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

The problem lies in the title: "La Passion de Simone." In a work described as "a musical journey in 15 stations," Kaija Saariaho, the Finnish composer, and Amin Maalouf, the Lebanese-born writer who also provided the librettos for Ms. Saariaho's other two operas, follow a traditional religious model in a homage to someone they compare to Jesus. But in doing so, they effectively distort what Simone Weil, the French philosopher, mystic and activist, was about.
— Read more at New York Times

The SF Opera wraps up its Fall season with two girls behaving badly, Puccini's Manon Lescaut and Bizet's Carmen. Manon is a young woman, who on her way to seclusion in a convent, elopes with a poor student, Des Grieux. It is not said what peccadillo she committed to earn a sentence of life as a nun, but her brother, instead of being dismayed at the news of her disappearance, calmly expects her to show up as a courtisan sooner than later. Which she does in Act II, taking residence with a filthy rich old lech named Geronte. When she realizes that, for all her jewelry, she is bored, undersexed and misses her hot stud of a student, and attempts to leave the gilded jail with both Des Grieux and the bling-bling, drama unfolds.
— Read more at SFist

Almost 100 opera houses across Europe have thrown their weight behind a new initiative to highlight both the vitality of opera and its broad appeal beyond the traditional elite image.
From Paris to Moscow, Lisbon to Helsinki, operatic establishments will take part in the first "European Days of Opera" to be held from February 16-18, 2007, organisers announced.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

From the Hummingbird to the Four Seasons Centre For the Performing Arts. From the lean, almost spartan genius of Alban Berg's Wozzeck to the full-blown sturm und drang of Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.
All in all, it was a memorable year for the Canadian Opera Company. And a profitable one, according to COC president J. Rob Collins.
— Read more at CANOE -- JAM

San Francisco Opera's Merola Program will mark its 50th birthday next year with a celebration dubbed "Voices Heard ?Round the World."
At a press conference on Monday, Merola Board President David Hugle, Opera Center Director Sheri Greenawald and San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley joined to announce a celebration of the anniversary, including the premiere of a commissioned work from Thomas Pasatieri.
— Read more at Examiner.com

[New works by John Adams and György Kurtág in Vienna.]
When, in October of last year, John Adams unveiled "Doctor Atomic," his opera of nuclear hubris and fear, he might have been expected to take a week or two off, or, at least, a day. Instead, on the afternoon following the première, in San Francisco, he sat down with the director Peter Sellars to plot out a new piece. The two longtime collaborators looked over a volume of South Indian oral tales, as rendered in English by the folklorist A. K. Ramanujan, and chose one about a woman who transforms herself into a tree. "A Flowering Tree," the result of their labors, had its première earlier this month at the MuseumsQuartier, in Vienna. The score is opulent, dreamlike, fiercely lyrical, at times shadowy and strange?unlike anything that the fifty-nine-year-old composer has written.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

IF THERE'S a surefire hit in the opera world, it's "Carmen." Bizet's masterpiece remains one of the most-produced works in the repertoire, for good reason: it's exciting, it's passionate and it contains one great tune after another.
The new San Francisco Opera production, which opened last week at the War Memorial Opera House as the last offering of the company's fall season, has the great tunes covered. But it comes up regrettably short on passion, excitement or dramatic urgency.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

IN some ways the Madama Butterfly brought by Ellen Kent's Opera International was similar to ones we've seen before, whether under the flag of the Chisinau National Opera from Moldova or the Ukrainian National Opera of Odessa.
— Read more at manchestereveningnews.co.uk

Fort Worth Opera has announced that it will condense its fall-winter season into a four-week spring festival; the first will take place in May 2007 and will be in lieu of this year's 2006-07 season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Jersey Opera House has appointed a new theatre director, as its board reached a settlement with previous incumbent Ian Stephens, who was dismissed from the post earlier this year.
— Read more at The Stage

European houses continue to produce new operas (see my last New Opera Notes, on John Adams, A Flowering Tree), reminding me to keep working on my plans to relocate Ionarts Central to Paris. Jean-Louis Validire reported on George Benjamin's first opera Into the Little Hill, being premiered at the Festival d'Automne, in an article (Le premier opéra de George Benjamin à Bastille, November 21) for Le Figaro (my translation):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Baritone Robert McFerrin, the first black male soloist at the Metropolitan Opera, died last Friday (November 24) at age 85, reports the Associated Press.
McFerrin, the father of vocalist and conductor Bobby McFerrin, was born in 1921 in Marianna, Arkansas, the fourth of eight children of a Baptist minister. As a child, McFerrin was discouraged from singing anything but gospel music, but when he moved to St. Louis in 1936 he auditioned for the choir at Sumner High School and was introduced to classical vocal music.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

After 60 years of producing operas singularly over a fall and winter season, Fort Worth Opera has announced a major change in its presentation format: it will condense its entire schedule to an annual festival ? with all of its operas and concerts being presented over a four week period (see attached schedule). The inaugural Fort Worth Opera Festival is scheduled to commence in May 2007. The 2007 Festival will be in lieu of a fall/winter schedule for 2006/2007.
— Read more at texasgigs.com

Verdi's Macbeth wastes no time on the psychology of its characters in its first act, and the king's murder is no sooner mentioned than accomplished. But the opera unfolds on two planes, at two separate tempos. On the one hand, there's the trajectory of violence, which moves extremely quickly and escalates with unstoppable momentum once the first murder takes place. On the other, there's Macbeth's journey to self-realization through guilt, which moves at a painfully slow pace. It is the difference between these two planes that gives the story its distinctive dynamic, but somehow Vancouver Opera's production of Macbeth, which opened on Saturday night at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver, could not manage to make that tension palpable.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

Downtown Raleigh's revival ain't over. But that won't stop the fat lady from singing there this week.
The Opera Company of North Carolina on Friday is moving to a Fayetteville Street storefront.
"We're on a mission to make opera not only a lot more visible, but a lot more accessible to people," says Frank Grebowski, the opera's general director.
That was harder to do from offices near Crabtree Valley Mall.
— Read more at newsobserver.com

Mark Jacoby will make his New York City opera debut playing Major-General Stanley in Gilbert and Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, which returns to the NYCO repertoire March 3, 2007.
Jacoby joins the previously announced Marc Kudisch as the Pirate King, Sarah Jane McMahon as Mabel, Myrna Paris as Ruth, Matt Morgan as Frederic and Kevin Burdette as the Sergeant of Police. Opening night is scheduled for March 7. Additional cast members will be announced shortly. (This cast will sing all 16 performances of Pirates.)
— Read more at Playbill News

A soprano opens her mouth to sing an aria and stutters, bringing out little fragments of a beautiful melody. A mezzo coaches a baritone, constantly interrupting to instruct him in proper technique. A tenor, auditioning, opens his mouth and falls silent. "Don't you have anything that's not by Mozart?" says the conductor he is auditioning for. "I can't stand Mozart either," the tenor says.
These might be views of everyday life in the opera world, where it gets harder every year to give Mozart a fresh twist. But they are also moments in an opera of their own: "I Hate Mozart," by Michael Sturminger and the Austrian jazz and electronic-music composer Bernard Lang. It had its premiere this month at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna's newest opera house.
— Read more at New York Times

Give some theatre types a sow's ear and they'll immediately set about making a silk purse, regardless of prevailing wisdom.
Give others, like director Christopher Newton, the same thing and they'll craft it into a bouncy little football for a talented cast to kick around the stage for an audience's enjoyment.
And make no mistake, the script for Glorious! (which opened Thursday at the Bluma Appel in a CanStage/Theatre Calgary co-production) is a sow's ear of major proportion.
— Read more at TorontoSun.com

Here's a line from the original text of Georges Bizet's "Carmen" by the team of Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy:
"Tra la la la-a-a-a-a."
Now consider the words that Oscar Hammerstein II wed to the same music in 1943: "Beat out dat rhythm on the drum."
Quite a transformation. But the differences between "Carmen," the 1875 opera, and "Carmen Jones," Hammerstein's World War II update, aren't so striking that Bizet's creation is wholly altered. Hammerstein's reworking is a masterful job of dramatic craftsmanship and cultural reinvention.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Anyone who saw Sunday afternoon's revival of "Manon Lescaut" at the War Memorial is likely still burbling about the performance of Karita Mattila in the title role. The Finnish beauty with the silvery soprano is as good an actress as Cherry Jones.
Yet Mattila shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone who has followed her dramatic career at San Francisco Opera, or as an enchanting recitalist who is apt to kick off her shoes to sing gypsy songs.
— Read more at Examiner.com

Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah," an adaptation of the Apocryphal biblical story of Susannah and the Elders that is relocated to an Appalachian valley and sung in hill-country dialect, is commonly described as an American folk opera.
But the Virginia Opera's new production is anything but folksy. The cast wears denim and gingham, square dances and shouts praise at a revival. All that, however, is theatrical gloss. As presented here, "Susannah" is as starkly expressive and psychologically charged as Richard Strauss' "Elektra."
— Read more at TimesDispatch.com

He has been dubbed a British Mozart, a child prodigy who began composing at the age of nine and at 20 became the youngest composer to have a work performed at the Proms.
But George Benjamin, one of Britain's most enigmatic and important contemporary composers, has sometimes been painstakingly slow with his eagerly awaited creations, often spending four years on one piano piece.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

[Puppets, Video and a Silly Witch Populate L.A. Opera's 'Hansel and Gretel']
L.A. Opera's new Hansel and Gretel at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion has all the ingredients of great children's theater: a spectacular set, novel special effects, a new English libretto, a strong cast and a terrific conductor. If it doesn't quite become gingerbread, it's not for lack of effort.
— Read more at LA Downtown News Online

[Divas ain't what they used to be. Thank goodness, then, for the great American soprano Renee Fleming, who performs in eight languages and all styles - and, she says, loves to dress the part ]
'Inside,' said Renee Fleming, 'I still feel like the nerdy secretary. You know, in the films - the little mouse with thick glasses and her hair in the bun. And then she lets down the hair, takes off the glasses and reveals how wild she is. Well, maybe not wild in my case, but with all those rich, intense emotions hidden.'
— Read more at The Observer

It's like turning a book into a movie: sometimes an opera that you've loved on recordings can pale when you see it onstage. This is especially true of operas that aren't performed enough to let operagoers get used to them.
Such an opera is Bellini's "Sonnambula," which the Vienna State Opera brought back on Sunday night for Anna Netrebko, in her first performance of the complete role. "Sonnambula" is a staple of the bel canto repertory, but the only reason to stage it is having a rare soprano who can really sing it.
— Read more at New York Times

If there's a surefire hit in the opera world, it's "Carmen." Bizet's masterpiece remains one of the most often-produced works in the repertoire, for good reason; it's exciting, it's passionate, and it contains one great tune after another.
The new San Francisco Opera production, which opened Tuesday at the War Memorial Opera House as the last offering of the company's fall season, has the great tunes covered. But it comes up regrettably short on passion, excitement or dramatic urgency.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Thanksgiving Day parade, Nobel Prize ceremony, Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall. What's a single mother to do?
Fleming, who made her professional opera debut 20 years ago, took her daughters on the road when they were younger. But Amelia is now 14 and Sage is 11, so the singer has booked fewer opera appearances, which demand a larger commitment of time away from her New York home. When the 47-year-old Fleming does tour, the girls spend more time with their father, actor Rick Ross, their aunt or a nanny.
— Read more at localnewswatch.com

It's been a pretty uneventful fall at the San Francisco Opera, as former General Director Pamela Rosenberg passes -- or rather tosses -- the baton to her successor, David Gockley. And nothing says "uneventful" like the umpteenth revival of Bizet's "Carmen," which is the company's final offering until the summer.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The French government has extended by more than a year the tenure of Gérard Mortier as Director of the Opéra national de Paris. According to an announcement made on Monday (November 20) by French minister of culture Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres and reported by Agence France-Presse, Mortier will remain in his post through the 2008-09 season, whose programming he has already begun to plan.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

New York's Metropolitan Opera, embracing 21st century technology as a tool for boosting an art form born in the 16th century, will send live feeds of its Dec. 30 Julie Taymor-directed and James Levine-conducted production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" to more than 50 theaters across North America ? including the Burbank 16 and the Irvine Spectrum 21.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Cincinnati Opera Guild presents the second annual Home for the Holidays tour on Sunday, Dec. 10 from 2-4 p.m. in Mount Lookout. Proceeds benefit Cincinnati Opera's 2007 Season.
Spend the afternoon touring six riverfront condominiums in Mount Lookout. These homes of prominent arts patrons will reflect their tastes and personalities with stylish holiday decorations.
— Read more at The Enquirer

Yitzchak Meir Helfgot is not the first cantor to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House - the opera singers Richard Tucker and Jan Peerce, who were also cantors, got there first. But the internationally renowned Helfgot will be the first to perform cantorial music at the Met, the grandest stage for grand opera in the United States.
As of Tuesday, his concert, "Helfgot Sings Cantorial Classics," scheduled for 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 3, had nearly sold out ? and the Met seats 4,400.
— Read more at Jewish Standard

Love is the intoxicant that drives Puccini's "Manon Lescaut." The opera often is dismissed as badly plotted and barely plausible in its portrayal of a beautiful, impetuous young woman's downfall in 18th century France. But the "Manon" which opened Sunday at San Francisco Opera isn't implausible in the least: It is emotionally real, crushingly so, because the performance at its center, by Karita Mattila, the great lyric dramatic soprano, is so penetrating, so soul-bearing, so... intoxicating.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

Wow, PBS has something good on this Thanksgiving, a documentary film called Beverly Sills: Made in America. It airs in most places on November 23 at 9 pm, but you have to check your local listings.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

"He's got everything I encourage my students to aspire to," Marilyn Horne said to me a few weeks ago during the intermission of a recital by the young Peruvian tenor Juan Diego Flórez in Oberlin College's acoustically wonderful Finney Chapel. "His understanding of musical style is impeccable. His sound is glorious. And he really connects. I?m blown away."
— Read more at observer.com

[Weekend gala was often stirring and occasionally silly]
The New Orleans Opera Association pulled off a theatrical coup Saturday, showcasing a "grand" art form in a lively, vaudeville-style gala that never took itself too seriously. Alternately stirring and silly, "The Toast of New Orleans" ranged across centuries and national styles with a "greatest hits" anthology of opera favorites presented by 10 visiting singers, the New Orleans Opera Chorus, and the Louisiana Symphony Orchestra -- all under the baton of conductor Robert Lyall. nola.com

Cincinnati Opera has announced the details of its 2007 season, which runs from June 14 to July 31 and includes Gounod's Faust, Mozart's Così fan tutte, Verdi's Aida and John Adams's Nixon in China.
Faust, a Montreal and Seattle Opera co-production, runs June 14 and 16 and features tenor Richard Leech in the title role, soprano Ruth Ann Swenson as Marguerite, bass Denis Sedov making his company debut as Méphistophélès, baritone Dalibor Jenis as Valentin and mezzo-soprano Marie Lenormand making her house debut as Siebel.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

It's been 18 years since the folks at the San Francisco Opera last staged Puccini's early melodrama "Manon Lescaut." Obviously, they've been waiting for Karita Mattila.
On Sunday afternoon at the War Memorial Opera House, the Finnish soprano added yet another chapter to her brief but triumphant history here with a gutsy, tender depiction of the doomed material girl. In Mattila's crisp and vocally resplendent portrait, poor Manon emerged in all her sexy, empty-headed, avaricious glory -- and without those qualities, who would care about her or her fate?
— Read more at sfgate.com

[Friday, Sept. 26, 1997 was a fateful day for Pasha, a Russian wolfhound. She was about to take a star turn for the worse. ]
At the Metropolitan Opera in New York that night, soprano Renée Fleming was singing the title role in Massenet's "Manon
The evening turned out to be far more than just another extraordinary Fleming performance as the head-turning, extroverted materialist.
As the diva sang "The Gavotte," a howl issued from somewhere upstage.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

One of the most amazing theatrical experiences of my life was not particularly because of the performance on the stage but because of the location. I sat in the king's box, albeit on the edge of a staircase, of the Opéra royal at Versailles one year, for a performance sponsored by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles. According to an article I read recently, that space has something new to recommend it and was the setting of perhaps the year's most interesting celebration of the Mozart anniversary. Here is a section of the article by Jean-Louis Validire (Un nouveau décor pour l'Opéra royal, November 20) in Le Figaro (my translation and links added):...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

The timing is perfect. On this upcoming, most American of holidays, you can stuff yourself at Thanksgiving dinner, fall into a deep, tryptophan-induced sleep, and then wake up, have another slice of pie, and settle in to watch "Beverly Sills: Made in America" on PBS.
— Read more at The New York Sun

[Review: Los Angeles Opera turns the fairy tale opera into a storybook spectacle. Oh, and there's music.]
Los Angeles Opera's new production of Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel," which opened at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday afternoon, is what is known in the business as kid-friendly. The little devils are welcomed to the wonderful world of opera with special activities, special treats and even complimentary seat cushions (at least at the matinees). Onstage, the wicked witch is turned into a comical character, a Raggedy Ann doll gone to seed, and even the glowing-eyed forest critters are fluffy and wholly benign, Muppets kicked up another notch. Sigmund Freud never once raises his ugly head.
— Read more at ocregister.com

[Russian tenor Misha Didyk successfully handles Puccini's nearly impossible role]
"Manon Lescaut" is seldom performed because the tenor part is a killer. The Chevalier des Grieux, feckless lover of the seductive, mercenary courtesan of the title, needs a powerful, tireless voice and all the finesse we expect of a young Frenchman.
Those two attributes, power and grace, are seldom found in the same singer -- especially not one good-looking enough in breeches to take Manon away from her wealthy but elderly lover, Geronte.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Thanksgiving Day parade, Nobel Prize ceremony, Christmas concert at Carnegie Hall. What's a single mother to do?
"I don't know," Renee Fleming, America's leading soprano and a divorced mother of two, says of her schedule. "I'm never on top of anything. But I'm constantly multitasking and scrambling. ... That's the biggest challenge, the juggling."
— Read more at sfgate.com

When Franco Zeffirelli's claustrophobic 1981 staging of "La Bohème" returned to the Metropolitan Opera House on Saturday, it was hard not to compare it to Bartlett Sher's nimble new "Barber of Seville" for the Met. Mr. Sher's walkway around the orchestra pit brings the action and the intimacy to the foreground. Watching the drama of "La Bohème" unfold in Zeffirelli's rooftop garret is like peering into a distant, cluttered dollhouse.
— Read more at New York Times

The Opera Company of the Highlands presents Gian Carlo Menotti's musical treasure, "Amahl and the Night Visitors" at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 2, an at 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, at The Lycian Centre, Pavilion Theatre, 1351 Kings Highway, Sugar Loaf; and at 3 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 9; and at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 10, at St. George?s Church, 105 Grand Street, Newburgh.
— Read more at The Chronicle

Alan Gilbert has a growing reputation as a conductor who makes sparks fly, both on the concert podium and in the opera pit. This was highlighted this past season, when he received ecstatic reviews following an unscheduled debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as raves for the two new productions he conducted at Santa Fe Opera. Of the former, a critic for the Berliner Morgenpost called Gilbert's performances "the embodiment of a conducting 'event'."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Scottish Opera's smart-arsed Tamerlano is dire, but Independent Opera's Orlando raises Hugh Canning's spirits]
If you thought the case for Handel's serious Italian operas had been finally made, think again. Although some 10 of his finest works in the opera seria genre - and a handful of his dramatic English oratorios - have established firm footholds in the repertoires of the most forward-looking lyric-theatre companies, they still suffer at the hands of directors who believe they have to come up with a "relevant" contemporary concept to bring these supposedly moribund works to life, and also conductors whose languid tempi in slow arias and sluggish pacing of the linking recitative hold up the dramatic momentum Handel strove ceaselessly to create. Yes, Handel's operas and oratorios are long, but they often seem much longer than they need to be when cut, slowed down and divvied up with smart- arsey directorial "insights" that are often nothing of the sort.
— Read more at Sunday Times

IT WASN'T so long ago that family fare was limited to Disney matinees and concerts that featured purple dinosaurs and treacly lyrics.
These days, families giggle their way through a comic opera crafted just for them by Lemony Snicket and the San Francisco Symphony. Kids sit cross-legged in the loge at the Opera House as Figaro serenades them from the stage. And teens spend their Friday evenings dining with a drama expert before sauntering into Berkeley Rep for whatever's showing on the main stage.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Christiane Noll, who created the role of Emma in the Broadway production of Jekyll & Hyde, will play Mabel in the Eugene Opera's upcoming production of The Pirates of Penzance.
Noll will join Richard White (as the Pirate King) and Eric Millegan (as Frederic) for the Dec. 29-31 performances of the classic Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Mark Beudert directs.
— Read more at Playbill News

The Russian mezzo Marina Domashenko has withdrawn from the San Francisco Opera revival of Bizet's Carmen which begins its run tomorrow night. A statement released by the company last Friday afternoon (November 17) said that Domashenko's cancellation was for health reasons.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

It is hard to imagine that Jacques Offenbach wrote "Orphée aux Enfers" with future greatness in mind. There is an element of haste in this jolly hit-and-run attack on "Bulfinch's Mythology." Crowded, cluttered and panting with hyperactivity, the plotline of this "opéra bouffon" probably had even more zip in the mid-1850s, when it was aimed at an audience eager to avenge itself on the tedious childhood hours spent studying ancient gods and goddesses.
— Read more at New York Times

Time magazine proclaimed Beverly Sills "America's Queen of Opera" in a 1971 cover story. Decades later, Sills still occupies the throne.
No other American soprano comes close to Sills' celebrity. Not even Renee Fleming can match her achievements.
Sills was more than a prima donna cheered in opera houses from New York City to San Francisco.
— Read more at courierpostonline.com

Even more than 2006, 2007 promises to be a banner year for opera and other vocal masterworks at Tanglewood.
Four opera productions plus a complete performance of "Carousel" are among the major works on tap, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced yesterday. Students of the Tanglewood Music Center will play the main performing roles.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle

[SOULFUL SOPRANO TALKS ABOUT HER LIFE, CAREER AND SINGING PUCCINI'S 'MANON']
Few performers are so universally admired as Karita Mattila, the Finnish soprano who routinely is lauded for her staggering soulfulness and unsettlingly direct dramatic abilities. One might call her approach "naked"-- nothing is left unexposed, which literally was the case two years ago at the Metropolitan Opera when she stripped down to bare skin during the "Dance of the Seven Veils" in Richard Strauss's "Salome."
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

IN September the puppet in the news was the bunraku boy in Anthony Minghella's staging of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" at the Metropolitan Opera. Next month comes the 12-foot Witch in Basil Twist's production of Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel" at the Houston Grand Opera. But there is more to this new world of puppet opera than puppets: masks, shape-shifting costumes (often colossal), sets that have an eerie way of coming to life.
— Read more at New York Times

The latest operatic crisis to hit this city-state's cultural life saw the resignation on Nov. 10 of Michael Schindhelm as Generaldirektor of the Opera Foundation that guides the destinies of the Staatsoper and the Komische Oper in erstwhile East Berlin and the Deutsche Oper in western Berlin. Schindhelm, in office for only 18 months of his five-year contract, quit in disgust over a mandate by the federal government to cut the foundation?s budget by 16 percent by 2009, from $143.5 million to $127 million. (He has since withdrawn that resignation, about which more later.)
— Read more at Musical America - Industry News Article

A crack of thunder, the crash of cymbals, the flash of a dagger, and another operatic heroine dies for love. Thus ends Madison Opera's stunning production of Giuseppe Verdi's "Rigoletto" to equally thunderous applause.
The three-hour production, which opened Friday before an Overture Hall crowd of nearly 2,000, ranks as one of the most highly regarded works in the operatic canon. Madison Opera assembled one of the best combinations of local and guest artists in recent memory to more than do justice to Verdi's seminal work.
— Read more at The Capital Times

The Utah Symphony & Opera said Friday that it is exceeding expectations for financial recovery and hopes to balance its budget by the end of next season.
At US&O's annual meeting, CEO Anne Ewers told the board of trustees the operating shortfall for the 2005-06 fiscal year - which ended in August - was around $182,000. That's about $233,000 less than the $415,000 originally projected in the restabilization plan adopted in early 2005. It is also much lower than the $1.8 million deficit it had the year after the Utah Symphony and Utah Opera merged in 2002.
Ticket sales increased last year, as did donations and revenue from renting sets and costumes to other companies.
— Read more at Salt Lake Tribune

During the past few years, Orlando Opera has been raising its standards by engaging increasingly better-known singers for its leads. To be sure, some of those names arrived in Orlando with voices that, while still very good for a regional company, were past their primes and rested on reputations made some time ago.
That was emphatically not the case Friday night at the Bob Carr Centre, where Orlando Opera premiered its production of Camille Saint-Saens' Samson & Dalila. Starring in the female title role was mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, a genuine international opera superstar at the top of her game.
— Read more at Orlando Sentinel

[ Handel in Iraq and ruin]
Things are not looking good for Scottish Opera. Nor should they be when productions as ill-conceived and ill-executed as Tamerlano are given the green light. A superb Handelian with his own period instruments ensemble, conductor Christian Curnyn is unable to galvanize this orchestra to play expressively in an unfamiliar argot. The overture stagnates, the arias are accompanied with a stolid, inflexible tone, and there are long, inexplicable caesurae. Meanwhile, director John La Bouchardière assays an unconvincing analogue for modern-day Iraq in an opera about two medieval plenipotentiaries.
— Read more at Independent Online

It's not often that two contemporary artists deliberately set out to make something beautiful. And John Adams and Peter Sellars, the composer and stage director, are more associated with politics than with prettiness. This is, after all, the team that brought you the operas "Nixon in China" and last season's "Doctor Atomic," about the making of the bomb.
So "A Flowering Tree," which had its world premiere here on Tuesday night, may come as a surprise: It's an Indian folk tale about magic and love, which Mr. Adams has set to sweet music and Mr. Sellars has wrapped in veils of bright color. It wants to be lovely. It wants to seduce. It is almost aggressive in its desire to be liked.
— Read more at New York Times

[Playwright, librettist, and diehard opera fan Terrence McNally tells the Met's Matt Dobkin why finding the drama in opera is a matter of life and death.]
Maria Callas looms large in Terrence McNally's work. One of the soprano's famed performances as Violetta Valéry was the focus of The Lisbon Traviata, and the diva returned to McNally's theatrical world in Master Class, which won the Tony Award for best play in 1996. But even a Callas acolyte like McNally says that a great singer alone cannot single-handedly make a performance succeed. The right director, a capable conductor, and a strong score are essential ? as is a lucid libretto, which McNally learned firsthand writing the text for Jake Heggie's 2000 opera, Dead Man Walking. So what does McNally think is required to make opera theatrical? Music! Vision! Collaboration!
— Read more at PlaybillArts

WHEN CRITICS describe Karita Mattila, words like "intense," "passionate" and "incendiary" often come up. So it's no surprise that the Finnish soprano, in town to sing the title role of "Manon Lescaut" for San Francisco Opera, has strong feelings about Puccini's lyric drama.
"It's fabulous," Mattila says of the opera, which hasn't been produced by San Francisco Opera since 1988. "I love this production, and I love my character. I never get tired of this music -- it's just so beautiful, and so moving."
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

It would be remiss of me not to mention this, although it does not really concern us. In his latest column (A walk on the web side, November 8), Norman Lebrecht dismisses classical music blogging on the basis of a handful of blogs. Sadly, Ionarts was not even lucky enough to have dirt thrown at us. (One of the blogs Lebrecht claims he read, High Notes by soprano Geraldine McGreevy, was last updated on October 18. For some reason, he also mentions Terry Teachout, who is no longer really concerned with classical music.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Opera doesn't get more charming and instantly likable than Mozart's The Magic Flute. It's got everything: endlessly lovely music, romance, drama, comedy and characters you can root for (or against).
Heck, there's even a dragon.
Adding to the promise of delight in Opera Colorado's production, which opened Friday at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House, are the stage designs of Maurice Sendak, modern literature's immortal gift to children and their parents. His enchanting sets and costumes (first seen here in the company's 1999 production at the Buell) induce endless smiles and a few chuckles.
— Read more at Rocky Mountain News

The Washington National Opera's current run of Madama Butterfly is neither new nor original to Washington - which might be a first strike against a house that's not a repertory company. But then Mariusz Trelinski's staging is at least visually arresting enough to deserve being exposed to Washington opera goers a second time around since 2001. Not having seen the production then, but having been much impressed by his André Chernier last season, I looked forward to this Butterfly, even if it isn't my favorite Puccini opera.
— Read more at ionarts

International opera star and National Spokesperson for The Partnership for the Homeless Jessye Norman will be "bearing witness" to the issues of homelessness and social injustice at St. Bartholomew's Church on November 20, 2006 at 7 o'clock.
"Bearing Witness" - A Sing Out for Social Justice in our City and Nation - will also include many notable activists, artists and community leaders. Ms. Norman will be joined by Kevin Maynor, a gifted recitalist and a Fulbright Award winner. Bearing Witness will raise awareness of the issue of homelessness; all proceeds will benefit The Partnership for the Homeless.
Tickets for the benefit are $25, $50, $100, $250 and $500 and can be purchased at the front desk of St. Bart's Church, through their website www.stbarts.org, or by contacting Gay Haubner, 212-645-3444 ext.102; ghaubner@pfth.org at The Partnership for the Homeless. VIP seating and sponsorship opportunities are also available.
— Learn more at www.stbarts.org

The pre-curtain drama almost rivaled what happened onstage. But a last-minute strike threat by the Dallas Opera's musicians was averted and the curtain rose on James Robinson's new production of Nabucco as scheduled last Friday (November 10).
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The Washington Concert Opera is on the list of every serious opera-lover in the region for increasingly great performances of works they won't otherwise hear in or near Washington. Music Director Antony Walker (who just signed up to be the MD for the Pittsburg Opera, thankfully without giving up his WCO post) and his staff have a great hand (aided by considerable budget-wizardry) for picking a cast that contains stars of tomorrow, often assembled around one well known quantity of a singer and exceptional vocal talent. Last Sunday night affirmed all positive prejudices when the company performed Handel's Orlando at the Lisner Auditorium.
— Read more at ionarts

Many times over, Madison Opera has shown a knack for snagging young talents on the rise and setting them center-stage in Overture Hall. This season's candidate for "we-knew-him-when" status is tenor Stephen Costello, the twentysomething Philadelphian who will play the Duke of Mantua in Madison Opera's production of Verdi's "Rigoletto," running Friday, Nov. 17, and Sunday, Nov. 19.
— Read more at Wisconsin State Journal

The head of a foundation set up to oversee debt-laden Berlin's three opera houses will step down, the city government said Wednesday, amid tensions with the capital's mayor. Michael Schindhelm was appointed in late 2004 as the first general director of the foundation, created in an effort to enhance coordination, cut costs and keep open all three opera houses - the Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper and Komische Oper.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Toledo Opera will present director Dave Touslon's updated, post-WWI interpretation of "Don Pasquale" Nov. 17 through 19 at the Valentine Theatre.
Toulson, who has previously directed "Elixir of Love" and "Face on the Ballroom Floor," has given "Don Pasquale" a non-traditional facelift with his 1919 version set in New York City in contrast to the original version, composed by Gaetano Donizetti, which took place in the mid-1800s in Rome.
— Read more at Toledo Free Press

Francine Segan, the acclaimed culinary historian and television personality who authored the cookbooks The Philosopher's Kitchen and Shakespeare's Kitchen, has a brand-new volume out for the opera fans among us: The Opera Lover's Cookbook. This evening from 5:30 to 7 at the Metropolitan Opera Shop, she and the Met Guild will be hosting a gathering with samples some of the delicious treats on offer in the book.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Francesca Zambello's staging of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades has returned to Covent Garden with a degree more clarity than when new in 2001.
Many of the discontinuities caused by Peter J Davison's inside-outside set, a Winter Palace so responsive to nature that a heap of snow appears in the ballroom, have been minimised. Too often though the over-laden visuals distract from the terrifying claustrophobia of the piece.
— Read more at This is London

The timeless, poignant music that fills the first floor orchestra room tonight doesn't feel as if it belongs here. Classical notes soar over the linoleum floors and hang at the tip of each violist's bow, hesitant to bounce off the bland white walls that just don't do Mozart justice.
The Opera Mafia Orchestra is playing their first full-length, on-campus opera, Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," on Friday and Sunday in the Jester Spanish Oaks Terrace. The two-hour opera will be sung in Italian, but there will be screens with subtitles and free food will be provided by Jester City Limits, the society's spokeswoman Maria Frederick said.
— Read more at dailytexanonline.com

I?ve kept my dirty little secret for years.
As an entertainment writer for news-press.com, I?ve covered everything from rock concerts to art exhibits to wine festivals. I?ve been doing this, on and off, for more than a decade.
Yet, somehow, I?d never seen a live opera.
Not "Don Giovanni." Not "Madama Butterfly" (although I loved its pop-opera update, "Miss Saigon").
And, until recently, not the popular "Amahl and the Night Visitors."
I?m so ashamed.
— Read more at The News-Press

Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia" abounds in comic confusion. In the opening scene an amorous count in Seville has fallen at first sight for a feisty young beauty, who is kept under lock and key by her guardian, a pompous doctor. The count decides to pursue her disguised as a penniless but gallant student. From that point on, the confusions become increasingly perplexing and not always so funny. The society Rossini depicts is a place where aloof aristocrats, fawning professionals and even servants are so wary of one another that a cottage industry has arisen for oily go-betweens who will spy, scheme and transmit secret notes.
— Read more at New York Times

In the opera "Every Man Jack," which had its world premiere Saturday night at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, the writer Jack London reels about the stage in an alcoholic stupor. The room spins, voices rise up and fade into the fog, and the proceedings are punctuated by sudden, all-too-brief episodes of blinding clarity.
— Read more at sfgate.com

In what will likely be the first sanctioned use of an iPod during an opera performance, Nashville Opera has announced that it will offer audience members the option of utilizing a pre-recorded director's commentary podcast during select performances of its upcoming production of Roméo et Juliette.
— Read more at Opera News

The orchestral players of the Dallas Opera have agreed to a new five-year contract, The Dallas Morning News has reported, thus averting the potential for a strike that appeared to hang over the company's season as late as the opening-night performance of Nabucco last Friday evening. The orchestra reportedly ratified the new contract on Saturday, November 11.
— Read more at Opera News

Cincinnati Opera has updated casting and production news for its 2007 Summer Festival (June 14-July 31). Ruth Ann Swenson, Richard Margison and conducting legend Julius Rudel will join the already-announced stars Richard Leech ("Faust"), Teddy Tahu Rhodes ("Cosi fan tutte") and conductor Kristjan Järvi ("Nixon in China") for Cincinnati Opera's 87th season.
— Read more at The Enquirer

EVEN in sunshine the approach to Mountjoy Prison is a bleak experience. Under clouds and rain the place chills the heart. And as I rang the doorbell (a surreal touch, but how else do you get into prison as a free man?) on a sodden Irish morning, it felt like that standard horror-movie scene where the innocent tries the knocker at a gothic mansion. Not that Mountjoy is exactly gothic, but its 19th-century granite grimness serves as well. As it was meant to.
— Read more at New York Times

Is it an opera? Is it a musical? Like Bizet's Carmen, the Gershwins' Porgy and Bess is enough like a musical to survive being turned into one.
Trevor Nunn's Glyndebourne production of the opera became a classic in the early 1990s; now he brings us Porgy the musical. It is shorter, it is amplified, some of the dialogue is spoken rather than sung, numbers are transposed into different keys, the orchestration is arranged for a 21-part band, almost every word is -intelligible.
— Read more at FT.com

After 25 years devoted to music of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Nicholas McGegan and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra took a fascinating step into the present over the weekend with the world premiere of "To Hell and Back," a one-act chamber opera commissioned from San Francisco composer Jake Heggie.
Yes, everything old is new again, even the Baroque.
— Read more at sfgate.com

When Toronto unveiled its new opera house in September, the opening production was Wagner's Der Ring des Niebelungen, which made history as the first time the four-opera cycle was performed in Canada.
The Carnival Center for the Performing Arts isn't quite making a Wagnerian splash with the programming for its opening season. Still, the new complex will host quite a few excellent performances this season that can't be enjoyed in other parts of Florida, particularly in opera and dance.
— Read more at St. Petersburg Times

Opera Ireland begins its winter season next Saturday at the Gaiety Theatre. The season lasts for nine nights.
The opening production, an updated version of Puccini's masterpiece La Boheme, is considered a box-office banker.
But it is the other opera, A Streetcar Named Desire, that has raised interest in Ireland's operatic circles.
— Read more at

In today's fast-track, high-tech world of easy accessibility and immediate gratification, the leisurely pace and rarefied air of opera can be a bit of a tough sell. There's also the matter of all those pesky jokes about fat ladies singing.
"Unfortunately," acknowledges Boston Lyric Opera general director Janice Mancini Del Sesto, "opera has had some really awful stereotypes -- oversized people with loud scary voices, the woman with the big horns."
— Read more at The Boston Globe

When Emperor Joseph II asks Mozart to rework his opera in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, Mozart responds. "How can I rewrite what is perfect?"
It's a good question.
Opera is rarely thought of in terms of perfection, but rather like legislation, it's something that is either better or worse than could be expected: Of course, opera is a collaboration and with anything you get a half-dozen people involved in, from librettist to costume designer, something is likely to go horribly wrong.
— Read more at azcentral.com

A CRITICALLY acclaimed opera starring knitters and spinners from Shetland will finally arrive in the islands later this month at the end of a UK and Norwegian tour.
Five Shetland women have left home for three months to join the caste of accomplished actors, musicians and the highly respected production team involved with Odysseus Unwound.
Artistic director Bill Bankes-Jones said: "I really admire the Shetlanders for performing in the play because it is a big commitment to be away from home and family for three months on tour. They have all been great and they are really thriving."
— Read more at shetland-news.co.uk

First came the Three Tenors.
And as soon as you thought the hype from Pavarotti and Placido and Carreras died down, along came an avalanche of tenors. Irish tenors. Ten tenors. Chinese tenors.
Matthew Lord, a Juilliard-educated lyric tenor who's performed at the Metropolitan Opera and recorded with Renee Fleming, decided he'd had enough. The sometime comedy writer and full-time opera singer decided to chuck his highbrow career for something with more mass appeal.
— Read more at Macon Telegraph

Classical-music purists probably wouldn't have much patience with the East Village Opera Company's major-label debut. "Nessun Dorma" with an electric-guitar solo? "O Mio Babbino Caro" with additional lyrics ("Outside, it starts to rain/ Inside, I go insane") that might have migrated from an R&B album? Sounds like heresy.
But taken on its own terms, "The East Village Opera Company" is an offbeat delight. If it sometimes teeters on the cheesy ? and occasionally ventures dangerously close to self-parody ? its sheer audacity is exhilarating.
— Read more at STLtoday .com

The argument doesn't exactly rage but it does go on - why does some music live past its own age, while some is very nearly left behind? One answer is a certain kind of quality, a genetic makeup that appeals as much now as it did then. There is also luck, good and bad.
Another idea is the tidal thesis: that public recognition comes and goes according to the phases of some musical moon. It would be nice to attach this last theory to Donizetti's "Dom Sébastien," an opera that was much on the minds of opera lovers in the late 19th century but is not much on ours. Eve Queler's Opera Orchestra of New York offered a reminder at Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night.
— Read more at New York Times

Anna Netrebko and Renee Fleming recorded their latest albums in close proximity at the Mariinsky theatre in St Petersburg last year. In each case, the conductor is Valery Gergiev, whose presence signifies an uncommon seriousness of purpose beneath a format primarily associated with vocal display. Both programmes combine the familiar with the little known. Netrebko examines the Russian repertoire from Glinka to Prokofiev, including snippets from her key role - Natasha in War and Peace - along with songs and arias by Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky, including her first forays into Eugene Onegin, an opera she has yet to tackle complete. Fleming, meanwhile, pays homage to the great singing-actresses of the first half of the 20th century, performing music associated with such famously charismatic figures as Maria Jeritza, Mary Garden, Geraldine Farrar and Magda Olivero.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Two new productions at the Lyric Opera of Chicago are quintessential examples of the good and the ugly. Happily, the musical side of things is strong in both, but while Verdi's Il trovatore, directed by David McVicar, is ripping good theatre, Richard Strauss's Salome has been given an inept treatment by director Francesca Zambello.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

Henry Fogel, former longtime president of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, has just introduced a new blog, called "On The Record".
For anyone who has had the opportunity to hear or see Henry speak or write about music and the arts - something he does with verve, unique perspective, personality and sometimes impressive endurance - this blog will provide another point of access.
— Read more at Chicago Classical Music

A new collective bargaining agreement between the San Francisco Opera and the union representing solo singers, chorus members, dancers and the production staff promises labor peace in what has often been a tempestuous relationship, according to representatives of both sides.
The five-year contract, ratified Oct. 30 by theAmerican Guild of Musical Artists, provides for annual pay increases of between 3 and 4 percent. This marks a contrast to the two-year freeze and 2 percent raise negotiated during the previous contract, when the company's finances were at their most perilous
— Read more at sfgate.com

When opera fans talk about the kinds of voices that are in short supply today - and opera lovers just love talking about such things - you can count on someone mentioning a dearth of true Verdi baritones.
But when you hear Mark Rucker sing the composer's music, the situation suddenly doesn't seem so bleak. Rucker, starring in the Baltimore Opera Company's production of Verdi's Nabucco that opens Saturday, has carved an impressive niche in this repertoire.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

When soprano Lyubov Petrova and tenor Massimo Giordano take the Benedum Center stage in Pittsburgh Opera's production of Gounod's "Romeo & Juliet," they'll carry with them a wealth of insight into the characters and a sizable amount of performance experience that belies their youthful good looks. They'll also bring similar histories with the Metropolitan Opera -- both of their Met debuts were as substitutes.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

The Metropolitan Opera made a rare late-night appearance.
A 22-piece orchestra, a 16-member chorus and six principal singers performed Wednesday on David Letterman's "Late Show."
At the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, where the show is taped, the performers crowded onto the show's signature blue floor and offered viewers a nearly 3-minute preview of the Met's new production of Gioachino Rossini's "The Barber of Seville."
— Read more at Newsday.com

OVER the last 25 years, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra has introduced Bay Area audiences to dozens of rarely performed 18th-century operas and oratorios. Thursday night, the early music ensemble unveiled another kind of first ? the world premiere of a 21st-century opera composed specifically for Baroque instruments.
Jake Heggie's "To Hell and Back," which revisits the myth of Persephone in a modern-day setting, was the radiant centerpiece of the orchestra's program at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

It's likely that Jack London would enjoy the fact that his life is being turned into an opera.
One of the earliest influences London cited in his literary development was Ouida's novel "Signa," about a peasant boy who grows up to be a famous opera composer. Born in San Francisco in 1876, London pursued a similar rags-to-riches path in his own life, tragically shortened by long illnesses exacerbated by alcoholism.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Allison Janney and Stockard Channing, who co-starred on NBC's "The West Wing," will help an opera company honor the late playwright Wendy Wasserstein.
The Glimmerglass Opera of Cooperstown will be joined by the two Emmy-winning actresses to present "An Uncommon Woman: A Celebration of Wendy Wasserstein," to be held Nov. 28 at the Colony Club in Manhattan.
— Read more at ABC News

Sonoma's most famous historical figure and literary icon, Jack London, is the subject of a newly commissioned opera "Every Man Jack," which the Sonoma City Opera will present this month.
Inspired by London's groundbreaking biographical work, "John Barleycorn," the work uses a vaudeville-like format to tell the compelling story of this adventurer, writer and flawed genius' lifelong struggle with alcohol. Written by Grammy award-winning composer Libby Larsen and celebrated librettist Philip Littell, "Every Man Jack" premieres at the Green Music Festival at Sonoma State University Nov. 11.
— Read more at Napa Valley Register

The Pittsburgh Opera has appointed Antony Walker, current artistic director of the Washington Concert Opera, as its artistic director as well. Mr. Walker's appointment is scheduled to begin immediately. He plans to retain his current post with the Washington Concert Opera, much to the relief of opera aficionados here.
— Read more at The Washington Times

After hearing professional opera singer Maria Callas for the first time, Shelley Jackson knew her future was in opera. Three years ago, the idea of opera was just a dream. Now, after hours upon hours of rehearsals and much devoted hard work, her dream will come true.
Jackson, a senior at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, will play the Countess, one of the two female leads in Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro." The production is one of two operas that the conservatory presents each year.
— Read more at catholicherald.com

Renée Fleming's crème-caramel tones, the black-and-gold brocade of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's timbre: Contrary to what some nostalgia buffs would have you believe, today's operatic scene hardly lacks for great and distinctive voices. Among the most idiosyncratic belongs to mezzo-soprano Vesselina Kasarova, 41, who makes one of her infrequent local appearances on Tuesday 7, as Zayda in Opera Orchestra of New York's performance of Donizetti's Dom Sébastien.
— Read more at Time Out New York

Daniele Gatti will step down as music director of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna when his contract expires at the end of this season.
The Italian conductor - who is also music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London and principal guest conductor of the Royal Opera House (Covent Garden) - announced the news last Thursday (November 2), according to a report in the newspaper L'espresso.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Jerry Springer - The Opera, the profane, audacious music theatre work that was a sensation in England, will get its American premiere in a non-Equity production by the professional Bailiwick Repertory in Chicago in spring 2007.
— Read more at Playbill News

Music is urgent business when the conductor Mariss Jansons is there to whip it along with his stick. Friday's concert by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall contained not a perfunctory moment. Jansons brought out the undertow of desperation in Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony, written in 1939, when each new work had the potential to land the composer in a gulag.
The sensational soprano Karita Mattila sang Richard Strauss' "Four Last Songs," threading her gilded voice through the orchestra's shimmer in a brocade of glorious melancholy. Even the "Rosenkavalier" Suite, a compressed symphonic medley from Strauss' silvery opera, had the force of something crucial. Jansons does not mess around.
— Read more at Newsday.com

We will be on hiatus through Thursday -- see you then.

NINETY YEARS after his death, Jack London remains one of California's most fascinating literary figures. Now the adventure-loving author is the subject of a new opera, opening next weekend in the town where he created many of his greatest works. "Every Man Jack," which features a score by American composer Libby Larsen, makes its world premiere Nov. 11 in a Sonoma City Opera production starring baritone Rod Gilfry. Presented as part of the Green Music Festival, performances at the Person Theatre on the Sonoma State University campus continue through Nov. 19.
The opera, which is inspired by London's autobiographical "John Barleycorn," recounts the writer's life, work, travels and adventures in a "Vaudeville-style" format. According to Larsen, London is a quintessential American hero. "He was self-made, born of the people, smart, industrious, brave, adventurous, rugged, acceptably outside the law, good-looking and, most importantly, youthful," notes the composer.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

A new opera makes its premiere in the Bay Area this week, and it's a rarity by any standard. Jake Heggie's "To Hell and Back" is a contemporary work for Baroque orchestra, drawing on the ancient myth of Persephone to tell a 21st century story of spousal abuse.
Heggie's opera, which features a libretto by Gene Scheer, was commissioned by the Bay Area's own Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, which will give its first performance tonight at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. Conducted by music director Nicholas McGegan, with Broadway legend Patti LuPone and rising opera star Isabel Bayrakdarian as vocal soloists, the performance repeats through Nov. 5 in San Francisco and Berkeley. The program also includes music by Geminiani and Locatelli.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

'THE marriage of words and music, and the way this union can tell the whole story - including that which is not spoken - inspires me," says Jake Heggie, the Bay Area's pre-eminent young resident composer.
In so saying, Heggie is in harmony with the rarified company of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Boston University's School of Music Opera Institute is currently showing the one-hour opera La Navarraise as part of the 10th Annual Fall Fringe Festival. The opera, held at the Boston University Theater's Studio 210, tells a dramatic tale of love, war and death.
The opera focuses on the forbidden love between soldier Araquil and the girl from Navarre, Anita. The most touching scenes include Anita's appeals with divine emotion to the Virgin Mary. During these songs, the lighting focuses on the pleading Anita who appears to shine with holy humility.
— Read more at dailyfreepress.com

ROSSINI'S "The Barber of Seville" is the world's most popular opera. Even when indifferently sung, it can energize a full house.
Tuesday night, at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House, "Barber" delighted the crowd and even won over this accident-prone critic, recovering from a fall and yearning for my bed.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

Richard Strauss changed the world of music when he composed Salome in 1905. Singers and orchestra members shook their heads at its impossible nature, and Strauss dreamed up the most impossible-to-play character in all operadom, Salome.
Whoever plays the teenage whirlwind had to possess the voice of an Isolde, singing tall mountains of notes, and most of all, the stamina to last the course. She also had to act and take all her clothes off!
— Read more at Beacon News

Opera's latest dream couple - successors to Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna - are the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko and the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon, a working team rather than husband and wife. Their joint Traviata did the business at last year's Salzburg Festival, but here they appeared in an operatic concert.
Villazon impressed in a rarity from Massenet's forgotten Le Mage, though ideally a bigger voice is required to ride its sumptuous orchestration. He opened up with a number from Sorozábal's La Tabernera del Puerto, and went the distance in Turiddu's hefty farewell aria from Cavalleria Rusticana.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

An operatic war is raging here, with one side devoted to preserving the canonical status and interpretation of Tchaikovsky's "Yevgeny Onegin" and the other seeking to breathe new life into a Bolshoi Theater standard.
The great soprano Galina Vishnevskaya was so infuriated by a new production of "Onegin" at the Bolshoi in September that she canceled her 80th-birthday gala, which was to be held there last Wednesday, and moved it to the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall.
— Read more at New York Times

The opera production in Berlin that was cancelled over security concerns because of a scene depicting the Prophet Muhammad will be staged twice in December, according to Deutsche Oper.
Officials confirmed the dates, Dec. 18 and 29, Wednesday, saying a security assessment by police had determined no "concrete danger."
— Read more at CBC.ca

The Metropolitan Opera Guild Inc., which has been operating the Met Opera's gift shop for more than two decades, is thinking about expanding the number of CDs it sells as a nearby Tower Records store goes out of business.
Tower Records, with 89 stores in 20 states, was sold in October to liquidator Great American Corp. for $134.3 million. The company's store at 1961 Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side is selling its inventory at deep discounts and will probably close by year's end.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Deborah Voigt always had the pipes for Salome, but the embonpoint of a pumpkin. After gastric bypass surgery slimmed her down by about 100 pounds, she finally took on the biblical wanton in a happily applauded new production at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. She even shimmied through the Dance of the Seven Veils and finished with a resounding tete a tete.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has been awarded a $1.1 million challenge grant for its endowment from the Wallace Foundation. Boston Lyric Opera will receive a $500,000 program grant from the same institution.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Opera star Russell Watson has postponed his UK tour, including a show at Preston's Guild Hall. Salford-born Watson, 39, is recovering from emergency surgery to remove a brain tumour.
Surgeons removed the 3in benign tumour during a five-hour operation at St George's Hospital in Tooting, south London, in September.
— Read more at lep.co.uk

Think opera is just for wealthy seniors?
Lament that you might find it too long, too incomprehensible, too expensive?
Fear that you might be the only Gen-Y'er to buy a ticket?
The Greensboro Opera Company has crafted a 25th anniversary season designed to dispel those stereotypes and reach diverse audiences.
— Read more at goTriad.com

The Finnish National Opera has been given a major donation of EUR 550,000, from a person who wishes to remain anonymous. This is the largest donation the Opera has received, at least in its recent history. While admitting that the Opera has been given such a sum, General Director Erkki Korhonen reported that the National Opera is not allowed to provide even the sex or nationality of the donor, let alone his or her name.
— Read more at Helsingin Sanomat

Global opera star Mark S. Doss is appearing for the first time in a Portland Opera production when he takes the stage as Mephistopheles in Faust, beginning on November 4, 2006. While in town, Mr. Doss will also sing the National Anthem for the Portland Trail Blazers home game on November 8, 2006 versus the Los Angeles Lakers.
— Read more at Yahoo! Finance

Although I never attended an actual performance, I sat in on a rehearsal in the final week before the premiere of Osvaldo Golijov's one-act opera Ainadamar at Santa Fe Opera two seasons ago. I have expressed some reservations about Golijov's music and noted that reaction to his brand of crossover sound is quite different outside the United States (and there have been American critics less than enchanted by the use of Latin American rhythms and instruments in crossover music). Still, I found the score of Golijov's opera on the death of Federico García Lorca to be pleasantly seductive. The Santa Fe production was beautiful, principally because of the set designed by California-based graffiti artist Gronk, who is responsible for designing this CD's cover art. Golijov's opera is doing as well as he could have hoped, I think, after its disastrous premiere. In the revised version engineered by Peter Sellars at Santa Fe, the opera has had concert performances at the Ravinia Festival and the Ojai Festival (Andrew Clark wrote a perceptive review for the Financial Times) this summer and will be staged at Cincinnati Opera in 2009.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Glimmerglass Opera will present "An Uncommon Woman: A Celebration of Wendy Wasserstein and Music," on Tuesday, November 28, at the Colony Club in New York City from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Featuring readings by special guests Jane Alexander and Stockard Channing, the evening will also include musical performances by Glimmerglass Opera Young American Artists, a screening of The Festival of Regrets from the Central Park opera trilogy, and a performance by the Mount Holyoke Chamber Singers.
— Read more at glimmerglass.org

Kwamé Ryan has been appointed musical and artistic director of the Opéra National and Orchestre National de Bordeaux-Aquitaine; his three-year tenure begins with the 2007-08 season, reports the French website AbeilleInfo.com.
The 36-year-old conductor, born in Toronto and raised in Trinidad, replaces Hans Graf, who stepped down in 2004 to spend more time with the Houston Symphony, where he is music director. PlaybillArts

The British-born maestro who spent more than a decade raising money, making speeches and twisting arms to get Toronto a first-rate opera house is this year's winner of the National Arts Centre Award "for exceptional achievement over the past performance year.''
Conductor Richard Bradshaw, director of the Canadian Opera Company, has been showered in praise since the $180-million Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts opened in June. He will receive the NAC Award later this week, along with this year's six winners of the Governor General's Performing Arts Awards for lifetime artistic achievement.
— Read more at canada.com

The union representing the musicians of Dallas Opera's orchestra and the company's administration have yet to finalize the details of a new five-year contract with less than two weeks to go before the company is due to open its fiftieth anniversary season with performances of Nabucco, setting the stage for a potential strike by the players.
— Read more at Opera News

This week, San Francisco-based period-instrument orchestra Philharmonia Baroque presents the world premiere of a new mini-opera by composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer. Titled To Hell and Back, it features the starry casting of none other than Isabel Bayrakdarian and Patti LuPone. For an exclusive preview of this singular new work, check out OPERA NEWS' inaugural podcast.
— Read more at Opera News

Mozart's opera Cosi Fan Tutte ("all women behave that way") is his exploration of the tangled area of love, desire and sexual politics.
It was first performed in 1790 when the formerly progressive Austro-Hungarian emperor Joseph II was abandoning his reform programme in the wake of the 1789 French Revolution.
— Read more at Socialist Worker