break his nose just ahead of the world premiere of a new opera.
— Read more at iol.co.za

[THEATER: Ricky Ian Gordon moves between popular and high-brow music]
More adroitly than anyone since Leonard Bernstein, composer Ricky Ian Gordon straddles the line between theater and classical music.
Prima donnas such as Renee Fleming and Harolyn Blackwell frequently program his art songs, and opera companies commission new works from him. But he also turns out theater pieces - Dream True, My Life With Albertine - that are performed off-Broadway and around the country.
— Read more at WFAA.com

Lucas Shoemaker and Bill Bennett will have perfection on their minds when they slip into their dress duds for Wednesday night's San Francisco Symphony gala opening. They've both spent the past few days getting their chops ready for the big night when the curtain rises on the San Francisco fall arts season, followed on Friday by the Opera's opulent opener.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The story went that this performance of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, a joint production by the Italian theatres of Reggio Emilia, Ferrara and Modena, was to be the climax of this year's Edinburgh Festival. Goodness knows who invented this hype, but the Festival audience certainly believed it, grabbing every available seat on the first day of booking, in spite of prices more suggestive of Salzburg than Scotland.
— Read more at Independent Online