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

On Wednesday night "I Puritani," Bellini's last and musically richest work, returned to the Metropolitan Opera after an absence of 10 years. But for once, the villains in this story, about a besieged band of Puritans during the English Civil War, were not members of the royal House of Stuart in London. No, the real villains were other unseen creatures: microbes.
Fear not, fans of Anna Netrebko. That glamorous Russian soprano appeared as scheduled in the touchstone role of Elvira. Indeed, the prolonged ovation she received after the Act II mad scene threatened to stop the performance midway. New York Times

A certified superstar operatic diva carries a lot of baggage. Not only are there the sundry suitcases, steamer trunks and Vuitton bags that are, by tradition, necessary to transport her various costumes for on and off the stage. There is also a whole freight of expectations, prejudices, comparisons with the past and, in the case of Anna Netrebko, the 35-year-old Russian soprano who is on her way to becoming opera's biggest megastar since Luciano Pavarotti, relentless media hype.
— Read more at New York Times

For opera fans, the sight of rattled tenor Roberto Alagna storming offstage recently after being booed at Milan's La Scala was stunning. But for those who don't follow opera, what was really stunning was the booing itself.
— Read more at Orlando Sentinel

A day at the opera: Having to dress up in tuxes and ball gowns to see an expensive, foreign language, two-hour concert about boring, fat people in lavish costumes and viking helmets, while sitting next to a bunch of old people and snobs. Did I leave anything out?
These are exactly the stereotypes Artistic Director, Michael Chadwick, is trying to break. His company, The Living Opera, strives to make opera accessible to any normal human being. In his interview, he talks about their upcoming season which includes three American operas, inexpensive prices for great seats, educational programs, and the thrill of seeing an opera with characters that are so human in emotion. [audio interview]
— Read [hear] more at pegasusnews.com

The relative rarity of world premieres at the Metropolitan Opera does not alone explain the buildup of good will, genuine excitement and high expectation over "The First Emperor," the opera by the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun, which had its premiere on Thursday night, conducted by the composer.
— Read more at Alanat News

When the curtain opens for the matinee of "The Magic Flute" on Saturday at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it will also part at the Hacienda Crossings movie theater in Dublin, where Mozart's opera will be shown, live, through a satellite transmission and high-definition projection.
It's the first of six Saturday matinees from the Metropolitan Opera to be shown in theaters this season, all at 10:30 a.m. in this time zone. The series will include everything from Rossini's popular "Barber of Seville" to "The First Emperor," a new opera by Tan Dun that premiered at the Met just last Friday.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Somewhere in the maze of sneaker shops and bath-soap stores, there are going to be operas. Grand ones.
The Neshaminy Mall - in a part of Bucks County that's more about suburban sprawl than the artsy, pastoral idylls of points north - is one of two places where the Metropolitan Opera will make its high-definition simulcast debut in the area at 1:30 p.m. Saturday. You can just imagine the disparity between the fur-coat-and-tiara crowd and the mall's piped-in hard-rock renditions of "Silver Bells." Except that most opera people don't dress that way anymore, and the debut presentation is a condensed version of Mozart's The Magic Flute specifically geared to families.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

First seen on television in the 1950s, Gian Carlo Menotti's one-act opera, "Amahl and the Night Visitors," is a musical miracle story. The three kings find themselves at the door of the house of a poor woman and her lame son Amahl, as they travel to bring gifts to the Christ child.
— Read more at dailyastorian.info

Two incidents of raucously censorious opera audiences seem to have caught the public unaware in recent weeks. At the Metropolitan Opera, Placido Domingo was booed when he conducted a "La Bohème," in which Anna Netrebko sang her only Mimi of the Met season. Five days later at La Scala in Milan, Italy, Roberto Alagna, singing Radamès in Franco Zeffirelli's new production of " Aida," was greeted with catcalls at the end of his " Celeste Aida," early in Act I. Mr. Alagna beat a hasty retreat, and Antonello Palombi was thrown onstage to pinch hit.
— Read more at The New York Sun

[Metropolitan Opera's New Manager Has Begun To Lift Opera's Veil Of Formality]
The streets of New York City normally sound like they're filled with honking and horns. But on one Autumn evening in Times Square, something brought the Big Apple to a stand-still, CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric reports.
— Read more at CBS News

The Wolf Trap Opera Company has created a new venue for aspiring singers all over the United States: The Wolf Trap Opera Studio.
Launching in May, the eight-week summer residency program for undergraduate singers is designed to fill a gap in opportunities for young singers.
"We always get calls through the year from people asking what their young singer can do to get more experience," explained Kim Witman, director of Wolftrap Opera and Classical Music. According to Witman, young singers nearing the end of their undergraduate voice programs do not have many choices when it comes to developing their talent.
— Read more at Times Community Newspapers

One of the world's most celebrated opera companies is coming to a city near you, but there's no need to rent a tux - the New York Met is broadcasting six live performances at movie theatres across Canada.
The initiative is one of several schemes brought in by Met general manager Peter Gelb to boost sagging ticket sales for an art form oft-considered too elitist for the masses.
"Opera is an aging art form," admits Gelb, a former head of Sony Classical worldwide, who raised controversy there for emphasizing crossover music above traditional repertoire.
— Read more at canada.com

Maria Callas's career was short, as was her life, but she made a lasting impact on the world of opera with her versatile voice and skills as a performer. King City resident Prof. Igor Babchine outlined the story of her talent and career recently, delivering one of the lectures in Arts Festival King. Calles, who lived from 1923 until 1977, is remembered as the best soprano of the 20th century, although Babchine indicated her range was broader than that might suggest.
— Read more at kingsentinel.com

Ghostlight Records will release the CD of Ricky Ian Gordon's song cycle Orpheus & Euridice on January 23. The recording features soprano Elizabeth Futral, clarinetist Todd Palmer, and pianist Melvin Chen.
— Read more at TheaterMania.com

The holidays look stressful for Placido Domingo.
He could have dressed as an elf and just sung "Jingle Bells" at the Metropolitan Opera last night and made everyone happy. Instead, always the over-achiever, the tenor waded through a strenuous new piece, "The First Emperor," by composer Tan Dun, that started around 8 p.m. and ended 3 1/2 hours later with one intermission.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com: Muse

Tan Dun has done it.
Well, not for all of "The First Emperor," not even for most of his important new opera, which had its premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday night. But for a little while, this frustrating yet momentarily glorious affair ? which brings to the Met stage everybody's favorite tenor, Plácido Domingo, along with a lot of people's favorite Chinese film director, Zhang Yimou, and novelist and poet Ha Jin ? is one big, wild and wonderful wow.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Fledgling opera singers are travelling from all over the world to compete in an Irish competition with the potential to launch them on the international circuit, it was revealed today.
The fifth Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition has attracted 42 competitors from countries including Mexico, Italy, Seoul, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, Germany and Istanbul.
— Read more at IOL

From the ferocious Lady Macbeth to the fizzy Hanna Glawari to the tempestuous Tosca, it will be the year of the diva at The Dallas Opera during the company's 51st season, which begins next fall. Plans for 2007-08, announced earlier this month, also include a new production of Salome and a gala benefit starring Renée Fleming.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Artwork collected by Arturo Toscanini will be exhibited in Avery Fisher Hall from January 16 to March 31 as part of the New York Philharmonic's tribute to the 50th anniversary of the conductor's death.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Renée Fleming has nothing left to prove at the opera house, and so it was heartening to observe her self-confidence and listen to an entire Thursday evening at Carnegie Hall without one single aria on the printed program. The concert, titled Rejoice Greatly, contained nods to the world of classical music but was primarily a Christmas compendium of favorite songs in varying styles. Ms. Fleming proved that she was a master of each and every one of them.
— Read more at The New York Sun

[Opera, in English, makes a comeback in the movie theate]
The Magic Flute was written for the rabble. Emperor Joseph II had died and his son wasn't sending any new commissions or cash Mozart's way, so Mozart turned to Emanuel Schikaneder, a self-made man who specialized in putting on popular musicals for the middle to lower class and who also hired the suddenly unfunded Mozart to compose for his rowdy audience.
— Read more at pw: philadelphia weekly online

The National Capital Commission (NCC) is pleased to announce a cultural premiere in the heart of Canada's Capital. The NCC will present OPERA UNDER THE STARS, in the new festival park at LeBreton Flats, on June 29th and 30th, 2007. This grand event will feature renowned conductor Richard Bradshaw leading two free evenings of opera highlights with internationally-acclaimed Canadian artists and the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, and the Opera Lyra Ottawa Chorus.
— Read more at Huliq

THE most striking makeover of a classical music institution in a long time took place this year at the Metropolitan Opera.
In the spring, Joseph Volpe, the long-serving general manager, took his leave with a lavish gala, a published memoir and one last fund-raising bonanza. Peter Gelb took over, and the changes began.
— Read more at New York Times

Those possibly eternal opposites, East and West, have met again in The First Emperor, a visually spectacular, often engaging, and not entirely successful opera by Tan Dun.
This new work by the winner of an Academy Award and a Grammy for his Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon film score is a hot ticket at New York's Metropolitan Opera, which commissioned the piece a decade ago. Although a few seats were available for last Thursday's opening night, the eight remaining performances have been listed as sold out since well before the premiere. Any new opera that can draw crowds has to be considered good news.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Memories don't burn. But Irene Dalis, founder of Opera San Jose, lost a lot when her house in Willow Glen burned to the ground in 1990. Her grand piano. Old musical scores. And boxes of reel-to-reel tapes, radio broadcast recordings of Dalis singing at New York's Metropolitan Opera, where she reigned as one of the great dramatic mezzo-sopranos from 1957-76.
— Read more at MercuryNews.com

New Yorkers were the first to see that something was up at the Metropolitan Opera. In addition to the 3,700 elegant guests at the Met's opening night performance of "Madama Butterfly," thousands more watched Puccini's masterpiece on giant outdoor screens at Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza.
That was Sept. 25, and it was a hint of the fresh winds blowing through the musty halls of the world's most distinguished opera company. But behind the scenes, the mastermind of the Met's transformation -- former Sony Classical head Peter Gelb -- was just getting started.
— Read more at Centre Daily Times

THE BAY AREA'S musical organizations expanded their horizons in 2006, reaching out to new audiences in myriad ways. In May, the San Francisco Opera's inaugural outdoor "plazacast" showed Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" to thousands of spectators in the Civic Center; the San Francisco Symphony's "Keeping Score" series on PBS brought the concert hall into the homes of TV viewers across the country. Throughout the year, there were tributes to the birthdays of Mozart (250th) and Shostakovich (100th), as well as premieres of new works, local debuts and fresh revivals. Here are some of the highlights.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

If "O Holy Night" is indeed Carl Tanner's signature tune, he may have another operatic tenor to thank for it - the legendary Luciano Pavarotti.
Tanner was just a child when he heard Pavarotti's version of the majestic tune, but he remembers listening in awe and wanting some day to sing it as heavenly as Pavarotti did.
— Read more at JS Online:

Opera and schoolchildren go together like champagne and macaroni and cheese, right? Not so fast. In January, the Cincinnati Opera goes to school on its 2007 education tour, a program of four scaled-down 45-minute operas for kids.
— Read more at The Enquirer

[Singer shakes up music world with gorgeous voice, wild antics]
A Russian soprano about to take the stage at the Metropolitan Opera is a rags-to-riches diva with a face for the movies -- and she's revolutionizing opera. Known as much for her cover-girl looks as her beautiful voice, Anna Netrebko is outselling Beyonce and Britney Spears in Europe. Charlotte Observer

LOOKING back over the year, I tried to compile a list of highs and lows in classical music. But call me irresponsible; I simply found too many exciting and meaningful achievements to dwell on the disappointments. So here are some of the most memorable events:
...
4. Peter Gelb, the new general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, deserves credit for his overdue, energetic and multifaceted public outreach efforts. And bringing Anthony Minghella's visually arresting, highly stylized production of Puccini's "Madama Butterfly" to New York in September was a bold way for Mr. Gelb to inaugurate his tenure.
— Read more at New York Times

A small group of Muslim Turkish nationalists protested Friday over the re-staging of a controversial production of Mozart's opera "Idomeneo," which features a scene with the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad.
Members of the nationalist right-wing Great Unity Party gathered in the garden of a Catholic church in the Mediterranean port city of Mersin protesting the play, which was performed in Berlin before dispersing peacefully.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

[Once thought to be a showboat, China's Tan Dun brings life to 'The First Emperor']
It was an ordinary afternoon in a subbasement of the Metropolitan Opera, though it could just as well have been dawn or the middle of the night. The Met's backstage is as vast and sunless as a Las Vegas casino, disorienting to navigate and difficult to leave. "The First Emperor," a new opera by Chinese-American composer Tan Dun and Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin, which had been in the works for a decade, was finally starting to take shape. A vague sense of chaos permeated the room, equal parts nervousness and tedium. Newsday.com

Eighty years ago the premiere of Puccini's "Turandot," a slender Chinese fairy tale smothered in feverish music, marked the beginning of the end of the great era of Italian opera. On Thursday night, the Metropolitan Opera gave the premiere of a new opera by a Chinese composer, staged and directed by an almost entirely Chinese production team.
Tan Dun's "The First Emperor," sung mostly in English, was a lavish affair, handsomely done, with Placido Domingo giving it star power in the title role. But will works like this accomplish what so many people hope for: the revival, through the infusion of foreign vitality, of an art form that has had very few success stories recently?
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

During the high-glam Metropolitan Opera world premiere of Tan Dun's The First Emperor on Thursday, the presence of so much high-style production and so little opera couldn't help prompting any number of faux-Asian aphorisms (none original to me).
"The elephant gave birth to the mouse" was one.
Another: "The blossom falls on the mountain, the mountain falls on the blossom. All things must fall."
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

After more than a decade of planning, East met West on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera with composer Tan Dun conducting the world premiere of "The First Emperor" and Placido Domingo singing the title role.
For Tan, Thursday night's program was the first Met performance of any of his four operas. His ambitions for the production, which cost a reported US$2 million to $3 million, were akin to those of China's first emperor - using the opera to help unify culture.
— Read more at canada.com

[Composer Tan Dun and tenor Plácido Domingo join forces for a cross-cultural production]
Composing a work for the Metropolitan Opera would seem challenge enough, without conducting the premiere run on top of it.
Chinese-born New Yorker Tan Dun is only the seventh composer to conduct his own opera at the Met, as he will do Thursday through Jan. 25 with "The First Emperor." The stars appear aligned for this expensive, visually ambitious, cross-cultural production -- featuring Plácido Domingo in the title role and staged by Chinese film director Zhang Yimou -- even if Tan's composer-conductor predecessors failed to yield enduring hits at the Met.
— Read more at nj.com

REMEMBER THE scandal of "Idomeneo" in Berlin? Remember how Islamists went mad when the Deutsche Oper decided to stage a controversial production of Mozart's opera, unleashing a storm of violence? Remember how there was rioting in the streets of the German capital, how Al Jazeera denounced Mozart (the Mozart!) as a "decadent purveyor of Orientalist trash," how Der Spiegel conceded that all artistic expression in Europe should henceforth be subject to Sharia law?
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Opera lovers are strange. While the rest of the world coos over reruns of films such as "It's a Wonderful Life" and "Miracle on 34th Street," our holiday treat is a heart-breaking tragedy in which a young seamstress falls in love with a poet, and promptly dies of consumption.
Critics at the 1896 premiere of "La Boheme" thought Puccini's opera facetious, yet it quickly achieved core- repertoire status. Debussy pronounced it the most evocative musical depiction of Paris, and Mimi and Rodolfo's candlelit encounter on a crisp Christmas Eve is one of the most beguiling scenes ever written. To this day, "La Boheme" is a reliable box-office hit; accessible yet daring, with piquant harmonies to offset the pellucid orchestration.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

As you may have noticed, I am not a Callas idolater. I never heard her sing in person, and if I have one rule about discussing singers, it's that I avoid raving or passing judgments on those I haven't heard live. Recordings are fun and even informative, but one should never substitute them for real life. (That snicker you just heard was from some Callas fan who would rather stay home with Maria's discs than venture to the Opera House to hear Catherine Nagelstad attempt Norma.)
— Read more at The Bay Area Reporter

For the composer of The First Emperor, which gets its world premiere performances at the Metropolitan Opera this month, creating a new opera was a voyage of self-discovery.
"Where is the music that can harmonize heaven, earth, and man?" This is the question posed by the title character of Tan Dun's The First Emperor, which has its world premiere at the Met this month. It's a question that the composer asked himself as he worked on the score to the epic new work, which marries Eastern and Western musical elements in a tricky compositional balancing act. "It's not about being Chinese or Western, about being old or new," Tan Dun explains. "My favorite formula now is 1+1=1."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Just before the curtain dropped on an otherwise uneventful opera, the grisly scene that everyone came to see finally transpired. The King of Crete pulled the severed head of the prophet Muhammad out of a sack and triumphantly placed it on a wooden chair, next to three decapitated deities.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

Gluck's 18th-century "Iphigenie en Tauride" will be co-produced next year by the Metropolitan Opera and the Seattle Opera in the first collaboration between the companies.
Stephen Wadsworth will direct, and the production will open in Seattle on Oct. 13 and in New York on Nov. 27.
— Read more at nwsource.com

Lyric Opera of Chicago has selected Donald Nally as its new chorus master, effective May 1 of next year. He replaces Donald Palumbo, the company's chorus master since 1991; the latter begins his tenure as chorus master for the Metropolitan Opera next season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Comic Dawn French is to appear in a Royal Opera House production of the The Daughter of the Regiment in January.]
The star has a non-singing role in the comic opera, which tells the story of a baby adopted by an army regiment.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Think "American Idol," only with more lung power.
Auditions for the Metropolitan Opera National Council will take place at noon, Jan. 6, at Iowa State University's Martha-Ellen Tye Recital Hall in Ames.
The event, which will feature promising young talent from across the Midwest, is free and open to the public. Audience members are welcome to watch the whole event or stay just for one or two singers.
— Read more at DesMoinesRegister.com

Ohio Light Opera artistic director Steven Daigle will be on partial leave of absence during his troupe's 2007 season at the College of Wooster. He will return in 2008.
— Read more at cleveland.com

The most talked-about tenor in the world at the moment is Roberto Alagna, who famously - infamously? - stormed off the stage of Milan's La Scala, the most prestigious Italian opera house, after his entrance aria in Verdi's Aida was coarsely booed last week.
The second most talked-about tenor is Antonello Palombi, who was pushed onstage, still in his street clothes, to pick up where Alagna left off. That didn't stop the catcalls right away - "Shame" (possibly aimed at the booers) and "buffoon" (presumably targeting Alagna) could be heard.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

He collected folk songs in villages in his native China, then planted rice during the Cultural Revolution. Later, he played music on the streets of New York to buy food.
Now, composer Tan Dun is making his Metropolitan Opera debut.
"The First Emperor," starring Placido Domingo in the title role of a production with a reported cost of up to $3 million, has its world premiere Thursday night _ on stage and in cyberspace.
— Read more at Newsday.com

Major orchestras don't play a lot of Baroque music these days, but don't tell that to Harry Bicket. Mr. Bicket, most recently of the Los Angeles Opera, has made his career conducting mainly Baroque operas in leading opera houses, from Munich to Los Angeles. Metropolitan Opera snagged him for Handel's "Rodelinda" two years ago, and he has also conducted at the New York City Opera. Now Mr. Bicket, who just finished conducted Monteverdi's "L'Incoronazione di Poppea" in Los Angeles, is preparing to make his debut with the New York Philharmonic in its annual performance of Handel's holiday favorite, "Messiah," at Riverside Church.
— Read more at The New York Sun

Two of Houston Grand Opera's hottest tickets this season are new productions of Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel and Rossini's La Cenerentola (Cinderella), both based on classic fairy tales. And while both works are kid-friendly ? emphatically so ? their themes aren't merely "kid stuff." The material they explore is similar to that in dozens of other great operas and ballets. Even Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen, which HGO presents this spring, uses folkloric music and a timeless life-and-death theme to create a "musical fable" ? it's not quite a fairy tale, but it evokes a kindred spirit.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

No riots. Just a good night at the opera.
Sensation-seekers looking for trouble Monday at the Deutsche Oper's revival of Mozart's "Idomeneo" were disappointed. The controversial scene displaying the severed head of the Prophet Muhammad provoked a few "boos," but fears of violence proved unfounded, and cheers and applause prevailed among the near-capacity audience.
— Read more at New York Times

Directors of five professional opera companies in North Carolina and the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute in Winston-Salem, NC sat in the lobby humming the last aria from practice waiting for the meeting to start. It's not the first time this group including Asheville Lyric Opera, Greensboro Opera Company, Charlotte's Opera Carolina, The Opera Company of NC in Raleigh and Winston-Salem's Piedmont Opera has worked together for the greater good of the industry - every year for the past 10 years they've convened to discuss repertoire (even Puccini wouldn't want to see Madama Butterfly six times). But this year there's more on the agenda than just who will be singing what - the NC Opera Consortium working under the name VOCE Carolina ("Voce" is Italian for Voice) plans to launch a first-ever statewide marketing initiative to promote opera as a tourism attraction.

[Editor's note: The "VOCE Carolina" website is currently "under construction". So, in the meantime, we encourage you to visit these six company sites:

Leave the tuxes and gowns in the closet. Aria lovers need not dress up for the Metropolitan Opera's Dec. 30 matinee performance of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
Nor must they pay the Met's steep ticket prices - or travel to New York City for that matter.
— Read more at Buffalo News

Dicapo Opera Theatre continues its Puccini Project with opera/dance presentations of two early works by the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini Friday and Saturday, January 12 and 13 at 8 p.m. and Sunday, January 14, at 4 p.m. Le Villi, Puccini's first opera written in 1884, will be staged and choreographed by Nilas Martins, principal dancer of New York City Ballet and Dicapo Opera's new director of dance, for ballet soloists Ashley Tuttle and Benjamin G. Bowman, a corps de ballet, and soprano, tenor, and baritone soloists. Messa di Gloria, based on the Latin Mass and written in 1880, will be choreographed and staged by Stephen Pier, a ballet master at the Juilliard School, for dancers, baritone and tenor soloists. Both works feature a corps de ballet of eight dancers?all members of The Nilas Martins Dance Company. The productions will be presented at Dicapo Opera Theatre, located on the lower level of St. Jean Baptiste Church at 184 East 76th Street at Lexington Avenue.
— Learn more at dicapo.com

Miss Piggy could not have done it better. A fiery tenor, goaded beyond measure by boos and whistles from the gallery, scandalises the operatic world by flouncing off La Scala's stage in Milan with a toss of his locks and a raised fist. Critics fear the only singing jobs that Roberto Alagna may be offered now are in the pizza bars and nightclubs from whence he sprang.
Catcalls are nothing special at La Scala, a bearpit for performers, so there is speculation over what caused the 43-year-old French-Sicilian to snap in the middle of a new production of Aida by Franco Zeffirelli last weekend.
— Read more at Times Online

Gluck's "Iphigenie en Tauride" will be co-produced by the Metropolitan Opera and the Seattle Opera in the first collaboration between the companies, one that will feature Placido Domingo in the New York run.
Stephen Wadsworth will direct, and the production will open in Seattle on Oct. 13, the companies planned to announce Monday. It will open at the Met on Nov. 26, and star Domingo as Oreste, Susan Graham as Iphigenie, Paul Groves as Pylade, and William Shimell as Thoas. Louis Langree will conduct in his Met debut.
— Read more at mercurynews.com

What the stars are up to, on stage and off.
If you think it takes hard work to be an opera singer, Ben Heppner says think again. The star tenor insists that the key to his success is his "laziness." Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the man considered one of today's greatest Wagnerians tells the Paris newspaper Le Figaro that "it requires too much work to sing with power." He continues: "I am convinced that it is easier to sing well than to sing badly."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Roberto Alagna, the tenor who left the stage at Milan's La Scala after being booed, yesterday said he plans to sue the famed opera house for damaging his reputation by dismissing him from the cast of Aida.
Alagna claims he suffered from low blood sugar and could not continue the performance. He also says he has a medical certificate proving his assertion.
Alagna became the first singer in memory to leave La Scala's stage during a performance.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

Atlanta Opera general director, Dennis Hanthorn, has announced that members of the company's orchestra have overwhelmingly ratified a new collective bargaining agreement that will go into effect on January 1, 2007 and will last through the company's 2009-10 season.
— Read more at Opera News

Berlin - Riot police, the media and celebrities turned out in force in Berlin Monday evening for a controversial production of the opera Idomeneo, but there was no evidence of any protesters upset by its anti-religion message.
— Read more at monstersandcritics.com

If you're curious about opera or have longed to see New York's famed Metropolitan Opera, circle Dec. 30 on your calendar.
On that day, you can have a front-row seat for a live performance of the Met's production of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" -- without leaving Louisville.
To broaden its audience, the Met is beaming live, high-definition satellite broadcasts of six operas to movie theaters in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The series begins at 1:30 p.m. on Dec. 30 with a one-time-only broadcast of "The Magic Flute," directed by Julie Taymor, creator of the Broadway smash "The Lion King."
— Read more at Met is coming to town

For opera fans, the sight of rattled tenor Roberto Alagna storming offstage after being booed at Milan's La Scala was stunning. But for those who don't follow opera, what was really stunning was the booing itself.
We pay our money to hear a favorite singer, watch an actor, root for an athlete or a team. In return, we expect something. If we don't get it, is booing justified? Or is it the very height of rudeness to hurl such a humiliation at someone who's summoned the courage to appear before thousands of people?
— Read more at CBS News

He's the guy in black jeans.
That is, he is Antonello Palombi, the Italian tenor who found himself on the stage of Teatro Alla Scala in Milan in his civvies during a lavish production of Verdi's "Aida." Mr. Palombi was thrust into the role of Radames after the original tenor, Roberto Alagna, stalked off in a huff because of boos.
— Read more at New York Times

Now that the opera season is over until June, you need to keep your musical life spicy with this sensational rarity. It's the opera in which Juan Diego Florez made a last-minute debut at Pesaro in 1996 and knocked the opera world on its ear.
This 2004 revival shows why. It is vintage coloratura Rossini of the "Cenerentola" era in Naples. With a silly story about a comic tyrant who throws people in dungeons and tries to have his sweetheart executed, the opera consists mostly of extra-fizzy ensembles.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

New Yorkers were the first to see that something was up at the Metropolitan Opera.
In addition to the 3,700 elegant guests at the Met's opening night performance of "Madama Butterfly" thousands more watched Puccini's masterpiece on giant outdoor screens at Times Square and Lincoln Center Plaza.
That was Sept. 25, and it was a hint of the fresh winds blowing through the musty halls of the world's most distinguished opera company. But behind the scenes, the mastermind of the Met's transformation, former Sony Classical head Peter Gelb, was just getting started.
— Read more at Kansas City Star

Audience members at Monday's Deutsche Oper production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" will be kindly asked to empty their pockets of all metal objects. And they should be prepared to leave quickly in case of a bomb alert.
The Austrian musical genius born 250 years ago was noted for an impish sense of humor and some directors take huge liberties with their interpretations of operas. But the security measures for the performance, which include electronic screening of opera goers and evacuation precautions, are not part of the plot.
— Read more at ABC News

The LA Opera opened this Holiday Season with an imaginative, new production of the children's classic, Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, based on the Brothers Grimm's story. It is a special production designed to be particularly appealing to children as well as adults.
Following Richard Sparks' new English libretto, the new LA Opera's version deviates from its 1893 Munich premiere in that it is brighter in tone, adding humor and warmth.
— Read more at The Epoch Times

For the second straight year, San Francisco Opera is playing in the black. George Hume, president of the San Francisco Opera Association, today announced a surplus of $557,367 on a $60.4 million operating budget for the 2006 fiscal year.
— Read more at San Francisco Business Times:

Music teacher Jackie Miller wants Easton School District students to experience different types of music that are not found in most schools - opera and the ballet.
Miller gave a presentation to the Easton School Board on Wednesday night showing some of the different projects the students worked on during the first half of the school year. Miller told the board that the students got to attend an opera. She said many students wanted to attend a ballet as well, but Miller decided against it. The students wanted to see a live performance of "The Nutcracker." However Miller told the board the only appearance the students would be able to attend would be the weekend before finals.
— Read more at Leavenworth Times - News

Following the imbroglio set into motion on Sunday evening in Milan, when Roberto Alagna abandoned a performance of Aida at the Teatro alla Scala after being booed for his rendition of the aria "Celeste Aida", the French tenor has threatened to sue the opera house, claiming he deserves to be compensated with the $13,000-per-performance fees he would have garnered for taking part in the rest of the performance's run.
— Read more at Opera News

German Muslim leaders are to attend a production of Mozart's "Idomeneo" at a Berlin opera house on Monday in an attempt to allay fears of a violent reaction to a scene showing the Prophet Mohammad's severed head.
Berlin's Deutsche Oper caused a storm in September when it cancelled performances of the 200-year-old work over security fears, leading to accusations that the director had caved in to terrorism.
— Read more at Scotsman.com

There is good reason for the popularity of "Amahl and the Night Visitors," says Craig Johnson.
Giancarlo Menotti, the creator of the tale of a boy and a Christmas miracle, is one of the most important composers of the 20th century, says Johnson, executive director of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony.
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune

This holiday season, Houston Grand Opera (HGO) stages a spectacular new production of Humperdinck's beloved fairy tale opera Hansel and Gretel featuring artists from the HGO Studio and members of the HGO Orchestra and Children's Chorus. Eleven public performances, December 1-23, will offer ample opportunities for opera patrons to enjoy this holiday treat.
— Read more at Elites TV

First it was hockey night at the movies.
Now, get ready for Placido and popcorn.
Canadian movie theatres will soon be filled with the sweeping orchestrations and soaring arias of New York's famed Metropolitan Opera.
— Read more at TheStar.com

Conductor Richard Buckley is stepping down as the Austin Lyric Opera's artistic director.
Buckley will relinquish the post, which he's held for four years, in June. He will serve as principal conductor in the company's upcoming season.
"The time constraints that will be placed upon ALO's artistic director as the company makes the transition to its new home at the Long Center, as well as my increasingly busy conducting schedule, led me to this move," Buckley says.
— Read more at Austin Business Journal

At La Scala, where Maria Callas was once pelted with radishes, Roberto Alagna made history last Sunday.
The high-strung French-Sicilian tenor with the silvery high notes walked off the stage during the second performance of a new production of Verdi's "Aida" after being booed by a few non- fans who decided his opening aria wasn't up to their standards of perfection.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

It's rare that you can flatter a great diva by saying that she brays like a donkey. It's even rarer that you can write glowingly about her furry soft ears and wide back. Pollyanne, though, is no ordinary opera star.
Pollyanne, 22, doesn't just bray like a donkey. She is a donkey.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[ When Roberto Alagna this week became the first singer to storm out of a performance at Milan's La Scala, it was just the latest tantrum from music's most demanding double act]
They are opera's golden couple whose romance flourished in the wake of tragedy. The tenor Roberto Alagna lost his first wife to cancer but found new love with the soprano Angela Gheorghiu.
It was a tale to warm the classical music heart and proved box-office magic. When they were paired for the Royal Opera House's production of Gounod's Faust two years ago, it sold out as soon as booking opened.
— Read more at Independent Online

Real-life opera still has the power to amaze people - especially in an intimate setting, says Manrico Tedeschi, an internationally renowned opera singer based in Pierrefonds.
"Nowadays, everything is recorded, but recording is cheating," Tedeschi said. "There's something magical about the real voice. People are amazed when they hear what comes out of your mouth. I want to make it accessible to all."
— Read more at The Suburban

Upstate New York's Glimmerglass Opera will present the first complete, fully-staged North American production of Wagner's opera Das Liebesverbot ("Forbidden Love") during its 2008 season.
This early work by Wagner - a comic opera inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, with a libretto by the composer - has been performed fully staged in Germany and Ireland; in the U.S. it received a concert presentation the Waterloo Festival in New Jersey as part of the Wagner centenary celebrations in 1983.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Roberto Alagna will sue opera house La Scala if they do not let him return to the stage following his abrupt exit during the second performance of Zefferelli's Aida.
The opera singer walked off after booing began, forcing understudy Antonello Palombi to come on in jeans and without a vocal warm-up to continue. His contract with the opera house has now been annulled.
— Read more at Digital Spy

Nobody in the casting room expected a happy ending. When opera's rising tenor fell in love at Covent Garden 12 years ago with the most ferocious soprano since Maria Callas, the Sunday supplements came out in a flutter and dewy-eyed opera lovers were promised an idyll of spousal pairings - Mrs and Mrs Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah, Pelleas and Melisande - a stage romance unexampled since Grisi and Mario toured the world in the high Victorian era.
— Read more at scena.org

In the history of operatic hissy fits, what happened at Teatro Alla Scala in Milan during "Aida" on Sunday night was a bravura performance.
Boos from La Scala's notoriously un-shy "loggionisti," the upper-balcony aficionado crowd, greeted the tenor Roberto Alagna after "Celeste Aida," his opening aria as Radames. He gave an unscripted military salute and promptly stalked off the stage. While the conductor Riccardo Chailly continued the performance, the stand-in, Antonello Palombi, was thrust on stage to finish the act in jeans. Two days later accusations of conspiracy, deception, violation of the theater's traditions and insulting the audience are flying.
— Read more at New York Times

I don't necessarily approve of the organised booing that performances at La Scala often attract, which resulted, the other evening, in Roberto Alagna ignominiously quitting the stage, but there was a bit of me that sympathised with the protesters. By almost all accounts, Alagna's performance in Verdi's Aida the previous night had been the one big disappointment in an otherwise spectacularly successful production.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

Ten years in the making, the world premiere of Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun's opera "The First Emperor," starring Placido Domingo, is scheduled for Dec. 21.
— Read more at The Cincinnati Post

Most New York operagoers are likely to know that the Metropolitan Opera's new production of "Madama Butterfly," which launched Peter Gelb's regime as general manager in September, wasn't really new at all, since it was borrowed from the English National Opera. Many, however, may be unaware that Anthony Minghella's mesmeric treatment of the Puccini tearjerker was actually a co-production of the ENO and the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

[ A bloodless tale of love and lust]
How appropriate that the diamond manufacturers De Beers should have been associated with the opening night of the Royal Opera's 60th anniversary production of Bizet's Carmen. Expensive and well-buffed might be one way of describing it; cool and collected might be another.
— Read more at Independent Online Edition

A bad weekend for opera's golden couple looked more like a nightmare yesterday when it was revealed that Roberto Alagna, who stormed off stage at La Scala in mid-performance, is to be replaced - and his wife, Angela Gheorghiu, has withdrawn from a flagship production at the Royal Opera.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

Mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe gave a solo recital on Sunday evening at Shriver Hall, which meant another trip to Baltimore for Ionarts. We last heard Ms. Blythe with Washington Concert Opera in Rossini's Tancredi. Her voice is just as puissant, silky, and dark chocolate as it ever was, but giving a recital of songs is not the same as powering one's way through an opera in a large hall. Blythe has assembled a varied program, in three languages, all of which she sings capably, if some sit more comfortably than others. The results were uneven but still with much to enjoy.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

As two boys headed to their first opera Saturday night, their mother worried. Would they make it through the show without a mishap? Would her youngest son get to intermission without proclaiming "I'm bored!" at high volume? Would she stave off spontaneous bouts of coughing without Ricola drops on hand?
— Read more at adn.com

The Rutgers-Camden Madrigal Singers will perform Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas at noon Wednesday in the final concert of a free series by the Rutgers-Camden Department of Fine Arts.
— Read more at courierpostonline.com

Berlin's Deutsche Oper hasn't had much luck getting sell-out crowds lately. But with politicians, Muslims, international journalists and police turning out for its controversial staging of Mozart's "Idomeneo" -- complete with the decapitated head of the Prophet Muhammad -- the opera house's fortunes could change.
— Read more at SPIEGEL ONLINE

Enrico Caruso once said it was easy to put on a good performance of "Il trovatore (The Troubador)." All you need are the four greatest singers in the world.
Using that reasoning, a production of "Carmen" should be even easier. You only need to find the best singers, conductor, director and choreographer. A cinch.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Angela Gheorghiu may be the current opera star most known for diva-like behavior, but it's her husband who has just thrown a diva fit.
— Read more at Roberto Alagna, the tenor lead in the wildly popular new Aida that opened La Scala's season last week, stormed off the stage and out of the house after his first aria in last night's performance was booed by some of the audience.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Cleveland is in professional-opera limbo for the first time in more decades than many of us have lived.
The Metropolitan Opera was a mainstay of the city's musical life until its annual spring tour - first at Public Auditorium, then at Playhouse Square's State Theatre - ended after the 1986 season. A decade before that, Cleveland Opera set up shop and provided four or five productions per year. During the same period, Lyric Opera Cleveland did its intimate thing at the Cleveland Institute of Music and Cleveland Play House.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Glimmerglass Opera has announced that it will present the first complete, fully-staged North American production of Richard Wagner's opera Das Liebesverbot (Forbidden Love) as part of its 2008 Festival Season. Performances will take place in July and August at the Alice Busch Opera Theater next to Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, upstate New York.
— Learn more at glimmerglass.org

Metropolitan Opera star Susan Graham will debut her 2007 recital tour at the Historic Asolo Theater, located at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, at 8 p.m. Jan. 8, it was announced today.
— Read more at Bradenton Herald

IT MIGHT have been the end of the run for Welsh National Opera's revived Tristan und Isolde at the Empire on Saturday night, but there was no sense of a production running on autopilot as musicians and singers looked forward to the Christmas holidays.
— Read more at icLiverpool Liverpool Empire

A veteran of 796 performances with the Metropolitan Opera, Richard Vernon died unexpectedly at his home. The bass's last Met performance was on November 28, 2006, as Sciarrone; he was scheduled to sing Foltz in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg with the company later this season.
— Read more at Opera News

[An understudy in jeans sang at La Scala, after Roberto Alagna quit the stage in the middle of an aria ]
Franco Zeffirelli's new production of Aida took an unexpected turn on its second performance at La Scala opera house, when tenor Roberto Alagna stunned the public and his colleagues by marching off the stage after the audience booed him.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited See also: Alex Ross - therestisnoise.com

Even for those who embrace opera as a celebration of excess, it seemed almost a provocation to open the Teatro alla Scala's season on Thursday with an extravagantly lavish new production of "Aida" created by Franco Zeffirelli. Indeed, after the buildup that preceded the show, how else could the audience respond but by cheering the singers, the orchestra, the director, La Scala - and themselves for being there?
— Read more at New York Times

The Canadian Opera Company's opera-house slogan -- "home at last" -- took on new resonance this week as the company staged its first Canadian opera for grownups in seven years. Swoon, the new one-act comedy from James Rolfe and Anna Chatterton, proved what thousands of kids (for whom the COC has staged several in-school works) already know: that home-grown opera can be at least as much fun as the imported kind.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

What happens when some of the world's best musicians are paired with top voices under a masterful conductor in an opera production that plays it straight instead of usurping what the composer and librettist were trying to say?
Saturday's near-perfect "Arabella," as staged by the Vienna State Opera.
In this premiere of Richard Strauss's comedy of errors, the musical bar was set so high that adequate was not good enough. On Saturday that was Thomas Hampson - his Madryka was no match for Arabella, and not only because Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal wanted it that way.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

The costumes have been cleaned and the rehearsal went on Friday for the Metropolitan Opera's biggest production of the season.
Ten years in the making, the world premiere of Oscar-winning composer Tan Dun's opera "The First Emperor," starring Placido Domingo, is scheduled for Dec. 21.
When the costumes arrived from China in late October, they emitted a strong chemical odor. One backstage worker had an allergic reaction to a preservative in the fabric and sought treatment at a hospital, Met officials said.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Royal Opera company turns 60 next month and celebrates with a lavish new production of Georges Bizet's "Carmen", the same opera it performed at its inauguration shortly after the end of World War Two.
U.S. director Francesca Zambello has said she wants to open opera up to the masses, and her latest "Carmen" is a deliberately populist take on the 19th century classic complete with a donkey, horse and chickens on stage.
— Read more at Reuters.co.uk

A gift of $4 million from a local philanthropist will allow the Los Angeles Opera to feature the work of composers whose work was affected by the politics of Nazi Germany, opera officials said Sunday.
Marilyn Ziering, a member of the opera's board of directors, donated $3.25 million and raised $750,000 more from various donors for the project known as "Recovered Voices."
— Read more at mercurynews.com

How do you harness a force of nature? The question arises at the very notion of the mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe in a song recital.
Ms. Blythe's voice is tremendous: it's not lovely so much as thrilling. It blazes out with a touch of steel at its edges in the lower notes, the roundness of soft trumpets on the top ones. It pulls a listener to the edge of his seat.
— Read more at New York Times

Muhammad's severed head had already caused enough consternation at Berlin's Deutsche Oper.
Fear that the head -- a prop in a Mozart opera -- could anger Muslims prompted the cancellation of the show in November and charges of needless self-censorship. Now the head has vanished, along with those of Jesus, Buddha and Neptune, just before the performance returns to the stage.
The four dummy heads appear in the final scene of a version of Mozart's "Idomeneo," which the opera dropped from its November schedule over security concerns.
— Read more at IndyStar.com

[ She's back, as feisty, sexy and indomitable as ever. As the curtain rises on a new Royal Opera staging, Jessica Duchen tells how Bizet's heroine sings to us all]
The librettist's friend didn't mince his words. "Your Carmen is a flop, a disaster! It will never play more than 20 times. The music goes on and on. It never stops. There's not even time to applaud. That's not music! And your play - that's not a play! A man meets a woman. He finds her pretty. That's the first act. He loves her, she loves him. That's the second act. She doesn't love him any more. That's the third act. He kills her. That's the fourth! And you call that a play? It's a crime, do you hear me, a crime!"
— Read more at Independent Online and Jessica Duchen's classical music blog

Quiz anyone with a musical background on singers or musicians who hail from Milwaukee, and they will no doubt rattle off the easy ones.
Steve Miller. Woody Herman, Al Jarreau. The BoDeans, who are technically from Waukesha, but in a pinch, we'll give you credit for Sammy Llanas and Kurt Neumann.
But here's a name you can dispense that will stump the panel - Dale Duesing.
— Read more at OnMilwaukee.com

Small opera companies are far more vulnerable to the fates than their well-heeled counterparts. Two local companies featured in a Sunday Arts & Music Calendar story have suddenly found their December plans derailed.
Citing financial difficulties, Lyric Opera of Los Angeles has canceled its performance of Mozart's "Bastien und Bastienne" scheduled for tonight through Dec. 17 at the Palace Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.
— Read more at calendarlive.com

Placido Domingo was roundly and vociferously booed at the Metropolitan Opera House on Tuesday evening.
Take a moment to let that statement sink in.
The occasion was the one and only appearance of Anna Netrebko as Mimi in the Met's current run of Giacomo Puccini's "La Bohème."
How does a single superstar turn affect the performance of an otherwise run-of-the-mill production? Let me count the ways.
— Read more at The New York Sun

Opera Boston's season takes a dark and satirical turn with The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, presented fully-staged at Boston's Cutler Majestic Theatre February 23, 25m, and 27.
Set in an underworld where vice and unrestrained capitalism are the law of the land, Mahagonny is a follow-up to Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera and an inspiration for musical theater favorites like Cabaret and Chicago. The cast is led by two renowned stars of opera and cabaret in their Opera Boston debuts: mezzo-soprano Joyce Castle as Leocadia Begbick - the grande dame of Mahagonny's gangster ruling class - and soprano Amy Burton as Jenny. Gil Rose, Opera Boston's award-winning Music Director, will conduct and Sam Helfrich, who recently directed Handel's Agrippina and Mozart's Don Giovanni for Boston Baroque, will direct. All performances will be sung in English translation and feature projected surtitles, as well as a free pre-performance talk one hour before curtain.
— Learn more at operaboston.org

The Grapes of Wrath, a new opera by Ricky Ian Gordon scheduled for its world premiere at Minnesota Opera next February, will get a sneak preview performance tonight at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street in Manhattan.
The evening will begin at 6 p.m. with the Center's annual holiday membership reception, followed by selections from the opera performed by singers Mary Phillips, Theodore Chletsos, Brian Leerhuber, John Michael Moore and Julia Mintzer with pianist Tim Long. There will also be a discussion with Gordon and librettist Michael Korie, moderated by Opera News features editor Brian Kellow.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Few opera stars can single-handedly transform a routine revival into a cause for celebration.
Anna Netrebko can.
The Russian soprano sang the role of Mimi in Puccini's "La Boheme" for the first and only time this season at the Metropolitan Opera on Tuesday night. And she brought a spark that had been missing earlier in the run, even in the performance of her operatic partner-of-choice, Mexican tenor Rolando Villazon. His Rodolfo was far more engaged and responsive, and he actually sang better, with a more direct attack and a more expansive ring to his high notes.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Renée Fleming opened her recital by virtuosically praising God and ended it by rapturously metamorphosing into a tree. The pieces in question were the Laudamus Te from Mozart's Mass in C minor and the closing scene of Strauss's Daphne. Given that Fleming's voice has been described as everything from heaven-sent to an unstoppable force of nature, the two works could not have been more appropriate.
— Read more at Guardian Unlimited

The world premiere of "The Bonesetter's Daughter" won't happen until the opening weekend of the San Francisco Opera's 2008-2009 season, but a small group of patrons got a preview of the Stewart Wallace-Amy Tan opera on Monday night. The party at Cissie Swig's Pacific Heights home was free, but the Opera was hoping the audience members would dig down into their deep pockets to help make the new work a reality.
— Read more at sfgate.com

They've made it official. Don Marrazzo, the Interim Director of Artistic Operations for Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York, has been appointed to the job in a permanent capacity. The company announced Marrazzo's engagement last week.
Marrazzo's rise at the company has been swift: he joined Glimmerglass as Director of Public Relations last year and was named to the interim artistic operations post in September, upon the departure of Nicholas G. Russell.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Philip Glass'"Satyagraha" will be given its Metropolitan Opera premiere next season as part of a co-production with the English National Opera.
Glass' opera, which had its world premiere in 1982, focuses on Mohandas K. Gandhi's years in South Africa and features Glass' repeated musical patterns. The title is the Sanskrit word for "force through truth," and the libretto is based on the Hindu text "Bhagavad-Gita."
— Read more at sfgate.com

[Despite car crash, Richard Margison is coming back to Victoria for benefit performance]
When Richard Margison answered the phone in New York recently, his voice was a little shaky.
"My wife and I were just in a car accident here on the way home from the opera," explained the internationally renowned tenor. He and his wife, Val, were in a cab that rear-ended another cab when it stopped in the middle of a turn, to pick up a fare.
— Read more at Opera star shows his loyalty

The general director of the Berkshire Opera Company has stepped down after nearly four years, forcing the company to rethink its upcoming season as it searches for a replacement.
William J. Powers left Berkshire Opera on Dec. 1. Board Chairman Norman Michaels said in a telephone interview that the search for Powers' replacement will begin immediately.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle

Opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti will not attend a concert on Wednesday that would have marked his first appearance since a cancer operation four months ago, prompting Italian media to speculate about his health.
Local organizers had said the 71-year-old Pavarotti had been billed to appear, although not sing, at a theater in Bergamo where he was to be given an award named after Gaetano Donizetti, the 19th century composer born in the northern Italian city.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

A new recording of Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci (The Players) starring the crossover tenor Andrea Bocelli has made the latest Billboard classical chart at no. 10 following its first full week in release.
Bocelli stars as Canio on the Decca Classics disc, with soprano Ana María Martínez as Nedda; Steven Mercurio conducts the Orchestra and Chorus of the Teatro Massimo Bellini of Catania, Sicily.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Second Act Opera, an educational division of Opera Grand Rapids, will bring the classic holiday opera "Amahl and the Night Visitors" to life in a one-night-only performance this Friday.
The English one-act, hour-long opera tells the Christmas story of the three kings who stop at the house of a shepherd boy and his mother on their way to visit the baby Jesus. The performance will be held at 7:30 p.m. Friday at St. Cecilia Music Society, 24 Ransom Ave. NE in Grand Rapids.
— Read more at mlive.com

[14-year-old John Marano enjoys singing opera]
John Marano was rocked to sleep to French composer Claude Debussy when he was a baby. Some of it must have crept into his dreams and lay within his soul for years. Now 14 years old, he's performed in a dozen operas and operettas from New York to Sarasota.
A freshman at Lakewood Ranch High School, Marano joined the Sarasota Youth Opera four years ago, and in 2005 he was awarded the Deane Allyn Scholarship from the Bradenton Opera Guild.
— Read more at Bradenton Herald

On Monday I decided all of a sudden that I would, after all, go to see Bryn Terfel sing with the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra the following evening. Because unlike most normal, sane people, I saw the ads for this concert months ago and decided not to go. Until at the last minute, it occured to me how very strange this decision really was. So I got the last ticket in the back row of the stalls - which is, incidentally, an incredibly good seat.
— Read more at Prima la musica, poi le parole

The San Francisco Opera's production of Bizet's "Carmen" has been spinning along very nicely since it opened at the War Memorial Opera House last month. All it needed, really, was a jolt of genuine eroticism.
That arrived Saturday night with a second cast headed by two electrifying performers, mezzo-soprano Kate Aldrich and tenor Stuart Skelton. As the fatally alluring Gypsy girl and the besotted soldier who together engineer each other's downfall, these two threw off theatrical and musical sparks that enlivened the proceedings.
— Read more at sfgate.com

WITH James Levine back at the helm, every thing is usually all right in the world of the Metropolitan Opera. And so it was Thursday night, when Verdi's great "Don Carlo" returned after a two-year absence.
Although the production dates from 1979, it's now - under the care of stage director Stephen Pickover - in very good shape. It had originally been staged by the late John Dexter who, with Levine, fine-tuned Verdi's epic take on this tale of conflict between duty, faith, love and freedom with exquisite histrionic sensibility - a sensibility that runs through the staging today.
— Read more at New York Post

Lately, I have gotten lazy about posting a few links now and then to the good things out there on other blogs. I'll try to make this a regular Sunday feature. Here are some of the goodies from Blogville:...
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts

Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced the naming of its podium in honor of the company's Artistic Director Emeritus, Bruno Bartoletti, who made his American debut conducting Il trovatore (The Troubador) at Lyric in 1956. Bartoletti concludes his 50th season with the company this Friday, December 8, conducting the same Verdi masterpiece.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

New York's Metropolitan Opera is coming soon to a movie theater near you. But that's only the beginning of the Met's multimedia ventures.
Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD begins Dec. 30 with a presentation of the Julie Taymor production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. The puppeteer, best known for Disney's Broadway version of The Lion King, designed and directed the family-friendly show, which will be telecast live from the Metropolitan Opera House.
— Read more at Houston Chronicle

Wichita Grand Opera began its fifth season on Saturday with Giuseppe Verdi's classic tearjerker "La traviata" in Century II Concert Hall. The opera featured a young, handsome cast that was one of the most enticing the company has assembled.
Soprano Cristina Nassif starred as the doomed courtesan Violetta. The 29-year-old American is new to the role but sang with assurance and dramatic intensity.
— Read more at Wichita Eagle

Nicolas Joel, the director of the Capitole, the Toulouse opera, will succeed Gerard Mortier as head of the Paris Opera in 2009, said Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, the French minister of culture.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

SINGERS at the Metropolitan Opera are holding their noses at costumes that arrived from China for the new production of "The First Emperor." The artists claim the costumes smell so bad, they might be toxic.
— Read more at New York Post

Verdi's monumental and profound opera "Don Carlo" requires a clarion-voiced and tireless tenor for the demanding title role. The Metropolitan Opera has not been able to present a truly great Don Carlo since Plácido Domingo in the early 1980s.
So there was great anticipation on Thursday night before the powerhouse South African tenor Johan Botha sang the role for the first time at the Met, when the company's starkly realistic 1979 production by John Dexter returned to the repertory. As those who have seen Mr. Botha cannot easily forget, he is a barrel-bellied man and a stiff actor. Still, he has the vocal goods. Though he took time to warm up, he sang with burnished sound, ringing top notes and poignant phrasing. Yes, he was a tree trunk onstage. But he acted with his voice, conveying youthful impetuosity and yearning.
— Read more at New York Times

Rolando Villazón was in grade school the first time he heard Plácido Domingo's voice, on a crossover CD the tenor recorded with John Denver in 1981. The young Mexican knew immediately he wanted to grow up and sing like Domingo.
Maybe it's no coincidence, then, that Villazón (bee-ya-SONE) is regarded by many as the most likely successor to his lifelong idol, who was born in Spain but, like Villazón, was raised and trained in Mexico City.
— Read more at Kansas City Star

FORGET about actors. Los Angeles is a town full of opera singers looking for work. They're your waiters, computer programmers, kindergarten teachers, even your letter carriers. Small companies have been springing up all over town and around the country, some even started by the singers themselves, to give them opportunities - not to mention offering budget-minded audiences an affordable way to see opera.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

[ For opera-lovers it's a great relief that Antonio Pappano, Italian but London-born, has just signed a new contract as Covent Garden's Musical Director. Anna Picard asks him about the highs - and occasional lows - of this high-pressure job]
Antonio Pappano is famously the youngest conductor to have command of Covent Garden since 1955. Yet his was not the meteoric rise of popular fiction. Though small of stature, he cuts a powerful figure. There's bulk in those shoulders, and grit behind the affable pragmatism of a busy man. Were we to come to blows over the highs and lows of his four-year career at the Royal Opera House, I wouldn't fancy my chances.
— Read more at Independent Online

"Diva" might be the most misunderstood word in the music world.
The term, which literally means "goddess," has been sullied to describe the likes of Cher, Beyonce and Mariah Carey. Divas are commonly thought to be egocentric sirens, singers more concerned with getting a bigger dressing room than giving their listening public musical thrills and goose bumps.
In her latest album, Homage: The Age of the Diva, Grammy-winning soprano Renee Fleming sets the record straight. In the title of this tribute CD to the great female singers of the early 20th century, "diva" refers not to attitude but to the kind of gifted artistry and technical brilliance that can mesmerize operagoers and great composers alike. Mary Garden, Geraldine Farrar, Maria Jeritza and Rosa Ponselle are among Fleming's inspirations. If you don't know these names, the CD's liner notes give you a brief history lesson. Still, Fleming's rich soprano voice is the focal point here, in a recording that's a delight for both connoisseur and polyglot.
— Read more at Star-Telegram

Soprano Angela Brown will give two mid-December performances of a holiday program, also set for public television broadcast on Christmas Eve.
Members of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra and Indianapolis Opera Chorus will join Brown at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 15 and 4 p.m. Dec. 17 at Tabernacle Presbyterian Church, 418 E. 34th St.
WFYI will broadcast the concert at 6 p.m. Dec. 24.
— Read more at IndyStar.com

[Antonacci's Royal Opera Carmen promises great things. Hugh Canning meets one feisty diva ]
Never will Carmen give in. "Free she was born, and free she will die!" With these defiant words, the heroine of Bizet's opera goads her crazed, jealous former lover into stabbing her at the moment when the Toreador, her new lover, is delivering the coup de grâce to his prey in the adjacent bullring. It's one of the most dramatic deaths, in one of the most familiar and popular operas. This week, Carmen gets a new look at Covent Garden, in Francesca Zambello's new staging, and opera's immortal femme fatale will stalk the boards in the magnetic form of the Italian diva Anna Caterina Antonacci.
— Read more at Sunday Times

The Vienna Opera's production of Vincenzo Bellini's "La Sonnanbula" has ended on a high note with standing ovations for its star, Russian diva Anna Netrebko.
The soprano, who also acquired Austrian citizenship this summer, seduced public and critics alike with her command, voice and grace during a series of three performances of Bellini's 1831 opera which closed on Wednesday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Einojuhani Rautavaara is part of the remarkable wave of new opera composition in Finland. His last opera, Rasputin, was commissioned by the Finnish National Opera and given its world premiere in Helsinki in 2003. Although Rautavaara revised the opera for a subsequent staging in Lübeck (February 2006, including revising the title role for a baritone instead of a bass), it is the Helsinki version that was captured on this DVD, released by Ondine last year, to glowing reviews in Opera News and elsewhere.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - ionarts