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Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna will reenergize the Met's free parks concerts June 20 with a special one-night-only event in the borough of kings.
In the summer of 1967, right after its inaugural season at Lincoln Center, the Met gave its first free concert in a New York City park - a performance in Queens of Puccini's La Bohème. Now the company is reinventing the parks format, with a one-night event in Brooklyn's Prospect Park on Friday, June 20. Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna will perform together in a concert of some of opera's greatest hits.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Domenico Cimarosa's comic opera "Il Matrimonio Segreto" had its premiere in Vienna in February 1792, two months after Mozart's death. The public reception was ecstatic. Mozart never had this kind of success in the city.
Though the best-known Cimarosa opera, "Il Matrimonio Segreto" ("The Secret Marriage") still does not turn up often in production. It's good news that the Brooklyn Academy of Music is presenting the work in a charming staging by the director Jonathan Miller at the Harvey Theater, with an appealing cast and Paul Goodwin conducting members of the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

It began life as a slide show before mutating into a prize-winning documentary and a book, but now An Inconvenient Truth, the work for which the former US vice-president Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is to become an opera.
Subtitled The Global Emergence of Planetary Warming, the documentary film intertwines Mr Gore's personal discovery of the issue of global warming with his presentation of the hazards it brings. The film has become the fourth most successful documentary in the US, after Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins and Sicko, earning $49m (£25m) at the box office worldwide.
— Read more at The Independent

THE world premiere of the first opera to be penned by award-winning novelist Ian McEwan has been postponed, after the leading man was told by doctors that he could not perform.
After months of anticipation, For You was set to be staged in partnership with the Hay Festival at Theatr Brycheiniog in Brecon on Saturday and Sunday, before embarking on a tour.
— Read more at icWales

On-stage villains aren't the only vermin at the Metropolitan Opera.
The grand theater at Lincoln Center, where much of New York's society gathers to show off gowns and jewels, has been cited for sanitary violations by the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Kansas City area is blessed with an abundance of musical talent. This was clear recently when Overland Park native Meggie Cansler returned home as a member of the touring company of the hit musical "Wicked."

As classical musicians go, there is probably none better known at this time than mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, a Prairie Village native who has garnered worldwide attention in recent years. She is a regular fixture on the most glamorous opera stages in the world - New York's Metropolitan Opera, the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London, the Paris Opera, the list goes on.
— Read more at KCCommunityNews.com

To cap off its 2007-2008 season, the Washington National Opera is offering a boldly flavored, if hardly unusual digestif, a concert performance of Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana. Shrewdly programmed concert performances of opera, like many of those offered by Washington Concert Opera, are opportunities to perform a relatively unknown opera by a well-known composer (Rossini's Tancredi or Bianca e Falliero) or something that few people in their right mind ever think of staging (like Moses und Aron or Das Wunder der Heliane).
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

When it was time for the curtain call at the end of the Fort Worth Opera Festival premiere of Puccini's Turandot on Saturday night, a very un-Fort Worth-like thing occurred. When young soprano Sandra Lopez, who had dazzled the sold-out audience as Liu took her bow, the enthusiastic ovation she received was punctuated by two bouquets of flowers tossed from a box several tiers above the stage.
— Read more at pegasusnews.com

In London, when it was announced in 2005 that Valery Gergiev had been appointed principal conductor - and therefore de facto music director - of the London Symphony, I was able to gauge the reactions of a surprised listening public and critical community. They were not entirely favorable. The dean of British critics and author of the definitive volume on the LSO, Richard Morrison, wrote that this was the beginning of the end of that celebrated ensemble's discipline.
— Read more at The New York Sun

For some, the main news from the 32nd Spoleto Festival USA here is that the festival, cut loose from its Italian counterpart in 1993, is patching up relations with its parent. For others, the big story is the new Memminger Theater, which opened on Thursday after a $6 million renovation with a revised version of "Amistad," Anthony Davis's 1997 opera about the lost slave ship.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

"Mordake," the solo opera by composer Erling Wold and librettist Douglas Kearney that had its world premiere as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, starts with a terrific premise. It's about a guy with a second face - a woman's face, no less - on the back of his head, who whispers evil nothings into his ear.
— Read more at sfgate.com

When Raffaele Cardone launched his Miami Lyric Opera four years ago, the reaction from other arts organizations ranged from bemusement to disdain. How could a retired tenor with no management experience expect to mount opera performances in as difficult a market as Miami, let alone hope to achieve any degree of artistic merit?
— Read more at MiamiHerald.com

For over a year Cecilia Bartoli has concentrated her skills on repertoire once sung by the great 19th-century mezzo-soprano Maria Malibran. An enthusiastically received Decca compact disc called "Maria" was followed by a slew of concerts, including a marathon in Paris on March 24, the bicentennial of Malibran's birth. Now Bartoli has spearheaded a revival of an obscure opera written for Malibran, "Clari," by the French composer Jacques Fromental Halévy, which opened last week at the Zurich Opera House.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

If it's chills-down-the-back opera you're looking for - stunning vocalism and high drama - get yourself to Bass Performance Hall this week. The Fort Worth Opera Festival's Turandot and Lucia di Lammermoor, which opened over the weekend, would give many a major-league opera company a run for its money.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

The Royal Opera House is taking on its first armourer's apprentice to look after weapons used during its productions.
The opera house in London has decided to take on its own trainee to shadow the official armourer because it has become difficult to recruit people with the right skills. University courses relied on by theatreland have been found to lack the right practical content.
— Read more at The Independent

There is a hush, still, when you say his name in this northern Italian hub or ask about his command of its legendary opera house. Muti. Riccardo Muti. The words are potent.
Some patrons offer swift best wishes when asked about the newly named musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In a half beat, they beg off further talk. Others consider questions about Muti, who three years ago was forced out as musical director of La Scala, in a kind of reflective crouch.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Forget Netrebko and Villazón, Gheorghiu and Alagna. Opera's new dream couple is Elizabeth Futral and Stephen Costello. And Fort Worth Opera has paired them for the Lucia di Lammermoor that opened Sunday afternoon at Bass Performance Hall. Indeed, all the principal roles, even some slight ones, are splendidly cast.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Mexican composer Daniel Catán will be in town to launch a series of events in preparation for Cincinnati Opera performances of his opera "Florencia en el Amazonas" (July 10 and 12).
Thursday, Catán will be guest speaker for an Opera Rap, "Florencia Magic," at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. The composer will speak about his 1996 opera, which follows the life of an opera singer, Florencia, and her mystical journey down the Amazon River. 7 p.m., Werner Recital Hall at CCM. Free, but reservations requested: 513-241-2742.
— Read more at The Enquirer

The opening scene is a vast cartoon, projected on a scrim, with viewers zooming past clouds and mountain peaks to an egg, which falls, bursts and gives birth to Monkey. The scrim goes up, and the cartoon dissolves into a stage full of flipping acrobats, a monkey tribe flying from bamboo pole to bamboo pole. The score pulsates with an electronic beat.
So begins "Monkey: Journey to the West," a newfangled sort of opera that is making its American debut here at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. Based on an old Chinese tale, it traces the Monkey King?s search for wisdom and immortality with singing, acrobatics, martial arts and cartoon segments. It is circus spectacle striving to become art ? or maybe art infused with spectacle.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Planning an opera season is a little like planning a wedding, says Evans Mirageas, artistic director of the Cincinnati Opera.
"You want something old, something new and so on," he said. "In a season with four operas, the challenge is greater than a season of eight operas because you only have four chances to make an impression."
— Read more at daytondailynews.com

Whenever someone mentions the word "opera," what usually comes to mind are works in Italian, French, German or some other European language because of the form's well-established traditions in those countries.
It's easy to forget there is also a long history of operas in English, dating back to at least Henry Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" in 1678. Don't expect to find that work on any area line-ups this summer, but three other highly varied English-language works, each from a different decade in the 20th century, do highlight regional opera schedules.
— Read more at The Denver Post

Not so often do new American operas find life after birth. But Anthony Davis's "Amistad," a historically inspired exploration of slavery and freedom, has come back to the stage 11 years after its debut at the Chicago Lyric Opera, and in a deeply resonant setting.
It is the central work at this summer's Spoleto Festival U.S.A., whose host is Charleston, a city fully freighted with slavery?s legacy. The relevance has not been lost on African-Americans involved: the composer, the librettist, performers and audience members.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Spoleto Festival USA is celebrating renewed ties with its namesake festival in Italy and featuring a new version of the opera Amistad during its 17-day season, which opened yesterday.
The opera tells of the 1839 revolt by Africans enslaved on the schooner Amistad.
The festival opening coincides with a visit from the Freedom Schooner Amistad, a replica of the original that sails from port to port telling the story of the revolt.
— Read more at The Columbus Dispatch

MOZART was wasted on Vienna, and he knew it. From 1786 to 1791, audiences there witnessed the premieres of "Le Nozze di Figaro," "Così Fan Tutte" and "Die Zauberflöte," but they made a bigger fuss over other operas.
Six months after the ho-hum reception for "Figaro," the Spanish composer Vicente Martín y Soler whipped up a frenzy with "Una Cosa Rara," and it cannot have improved Mozart's humor that the five principals from his opera headed the cast. Luckily, Prague gave "Figaro" the kind of welcome it deserved, and commissioned "Don Giovanni" as an encore.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Why is Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" the world's single most beloved opera?
"Almost from the beginning," says Opera Theatre of St. Louis general director Charles MacKay, "'Madame Butterfly' has been at the top of the charts. It's because of, number one, Puccini's irresistible melodies. Add to that the exotic Japanese setting, a story that combines romance and pathos, and an ending that totally pulls at the heartstrings.
— Read more at STLtoday

Wotan, the king of the gods in Wagner's "Ring" cycle, is a difficult character under the best of circumstances. For all his valor and intelligence, he has a near-fatal streak of arrogance that endangers himself, his family and potentially the entire world.
Mark Delavan understands what that's about.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" premiered last year to sold-out houses, enthusiastic applause, and lukewarm to poor critical response - Gay City News' James Jorden dubbed it "Technicolor Twaddle" in these pages. Evidently, Tan Dun wanted another try at fixing the piece, and Peter Gelb shelved a revival of Tobias Picker's "An American Tragedy" - a more successful piece in my view - so that the Emperor could sing again.
— Read more at GayCityNews

We know fat happy Mambo,
Simple lazy Sambo.

Those are among the milder lines from one of many raw scenes in "Amistad," the opera that opened the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. It is a work about the horror of slavery performed in a port city that once supplied a large portion of this nation's enchained humanity. (More on that juxtaposition later, in blog or newspaper form.)
— Read more at New York Times Blog

Katherine Jenkins has hit out at critics who said she is not an opera singer.
The Classical Brit-winning artist told the opening night of the Hay Festival she never claimed to be an opera star.
But the singer, who won a six-record deal while still at college, told the audience opera was her long-term aim.
— Read more at BBC

The short, two-act opera "The Medium" (1945) by Gian Carlo Menotti is sort of the precursor to the supernatural hit movie "Ghost" (1990).
Only there's no Patrick Swayze. No mud-flinging, steamy sex scene with a potter's wheel. No "Unchained Melody."
But there's a charlatan character very similar to the one played by Whoopi Goldberg in her Oscar-winning role.
In "The Medium," which is being produced this weekend by the Florida State Opera, the boozy Madame Flora (Valerie Hart Nelson) orchestrates rigged seances in New Orleans during the ragtime heyday of Storyville. Flora's got a good con going until, one night at a bogus seance, something cold and unplanned reaches out to grab her in the dark.
— Read more at Tallahassee Democrat

When conductor and company patriarch Alfredo Silipigni died two years ago, New Jersey State Opera was itself in danger of expiring. For four decades, Silipigni embodied the company, keeping it going through debts and disorganization in later years through sheer force of personality.
Fallow since 2006, State Opera spent its post-Silipigni years reorganizing and raising money. Today, at Newark's Robert Treat Hotel, the company announced new leadership and gradually unfolding plans for renewing its work on stage.
— Read more at NJ.com

Singers from the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music swept the awards at the Opera Guild of Dayton Tri-State College Vocal Competition.
Andrea Shokery, a senior from Columbus, won first prize and $2,500, and was also the audience favorite, earning another $400. Soprano Katelyn Lee, a junior from Springfield, Mo., finished second to win $1,500. Marshall Dean and Megan Aylward were finalists, winning $150 each. All four students study with Barbara Paver.
— Read more at The Enquirer

Isola Jones has sung with the Metropolitan Opera and has been paired with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. So why is the mezzo-soprano so eager to come back to the Acorn Theater in Three Oaks?
"Because Bob asked me to," she says by telephone from her home in Phoenix.
Bob, in this case, is Rolling Prairie resident Robert Swan, whose "Opera at the Acorn" series opens its second season Saturday with Jones performing a new program of mostly Viennese classics.
— Read more at South Bend Tribune

The Muddy River Opera Company will produce the comic opera "L'Elisir d'Amore (The Elixir of Love)," by Gaetano Donizetti, at 8 p.m. Saturday, May 30, and 2 p.m. Sunday, June 1, in the Quincy Community Theatre.
English text of the Italian opera will be shown above the stage.
— Read more at Quincy Herald Whig

Hsiu-Lan Chang borrows a pencil and leans over her cobb salad, drawing quick circles in groups on the table in front of her. In one group, the circles overlap only slightly where they touch. On another part of the table, circles overlap each other in tight a mass of loops - each circle touching the other.
This, Chang said, is the potential of "Madame White Snake," a groundbreaking opera written by Cerise Jacobs, an attorney-turned-librettist seated across the table from her. Chang believes the opera, now under production, has the power to bring together communities that otherwise touch only at their edges.
— Read more at Brookline TAB

[Florida Grand Opera closed out its 2007-2008 season on May 17 with the revival of its acclaimed 2000 production of George Frideric Handel's Julius Caesar in Egypt (aka Giulio Cesare in Egitto).]
FGO press notes describe the work as "a tale of power and passion with grand themes of warfare, heroic action, and inner turmoil."
"Handel's sumptuous score and epic tale define the Baroque Opera tradition, and internationally, Julius Caesar is arguably the most frequently produced pre-Mozart opera."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[Rupert Christiansen reviews Roméo et Juliette by Opera North at Grand Theatre, Leeds and Falstaff by Scottish Opera at Theatre Royal, Glasgow]
With this energetic and inventive production of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette following hard on its success with Verdi's Macbeth and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opera North completes a magnificent Shakespearean hat-trick.
— Read more at Telegraph

At a recent press conference Opera Boston General Director Carole Charnow announced the company's first-ever commissioned work in its 2009/2010 season with the world premiere of Madame White Snake, a new opera based on a beloved ancient Chinese legend, by composer Zhou Long and librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs. The work is co-commissioned with the Beijing Music Festival in an historic partnership between a Chinese performing arts organization and an American opera company. The world premiere is presented by State Street Corporation.
— Learn more at madamewhitesnake.org

Glimmerglass Opera will stage its 34th Festival Season July 5-August 24, 2008, "If music be the food of love, play on!" Four new productions with links to Shakespeare will be presented on a set resembling an Elizabethan theater: Porter's Kiss Me, Kate, Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto, the American fully-staged premiere of Wagner's Das Liebesverbot (inspired by Shakespeare's Measure for Measure), and Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi. Additionally, Glimmerglass will present two concert performances of Mendelssohn's Complete Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night's Dream.
— Learn more at glimmerglass.org

In his mission to reinvigorate the Metropolitan Opera, Peter Gelb, who completed his second season as general manager on Saturday night, has inaugurated outreach campaigns and digital-media ventures that are the envy of the opera world. There have been the enormously popular live high-definition transmissions of broadcasts to movie theaters worldwide, and the Met's lively 24-hour station on Sirius satellite radio. Mr. Gelb has proved a master of marketing and drawn high-profile directors from film and theater into the house.
— Read more at New York Times

A cast of seven will play 38 roles. Twelve English handbells, along with a few whistles, tambourines, drums and other percussion paraphernalia, will make up the orchestra. A projection system will create the special effects needed for the vastly changing size of the set.
What may sound like a backyard production by young people is actually an ambitious professional staging of an adult opera by composer Peter Westergaard, based on a children's classic.
— Read more at Princeton Packet

Scottish Opera's new director of music, the Italian Francesco Corti, may not always have the English vocabulary he wants to express his thoughts, but he says some very interesting things.
— Read more at The Herald

Lyric Opera of Chicago released the initial financial results of it's 2007-08 season today, with the company reporting having sold 98 percent of its seating capacity for the 79 performances comprising its season, in addition to having maintained a surplus in excess of $800,000.
— Read more at Opera News

Puccini's "Turandot" is a really big show.
But, undaunted, the Connecticut Grand Opera & Orchestra rose to meet its considerable challenges at the Palace Theatre last Saturday evening.
Principal among the challenges is finding a soprano capable of singing the title role. Enter Othalie Graham, a young Canadian soprano who began her career singing such heavy roles as Richard Strauss's Elektra, Verdi's Aida, and, of course, Princess Turandot.
— Read more at The Advocate

Opera Grand Rapids Executive Director John Peter "Jeep" Jeffries is leaving the company to take a position with Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma.
Jeffries, who has led Opera Grand Rapids for seven seasons, will begin new duties as executive director in mid-July with a company that's about three times the size of Opera Grand Rapids in terms of budget and staff.
— Read more at mlive.com

James Levine has made the Met Orchestra into a powerful precision instrument that plays Romantic and contemporary works with an uncommon beauty and suppleness. But if you want to hear these players in music that howls, roars and drags you through one or two dark nights of the soul, Valery Gergiev is your man.
— Read more at New York Times

HERE is a treasure. Opera DVDs tumble out by the dozens nowadays, too often featuring routine performances of recent productions that hardly seem worth preserving. In contrast Arthaus's scholarly and imposing "Walter Felsenstein Edition" offers a fascinating glimpse of an important moment in operatic history now vanished.
— Read more at New York Times

It still feels odd talking about opera when the temps have hovered close to 90, but that's the new thing for the Fort Worth Opera and its second annual festival season. This year, we get two beloved classics (Lucia di Lammermoor and Turandot) and one lesser-seen American work (Of Mice and Men), all in big productions at Bass Hall.
— Read more at Star-Telegram.com

[Valery Gergiev, the Met's Principal Guest Conductor since 1997, talks to Philipp Brieler about some of the highlights of the past 10 years.]
Valery Gergiev, Artistic Director of St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre, has brought some of the greatest Russian operas to the Met, introducing many of his home country's most talented artists. The perpetually busy maestro wraps up his stint at the end of the current season.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

In the past decade, there has been a procession of pop artists trying their hands at classical music with mixed results, from the bloated and pretentious (Paul McCartney, Roger Waters) to a more natural synthesis of rock and classical (Joe Jackson).
Carly Simon was ahead of the curve in 1993 when she wrote her opera of family conflict, Romulus Hunt, which received its belated South Florida premiere Saturday night at the Gusman Center. The benefit event raised funds for CHARLEE Homes for Children, a foster-care organization, and the Girls Advocacy Project, which mentors juvenile girls in detention.
— Read more at MiamiHerald.com

[Desire, passion, suffering - it's all in Monteverdi's Poppea, as Robert Carsen explains to Martin Kettle ]
Why it is only now, at 53, that Robert Carsen has become a force in British opera? It is not, after all, as if the renowned Canadian director is unknown here. It is nearly three decades since the Bristol Old Vic-trained actor was first hired as an assistant director at the Glyndebourne festival, where he spent five years working with the likes of John Cox and Trevor Nunn. And it is 22 years since Carsen staged Mozart's La Finta Giardiniera at the Camden festival, a production that led to a host of influential and highly regarded work in continental Europe and north America.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk Arts

Danielle de Niese, mega-star soprano, virtuoso dancer and all-purpose force of nature, has already spent a decade in the operatic fast lane - and she's still only 28. But this week sees the biggest challenge of her career so far. Her first solo CD came out two days ago, and on Saturday she takes the title role in L'Incoronazione di Poppea, in the keenly anticipated new production that opens the 2008 Glyndebourne season.
— Read more at This is London

To judge from lobby talk during performances by the New York City Opera this spring and continuing chat on opera blogs, there has been growing trepidation among the company's supporters over the coming of Gérard Mortier. The Belgian-born Mortier becomes the general manager and artistic director of the people's opera, as this essential company has been called, in 2009.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

Like phone calls at 3 a.m., and letters from the I.R.S., announcements before an operatic performance are rarely good news.
Saturday night, before L.A. Opera's latest revival/resuscitation of its venerable - and for this listener, rapidly aging - production of Puccini's "Tosca," the omniscient disembodied voice over the P.A. system announced that Neil Shicoff, the evening's Cavaradossi, had been vocally indisposed enough to cut a dress rehearsal short, but was consenting to go ahead with the evening's performance anyway.
— Read more at OCRegister.com

Chatham, Ont., and Kansas City, Mo., seldom if ever mentioned in the same breath, became unwitting partners in history this month, thanks to the fiery figure of John Brown.
...
Months later he was dead, hanged by government order for leading an abortive raid on a military arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va., an event portrayed on stage this month by Lyric Opera of Kansas City in its world premiere production of Kirke Mechem's three-act opera John Brown.
— Read more at TheStar.com

The resurrection of an opera and an auditorium launch the Spoleto Festival USA this year.
"Amistad," a 1997 opera that composer Anthony Davis has extensively reworked, will reopen Charleston's Memminger Auditorium, which was abandoned for about 30 years and just renovated.
— Read more at The State

Once in a while, but as rarely as the sun shines on a first day at Lord's, one singer can singlehandedly lift an opera from the level of mere excellence into the realms of the unforgettable. Such is the contribution made by German tenor Jonas Kaufmann to the Royal Opera's revival of Tosca, in which his exquisitely sung and affectingly acted Cavaradossi makes the rest of an impressive cast look and sound rather ordinary.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

The head of Berlin's prestigious Staatsoper quit the opera company Thursday in a row over funding and artistic differences, a spokesman said.
Peter Mussbach, whose contract was not due to expire until 2010, leaves with immediate effect "by common consent" owing to differences over the "future direction of the establishment and its artistic programming," a statement added.
— Read more at AFP

Opera Pacific has always had an eye on the American segment of the art form, and for a few years, in the late '90s and early 2000s, the company was looking into one such work each season. Hard times hit and the company veered toward the more easy-to-sell German and Italian classics, and cut down its schedule. But things are turning around.
At the beginning of last season Opera Pacific gave us a snazzy concert version of the complete "Porgy and Bess." Next season we'll see the West Coast premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon's well received "The Grapes of Wrath." And to wind up its slate this year, Opera Pacific is giving its first performances of Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah," which opened Wednesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter.
— Read more at TIMOTHY MANGAN - OCRegister.com

Washington National Opera opened its final production of the season on Saturday night, Richard Strauss's 1909 opera Elektra. This opera is in a sense an extension of the verismo style, just with a much better orchestral score and less vulgar melodies. It takes on ancient stories, from Greek mythology, and shockingly refracts them through the lens of modern psychology. Carl Jung used the story of Electra, of course, to describe the female counterpart of Freud's Oedipus complex, just a few years after the premiere of Strauss's opera. Hugo von Hoffmansthal's libretto for Elektra leaves open many possible motivations for Elektra's unhinged rage toward her mother, none of them pleasant to contemplate.
— Read more at DCist

The United States government is honoring opera. The National Endowment for the Arts said on Tuesday that it was establishing yearly Opera Honors awards, and named the first four recipients: James Levine, the Metropolitan Opera's music director; the soprano Leontyne Price; the composer Carlisle Floyd; and Richard Gaddes, the general director of the Santa Fe Opera.
— Read more at New York Times Blog

Since 1999 New York City Opera's lively Vox series has offered concert performances of excerpts from new operas by American composers, like fashion designers previewing a new collection on the runway.
Of the 82 works presented at previous Vox concerts, 33 have received full stagings, including Robert Aldridge's "Elmer Gantry," Mark Adamo's "Lysistrata" and Richard Danielpour's "Margaret Garner" (at City Opera last fall). At the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University last weekend the City Opera Orchestra performed 10 new works, with each excerpt preceded by an insightful video interview with the composer.
— Read more at New York Times

This Sunday, May 18, the Los Angeles Master Chorale presents the world premiere of a chorale concert suite from Ricky Ian Gordon's "The Grapes of Wrath" at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
— Learn more at lamc.org

Despite a flood of negative reviews and urges for a boycott, a controversial revamp of a Verdi opera is playing to a packed house in Germany.
Provocative choreographer and theatre director Johann Kresnik's new staging of Un Ballo in Maschera (A Masked Ball) has been blasted by critics and booed by some audiences since its debut in April in the eastern German city of Erfurt.
Verdi's opera, loosely based on the 18th-century assassination of Sweden's King Gustav III, was controversial even during its debut in 1859, because it depicts the killing of a European monarch. The composer succumbed to censors and set the opera in the New World colony of Boston instead.
— Read more at cbc.ca

The world premiere of "Alice in Wonderland" is set for 8 p.m. Thursday, May 22, in Richardson Auditorium of Alexander Hall at Princeton University. At 8:00 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, June 3-4, the opera will be performed at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th Street in New York. Tickets for the New York event are priced at $30, $40, and $50 through the Symphony Space box office at 212-864-5400
A cast of seven will play 38 roles. Twelve English handbells, along with a few whistles, tambourines, drums and other percussion paraphernalia, will make up the orchestra. A projection system will create the special effects needed for the vastly changing size of the set. "Alice in Wonderland" is the sixth opera by Peter Westergaard.
— Learn more at conopera.org

Scholars disagree on the nature of the friendship between the biblical characters David and Jonathan. It is unlikely that the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier intended to highlight any possible romance in "David et Jonathas," written in 1688 for a Jesuit college.
But a new production of the rarely staged work directed by Timothy Nelson, the 28-year-old founder of the American Opera Theater, brought David and Jonathan out of the closet, interpreting their relationship as a modern audience would. It opened to a handful of people on Friday evening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
— Read more at New York Times

Thousands of Toronto opera lovers who have turned the Metropolitan Opera's HD series into a huge hit at select Cineplex theatres will be delighted by the lineup for 2008-09.
There will be 11 simulcasts next year (compared to eight this past year), starting with a star-studded opening night on Monday, Sept 22. That will be followed by 10 Saturday afternoon HD presentations.
— Read more at TheStar.com

With the volatile mix of race, religion and politics stirred up in the presidential primaries, the new opera introduced Saturday by Lyric Opera of Kansas City is unexpectedly au courant.
Exploring the run-up to the Civil War, Kansas-born composer Kirke Mechem's John Brown is peopled by Frederick Douglass and Lt. J.E.B. Stuart as well as the eponymous and still-controversial abolitionist. With some compression and dramatic license, the opera spans a period from December 1855 to December 1859.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

In the mid-1950s, when Carlisle Floyd began composing his first, full-scale opera, he had a very particular kind of audience in mind ? the kind, in short, that didn't go to opera.
"I felt that there was a large, college-educated audience in this country who had never gone inside an opera house, or seen an opera, and viewed it as something very forbidding and for the cognoscenti alone," the gentlemanly composer, 81, recalled the other day from his home in Tallahassee, Fla. "So I wanted to write an opera that would seem comfortable for that audience, if we could get them inside."
— Read more at TIMOTHY MANGAN - OCRegister.com

A BAWDY bedroom scene is playing on Scottish Opera's rehearsal stage. Baritone Peter Sidhom, playing Sir John Falstaff - in a padded fat suit that bulges bizarrely from both his front and rear - is comically attempting to pin soprano Amanda Roocroft on the bed.
— Read more at The Scotsman

The folks at the Berkeley Opera figured out a while ago that video projections are a canny way of adding a visual dimension to a production within the constraints of a tight budget and the spare settings of the company's home in the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts. But they've never pursued the idea as comprehensively as in the company's latest offering, a double bill of one-acts by Bartók and Ravel.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Jonas Kaufmann is a rare breed of singer. Coming originally from Munich, he has avoided being type-cast and has a repertoire that ranges from Mozart to Wagner, encompassing many of the great French and Italian roles. This season at Covent Garden he's already impressed critics and audiences alike opposite Anna Netrebko in La traviata. His Don José in Francesca Zambello's production of Carmen (when it opened in 2006) received the kind of universal acclaim that's hard to come by in the opera world. He first made an impression at the Royal Opera House when he appeared opposite Angela Gheoghiu in Puccini's La Rondine and it's in the same composer's Tosca that he makes a role debut next week, as Mario Cavaradossi.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

It is a Thursday night at 7:30, and the members of the Bronx Opera, its two designated divas included, have assembled to rehearse.
Tables must be moved to make space inside Lehman College's East Dining Room, so they are moved with a song. As performers await their scenes, they eat takeout food, singing between bites. A chorus member waiting his turn reads a newspaper, humming to himself. People pace or study scores, singing all the while.
— Read more at New York Times

With directors Robert Lepage and Penny Woolcock making Met debuts and Mary Zimmerman returning after her hit production of Lucia di Lammermoor, the potential for dynamic stagecraft at the Met next season is enormous. But beyond theatrical ingenuity, the 2008?09 season's new productions also afford the opportunity for extraordinary vocalism. The stars of the six new productions may be familiar to Met audiences, but their repertoire is not. With the exception of Il trovatore, none of these operas has been performed at the Met in more than a generation - and in the case of Doctor Atomic, never before.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

There are two gripping productions of "Macbeth" in New York right now.
The darkly theatrical, cinematic staging directed by Rupert Goold and starring Patrick Stewart opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is now at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway.
Then there is the Metropolitan Opera's new production of Verdi's operatic adaptation of that Shakespeare drama, a breakthrough work for the young Verdi, first performed in 1847. The Met's grim, boldly updated production by the director Adrian Noble, which opened in October, returns on Friday with a new cast, led by the baritone Carlos Álvarez, the soprano Hasmik Papian as Lady Macbeth, and, in the crucial role of Banquo, the formidable bass René Pape. James Levine conducts.
— Read more at New York Times

Applications are now being accepted for American Lyric Theater's Composer Librettist Development Program - the only full time mentorship program for emerging operatic composers and librettist in the United States. Producing Artistic Director Lawrence Edelson explains, "while there are playwright programs at theater companies around the country that have proven immensely successful at mentoring artists, no opera company has a full-time program to mentor its writers. Opera companies tend to focus their resources on the mentorship of young singers ? and the results have been extraordinary. Just imagine what could happen on the American opera stage if there were comparable mentorship opportunities for our emerging writers... ALT is committed to making this happen."
— Learn more at altnyc.org

It was plucky, not to say defiant, of Roberto Alagna to include the treacherous "Celeste Aida" in his Viva Verdi recital. This was, after all, the aria that precipitated his famous walk-out from La Scala, Milan, in December 2006, when elements in the audience showed their disapproval in the traditional manner. But if he sang it there as he did here, then I can't say I blame them.
— Read more at The Independent

In three decades of adventurous programming, Long Beach Opera has tried a lot of things - from its beginning in 1979 as Long Beach Grand Opera producing large works, to its recent experiments in operas performed in a parking garage and a swimming pool.
— Read more at Press-Telegram

Frances Yeend, an internationally known soprano who appeared regularly with the New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in the decades after World War II, died on April 27 in Morgantown, W.Va. She was 95 and lived in Morgantown.
— Read more at New York Times

Duke Ellington's only opera, Queenie Pie is scheduled for 12 performances during May at the Oakland Metro Operahouse in Oakland, Calif. Produced by the Oakland Opera Theater and the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra, under the artistic direction of Tom Dean and musical direction of Deirdre McClure, it opens on May 10th and runs through May 25th. The stage director and choreographer is Michael Mohammed, the musical orchestrator and arranger is Marc Bolin, and the playwright is Tommy Shepherd.
— Read more at JazzTimes Magazine

How does a perfectly sane person -- if an opera singer can said to be perfectly sane -- portray insanity?
That's the challenge that faces soprano Luz del Alba and the entire Madison Opera as it tackles its first-time production of Gaetano Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" this weekend at Overture Hall.
— Read more at madison.com

They're understandably wary of one another, but hip hop and opera aren't totally alien bedfellows.
Both rely on outsized characterizations to spin a good yarn through music, and when rappers get particularly ambitious with their storytelling - Jay-Z on American Gangster or Lupe Fiasco on The Cool, to name two recent examples - the results tend to be painted in the same epic (and violent) narrative strokes as any corpse-littered production of Tosca.
— Read more at TheStar.com

There's opera, and then there's children's opera, each with its own audience. But the beguiling opening-night performance of "The Little Prince" gave both groups a chance to meet on common ground.
On Friday, Rachel Portman's adaptation of the classic 1943 novella by Antoine Saint-Exupéry made its West Coast debut at Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. Presented by Cal Performances and San Francisco Opera through Sunday, the production attracted both seasoned operagoers and families.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

It was a night for the history books.
Juan Diego Florez jauntily cherry-picked the nine high C's in "La Fille du Regiment" at the Metropolitan Opera April 21. These were the same stratospheric nine that signaled the 1972 breakthrough of some tenor named Pavarotti. And the aria sent a special shiver of approval through the primed opening-night crowd.
— Read more at Nevada Appeal

A great night at the opera means seeing a stage full of characters who feel trapped by their fates and emotions, yet still leaving the theatre feeling exalted.
It's not so good when you feel your own life force ebbing away well before the title character has had a chance to slip into death.
Unfortunately, the Canadian Opera Company's mainstage season-closer - Claude Debussy's early 20th-century masterpiece, Pelléas et Mélisande - feels twice as long as its 3-plus-hour running time. This despite a captivating stage design (by Dany Lyne) and a stunning performance by Canadian baritone Russell Braun in the role of Pelléas.
— Read more at TheStar.com

"I have no idea what I'm doing," said Woody Allen. "But incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm."
So declared the New York filmmaker when the Los Angeles Opera announced last June that he would direct a production of Puccini's "Gianni Schicchi" to be staged this September.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

The creators of books, musicals, movies and television shows all figured out long ago how to tailor their art specifically for children. Until now, opera has been late to the party.
Rachel Portman's beautiful 2003 opera, "The Little Prince," which had its West Coast premiere over the weekend in a co-production by the San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances, corrects that oversight with uncommon sensitivity and flair. Tender and funny, brightly colored and easy to digest, it has all the qualities of a first-rate kids' story.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, best known for producing classical European operas for almost 60 years, is breaking new ground with an original hip hopera production on Wednesday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Pittsburgh Opera is almost done with its move from its Downtown offices to its new, huge complex in the Strip District. Our intrepid videographer, Michael Henninger, shot a short video last week, if you want to get a sense of the enormity of the transfer. With many costumes, scores, computers, files and sets, this is not your standard house move.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

Nobody booed this time. Roberto Alagna didn't flounce off the stage, as he famously did in December 2006 after nasty noises from La Scala's cheaper seats and one aria's worth of Aïda.
In any case, the atmosphere in the Barbican Hall was a world away from that bearpit in Milan. Here, this tenor "divo" was entirely among friends - his wife Angela Gheorghiu included, who was the encore recipient of an unaccompanied love song. Alagna wooed the whole audience too, with every gesture and most of his notes. "Very nice to be here," he said, before settling into another Verdi aria of abject suffering.
— Read more at timesonline.co.uk

The 22nd Season of the Delaware Valley Opera will highlight two of Opera's most notorious bad boys: Mozart's "Don Giovanni" and Donizetti's "Don Pasquale."
The season will also offer a program of highlights from favorite operas called "Divas on the Delaware," and a program of Broadway songs by the amazing lyricist, Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to "The Wizard of Oz," among other great songs. Performances will be in Sullivan County, NY and across the Delaware River in Pike County, PA.
— Read more at tristateobserver.com

Mozart's "Clemenza di Tito" has the reputation of being an opera for connoisseurs, not because the music is rarefied but because it typically takes a discerning opera lover to appreciate the work's splendors while overlooking its flaws.
But as the Metropolitan Opera's revival of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's elegantly stylized 1984 production made clear on Saturday night in the first of four performances, with a strong cast and a sympathetic conductor (here Harry Bicket), "Clemenza" emerges as a musically ravishing and dramatically complex opera of great immediacy.
— Read more at New York Times

In the 10 years that Joseph Colaneri has been artistic director of the Mannes Opera at Mannes College the New School for Music, the program has earned a stellar reputation for the quality of its presentations and the excellence of its student singers. On Saturday evening in the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College the company presented Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites" in a production that lived up to the expected high standard. A second performance with a different cast was scheduled for Sunday
— Read more at New York Times

For every professional accolade that's come her way since emerging in the past decade as a wondrous young opera talent, Barbara Quintiliani is remarkably down-to-earth in person.
"It's great. There's nothing diva-ish about her - except for that extraordinary voice," a colleague said.
Sounds like she gets that a lot.
— Read more at The Enterprise

Jennifer Holloway was hard to track down for an interview, and with good reason - she was giving birth. She stopped performing in December 2007 and took the last two months of her pregnancy to woodshed the roles for her debuts in Madrid (Irene in Tamerlano), Bordeaux (Idamante in Idomeneo) and, this summer, Glyndebourne (Hansel in Hansel and Gretel). OPERA NEWS eventually caught up with her while she was arranging to get two-week-old Lily her first passport.
— Read more at Opera News

Jonas Kaufmann offers more than just a tall slim physique, handsome features and Romantic-era dark curls, more than a centered, comfortable aura onstage. What sets Kaufmann apart from many currently touted tenors is his specificity: he doesn't always play himself or drown his characters in generalized hyper-enthusiasm but crafts a different persona, not only for different roles but for different stagings of the same piece.
— Read more at Opera News

At several points during composer Kirke Mechem's 20-year struggle to put the story of John Brown on the opera stage, he must have despaired of its chances of ever becoming a reality.
But it is very real, and Saturday's world premiere of "John Brown" by the Lyric Opera of Kansas City was the sort of magical success that composers and musicians dream of.
— Read more at kansascity.com

Dark. Very dark. Beautiful. Disturbing. Provocative. Hilarious. Chilling. Engrossing.
Chicago Opera Theater has scored another triumph with its new production of "Don Giovanni," the last of the Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy to be taken up by the company's superb partnership of conductor Jane Glover and director Diane Paulus.
— Read more at CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

When a musician from the southern Czech Republic stumbled upon an anonymous score, he knew it was the long-lost opera "Argippo" by Italian baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi.
Ondrej Macek, a 36-year-old harpsichordist and conductor from Cesky Krumlov, then decided to bring the opera back to Prague, where it opened 278 years ago.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Jessye Norman, a busy and faithful participant in New York's vocal world for so many years, has not been around much in recent seasons. She returned to Carnegie Hall on Thursday in a recital titled "The Five Seasons." It consisted, she explained, of the usual four, and she added "The Eternal Season of Love."
— Read more at New York Times

The themes of regret, jealousy, immigration and domestic violence central to "Street Scene," Kurt Weill's 1947 opera about life in a New York tenement on a sweltering summer day, are still relevant, although city dwellers are now more likely to be texting on cellphones or huddling inside over a computer than actually talking to one another.
— Read more at New York Times

Zurich Opera's resurgence since 1991 under general manager Alexander Pereira is one of the great success stories of the current opera world. Since taking over Switzerland's leading house, he has reversed a period of artistic doldrums and social controversy and showed a Midas touch with sponsorships and philanthropy. Today Zurich is considered one of the world's leading companies. Little wonder that the Austrian-born Pereira, sixty, reigns as such a celebrity in the German-speaking media, or that La Scala recently went to some trouble trying to recruit him.
— Read more at Opera News

You don't usually think of Plácido Domingo as a singer with a passion for Baroque opera, but having left his mark on virtually everything else in the repertory, he is giving it a look. In November he sang Oreste in Gluck's "Iphigénie en Tauride" at the Met. Now he has taken up Bajazet, the central tenor role in Handel's "Tamerlano." After a run at the Teatro Real in Madrid this season, he sang his first American Bajazet on Wednesday evening in a new Washington National Opera production of "Tamerlano" at the Kennedy Center.
— Read more at New York Times

If martyrdom, love and violence are hallmarks of opera, then a new production opening this weekend in Kansas City will go over well - even if it's set in Kansas.
"John Brown," a new work premiering at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City, tells the story of the famed abolitionist through words and song.
— Read more at LJWorld.com

Asteroids swirl and stars glimmer in the basement of Davies Symphony Hall, as a small prince and his beloved rose sing words that have entranced generations of children.
Soprano Ji Young Yang fluffs her rose petals as her first ethereal aria in Rachel Portman's new opera, "The Little Prince," floats into the air.
"I was born," she sings, "at the same time as the sun."
Her gold-spangled hair bobs as the hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupery's classic tale tips a watering can over her head.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

Vincenzo Bellini was born in Sicily in 1801 and wrote three great operas, among others, before his death in 1835, when his final opera, "I puritani," premiered.
During its nearly 45 years, Seattle Opera has done two of those three operas -- "La sonnambula" and "Norma" -- but studiously avoided "Puritani" because of the huge challenges facing the principal quartet of singers, particularly the tenor, who must travel above high C a number of times.
— Read more at nwsource.com

After a 278-year hiatus, a long-lost opera by the Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi will be performed in Prague Saturday in a tour de force for a young Czech conductor with a detective's nose.
Argippo", a two-hour drama about a young princess smitten with a dishonest suitor, was scouted out nearly a year-and-a-half ago by 37-year-old Ondrej Macek, who founded and directs a Baroque music ensemble.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

"Covers" are insurance policies for opera companies and, like all insurance holders, they hope not to call on those singers hired to back up major roles. But Lyric Opera of Chicago needed Rice University graduate Erin Wall in a big way for opening night of its 50th anniversary season.
Finnish superstar soprano Karita Mattila fell ill, and Wall, who makes her Houston professional debut this weekend, had only a few hours' notice before stepping in as Donna Anna in Wolfgang Mozart's Don Giovanni.
— Read more at Houston Chronicle

For lovers of vocal music, Lee Hoiby is a name to be reckoned with. Leontyne Price and Renée Fleming have been among the composer's champions, and his songs are common currency for vocal students. Fate has not been as kind to Mr. Hoiby's 11 operas - a pity, given the admirable craft and imagination they reveal.
— Read more at New York Times

[This season's annual VOX showcase for American composers begs the question: "In musical composition, is biology destiny?" VOX 2008 takes place May 10 and 11. Admission is free.]
Mimí and Salome, Brünnhilde and Elvira. Opera without women's voices may be unimaginable, but when it comes to offstage business, their absence is rarely questioned.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Tulsa Opera dedicates one of its productions each season to a youth-oriented opera. Last season, it treated us to The Little Prince. Next season will bring us Hansel & Gretel. This year, Tulsa Opera produced Mozart's The Magic Flute, a whimsical fantasy about a prince caught in a power struggle between The Queen of the Night and Sarastro, a priest wielding the power of the sun.
— Read more at Urban Tulsa Weekly

There are no lions and tigers and bears at the Berkeley Opera's latest offering, a double-bill program of Maurice Ravel's "L'Enfant et les Sortileges" and Bela Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle," opening Saturday. Nonetheless, audiences are in for an "oh my" of the sort uttered by Dorothy Gale in the land of Oz when they cast their eyes on oversize frog puppets, cartoon-like singing teapots and Impressionistic paintings that are projected and meld digitally in layers on a 14-foot by 24-foot screen behind the singers, doubling as moody backdrop and stage set.
— Read more at sfgate.com

By all accounts, Lyric Opera San Diego has been a major catalyst in the revitalization of North Park by attracting restaurants and shops to the urban neighborhood.
But the theater company has been struggling financially because of a three-year dispute with the city over the delayed opening of a parking garage built in a public-private venture to serve the theater's patrons.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com