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

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

"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