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

Stylish yet sanctimonious, Robert Carsen's lavish Théâtre du Châtelet adaptation of Candide documents the dismal history of the kingdom of WestFailure. You may not have heard of this place, but you will certainly recognise it. It's a world of sports cars and space rockets, cruise-liners and kitchen appliances, baby-boomers and bunny-girls, small-town evangelists and swindling oil-men, avaricious producers and ambitious starlets. It's a world of confidence, luxury, greed and power. And it's a world of poverty, pollution and war.
— Read more at The Independent

Opera usually involves the suspension of disbelief, but in the case of Deborah Voigt it needed quite a lot more than usual. As the world now knows, she is the soprano who was deemed too fat even for Covent Garden. For years audiences and directors had put up with the truly gargantuan singer, who tipped the scales at about 25 stone at her zenith.
— Read more at Times Online

Some may ask, "Opera in Brooklyn?" Borough President Marty Markowitz noted that Brooklyn is the birthplace of Beverly Sills and Robert Merrill, to which I add the great tenor Richard Tucker.
From its inaugural season in 1883 until 1937, the Metropolitan Opera came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) as part of its tour. The great Caruso sang many times at BAM as did all of the Met's stellar singers. Brooklyn is also home to the Enrico Caruso Museum. In the 1960s, the Met began its park series and Prospect Park was one of its venues.
— Read more at brooklyneagle.com

There's good financial news at the Dallas Opera.
The company ended its 2007-08 fiscal year June 1 in the black, even eliminating a $135,000 accumulated deficit. And a two-year, 50th anniversary fund-raising campaign concluded with net revenue of $2.3 million.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

The Asheville Lyric Opera is gearing up for a major milestone as it begins its 10th annual season of performances and productions.
Season tickets are now on sale for the 2008-09 year, which includes two classic operas and a concert.
— Read more at Asheville Citizen-Times

On June 10 Carnegie Hall paid tribute to Jerome Kern's 1927 landmark "Show Boat" with a mixture of Broadway and operatic participants -- an apt approach for a work poised between operetta and musical comedy. The textual history of this numerously revised piece is Byzantine, but under the circumstances I wished that Paul Gemignani had not opted for the late-'40s redaction that tends to homogenize the various styles of popular music Kern's original concept flirts with for period coloration into a "classic Broadway" sound.
— Read more at GayCityNews

About 22,000 opera junkies are plunking down hard-earned cash this month and next to see the San Francisco Opera debut of Natalie Dessay, the dazzling French soprano, starring in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" at War Memorial Opera House.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

Pittsburgh Opera artistic director Christopher Hahn was promoted to general director Wednesday evening at a meeting of the board of directors.
He succeeds Mark Weinstein, who left in January to become executive director of Washington National Opera in the nation's capital.
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

Annapolis Opera will present an innovative 2008-2009 season, including two concerts featuring the Annapolis Opera Chamber Orchestra and widening the scope of its popular December candlelight concert beyond an all-Mozart repertoire.
To steer this new course, the Annapolis Opera board has elected a new president, Greg Stiverson.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Canadian Opera Company has named Alexander Neef its new general director, almost a year after the sudden death of former head Richard Bradshaw.
The German-born Neef, currently director of casting at the Opera national de Paris, takes the helm at the COC on Oct. 1.
— Read more at Yahoo! Canada News

In a timely way, a new children's opera called Spirit Moon is celebrating this year as the 150th anniversary of the province's proclamation as a British Crown Colony in 1858.
The opera company, called Young People's Opera Society of B.C., is itself very young, being in its fourth year of operation, and intended for audiences of Grade 5 and up. Spirit Moon, a pre-Canadian confederation opera is only its second production, the first being The King Who Wouldn't Sing, which was also composed by George Austin.
— Read more at canada.com

The founder and guide of Summer Opera Theater Company, Elaine Walter, is taken by Erich Korngold's most successful opera, Die tote Stadt. In only thirty seasons, the company has now mounted this unlikely work not once but twice, last in 1998 (in what was by all accounts an extravagantly strange production) and again this month. Perhaps it is justified by the coincidence with the 50th anniversary of Korngold's death, which was observed last November. For whatever reason, the production that Walter directed was stripped down to its essence, in musical and visual terms.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

Natalie Dessay's theatrical skills are hard to miss. If you were one of the lucky moviegoers who caught the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of "La Fille du Regiment" earlier this season in theaters, you witnessed the French soprano at her funniest.
Singing the title role of Marie in Donizetti's comic opera, Dessay lit up the stage with a brilliant blend of wit, physicality and glittering coloratura lines.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

When Giacomo Puccini's 1889 opera "Edgar" was first performed, the production was panned. As a result, Puccini extensively revised the work to be more appealing to audiences.
For the past five years, Linda Fairtile, head of the University of Richmond's Parsons Music Library, has been editing and reconstructing the original version for Milan-based opera publisher Ricordi. She spent a month in Milan reviewing acts one and three, assuming that the original manuscripts of acts two and four were missing. She planned to rebuild the entire orchestral score from voice and piano accompaniments, the only original parts thought to be surviving at the time.
— Read more at newswise.com

San Francisco Opera's free Friday night simulcast of Gaetano Donizetti's tragic warhorse "Lucia di Lammermoor" drew about 23,000 people to AT&T Park, according to Opera estimates. It was the second time the company simulcast a production from the the War Memorial Opera House (Camille Saint-Saëns' "Samson and Delilah" was the first, in September).
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Cincinnati Opera chose the second of its four shows this summer in order to engage the services of an up-and-coming star.
Sarah Coburn first appeared in Cincinnati in "The Masked Ball" in 2006, and artistic director Evans Mirages was smitten at once.
— Read more at daytondailynews.com

Every so often, just when you think you've seen and heard everything, something comes along to knock your socks off. That's what happened to me Saturday night with Sir William Walton's opera Troilus and Cressida, presented by Opera Theatre of St. Louis. This will be hard to outdo as the operatic revelation of the year.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Andreas Homoki, the director of Berlin's Komische Oper opera house, will leave his post in 2012 to become director of Zurich's Opernhaus, the Swiss opera company said in a statement.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[Two enterprising new albums feature instrumental music by composers famous for their operas.]
In an era when the ease of digital downloads can obscure the virtues of physical product, this deluxe release shows how the physical can be special. The disc comes in a CD-sized, 118-page hardback book filled with quality reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and artists inspired by him -- all evoking the gorgeous colors from the Provencal setting of the 1872 play "L'Arlesienne," for which Georges Bizet supplied vivid, melodious music. Along with essays on the scores by conductor Marc Minkowski and others, the book includes a short story that seeded the "L'Arlesienne" play.
— Read more at NJ.com

Opera Theatre of St. Louis wasn't founded until 1976, two decades after the postwar explosion of regional companies including the Dallas Opera and Houston Grand Opera. But it quickly became known for balancing standard repertory (in often provocative productions) with new and offbeat operas, and for finding and cultivating young singers of promise. Its summer-festival format was an inspiration for Fort Worth Opera's two-year-old version.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Almost 100 children enjoyed the experience of a lifetime appearing on stage at the Grand Theatre ? performing an opera written themselves.
The youngsters from four schools in the city each spent two days preparing the work with a professional director and composer from English Touring Opera.
— Read more at Express & Star

It won't work,' somebody said. And heads nodded. 'An opera house at the side of a small road on the edge of the Kalahari? Not exactly sensible.'
That's the nice thing about hare-brained schemes - they may not be exactly sensible, but then if we all stuck to sensible schemes we would never have great triumphs like the Dome, for instance ... Well, that is not the best example.
So, let me explain why last night, at the side of a dusty road outside Gaborone, we opened the first and only opera house in Botswana - the No 1 Ladies' Opera House.
— Read more at Alexander Mccall Smith - Mail Online

She's lost the weight, but has she lost the voice?
Reviewers loved the Royal Opera's production of "Ariadne auf Naxos," which opened this week. But soprano Deborah Voigt - who was famously dropped from the 2004 revival for being too heavy to fit into her costume - got a mixed reception.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Even though Senator Schumer, introducing the festivities in Prospect Park on Friday, stated that the summer solstice was the "longest night of the year" - it is, of course, just the opposite - the time seemed to fly by as the Metropolitan Opera presented soprano Angela Gheorghiu and tenor Roberto Alagna singing a program of highlights and arias. This was typical summer fare: Everything was fine, nothing was great.
— Read more at The New York Sun

If you've never before seen The Tales of Hoffmann, maybe the new Opera Theatre of St. Louis production will make sense. But even if you know several different versions of the opera Jacques Offenbach left unfinished at his 1880 death, this one may leave you scratching your head.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Since 2006 the Met's Live in High Definition transmissions have been bringing the company's performances to a vast global audience. And in 2008?09, the series expands.
At the end of La Fille du Régiment, the reunited lovers join the chorus for a final "Salut à la France!" On April 26, right before the curtain came down on the Met's hit production of Donizetti's opera, people in France got to see it?thanks to The Met: Live in High Definition.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

In opera, anything can happen as long as you sing about it.
In Eric Sawyer and John Shoptaw's new opera "Our American Cousin," the events immediately surrounding President Abraham Lincoln's assassination were examined operatically through the eyes of the actors in the play the president came to Ford's Theater to attend that fateful evening.
— Read more at MassLive.com

Bass-baritone Mark S. Doss has been singing professionally since 1984, when he joined the Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
Since then he's sung at opera houses around the world, from covering roles at the Met to singing leads in various European opera houses, primarily in Germany and Italy. Along the way, he's had to overcome some firmly set ideas about African-American singers.
— Read more at STLtoday

The speculation that 100,000 people, maybe even 150,000, might turn up for the Metropolitan Opera's concert in Prospect Park in Brooklyn on Friday night may have been strategic hype from the company's media-savvy general manager, Peter Gelb. Still, Mr. Gelb promised a big show, and this concert, featuring opera's starriest married couple, the soprano Angela Gheorghiu and the tenor Roberto Alagna, was certainly that.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Got to Ariadne auf Naxos on the Royal Opera's website, click on 'Watch Deborah Voigt's trailer' and you'll see the American soprano flirting with the little black cocktail dress that famously cost her the title role in this Strauss treat four years ago. On the fees Covent Garden was still obliged to pay her, Voigt had a gastric by-pass operation, which has since reduced her weight from 25 stone to 10, her dress size from 30 to 14. Now she is back in the role she was denied in 2004, though, to be frank, the black dress Ariadne wears still looks a few sizes bigger than the one in the video.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

George Bernard Shaw wrote his short, fanciful play "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets" for a performance in 1910 in support of establishing a national theater to honor Shakespeare. Here Shaw puts a royal twist into the mystery surrounding these love poems: To whom were they directed? In another short work, "Passion, Poison and Petrifaction, or the Fatal Gazogene," Shaw gleefully skewers the murderous mayhem and convoluted plot turns of Shakespearean drama.
The composer Philip Hagemann saw operatic potential in these two inventive comedies. He adapted librettos from Shaw's texts and combined them into an evening of one-act operas, "Shaw Sings!" The adventurous Encompass New Opera Theater presented the New York premiere of "Shaw Sings!" on Thursday night at Symphony Space. The simple, colorful production, directed by Nancy Rhodes and conducted by Mara Waldman, played to a nearly full house.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal must have felt very daring when, in the prologue to Ariadne, they decided to lift the lid on the clashing egos and mean machinations behind the scenes in the opera world. But truth proved more riveting than fiction when the Royal Opera revived Christof Loy's modern-dress staging of this work in 2004. The American soprano Deborah Voigt, scheduled to sing the title role, was humiliatingly sacked by Covent Garden when (as she put it) her "big hips" proved unable to fit into the svelte black frock that Loy specified.
— Read more at Times Online

Dramatic rescues are central to both Mozart's "Idomeneo" and the Cuvilliés Theater here. Like the main characters of the opera, which had its premiere at the theater in 1781, this beautiful matchbox space (with only 523 seats) was once saved from destruction at the last minute.
The ornately gilded interior was removed and stored for safekeeping before the exterior was bombed in World War II. The theater was rebuilt in 1958 in a wing of the royal residence here and closed for renovation four years ago. The Cuvilliés reopened this week in honor of the city's 850th anniversary, with the Bavarian State Opera's new production of "Idomeneo."
— Read more at NYTimes.com

On paper, it might seem like unlikely material for a Broadway musical. But Voltaire's satirical novella Candide provided Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein with the ideal vehicle for their 1956 show of the same name, dealing as it does with issues such as corruption and bigotry that remained sadly relevant to the America of the 1950s. In 2006, the Paris Opera gave the piece its French premiere in a new production by Canadian director Robert Carsen, renowned for his challenging and insightful presentations of a wide repertoire from Monteverdi's Poppea to Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Beautiful Game. The production, which is updated to the twentieth century, caused controversy when it was taken to Milan, and will be staged by English National Opera next week to end their 2007-08 season. I caught up with Carsen to find out why Candide remains so potent for today's audiences fifty-two years after it was first performed.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Wait a minute: In the opera, the fat lady is supposed to be, well, fat ... right?
Our cultural obsession with weight is reasonable when it focuses on valid health issues.
But, when the concern centers solely on appearance, there is something creepy and disturbing about the obsession.
— Read more at MySA.com

Opera buffs who admire the American baritone Nathan Gunn should perhaps be concerned about his recent forays into musical theater. After stealing the show as Lancelot in the New York Philharmonic's presentation of Lerner and Loewe's "Camelot" in May, he scored another triumph as Gaylord Ravenal in the concert adaptation of "Show Boat," the landmark Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical, at Carnegie Hall on June 10.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Through the decades, the touchstone role of Lucia in Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor" has been sung in San Francisco by Lily Pons, Joan Sutherland, Beverly Sills and other luminary sopranos. It's time to add Natalie Dessay to the list.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

PLAYFUL kisses, an arm around the shoulder, quiet 'bravas" and prime voices: Opera's celebrated love duo, the married couple Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, were rehearsing (and maybe performing a little too) one day this week at the Metropolitan Opera.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Interest in this revival of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos regrettably focused on a silly kerfuffle over the slimming of a fat lady.
A few years ago, the Royal Opera cancelled the booking of American diva Deborah Voigt to sing the title role in a previous revival, apparently on the grounds that her fuller figure would make her look ridiculous in the "little black dress" that constitutes one of the costumes
— Read more at Telegraph

Reviewers have abundant praise for the Royal Opera's "Ariadne auf Naxos." They love the sets, the orchestration and the production. But the newly slimmed-down soprano Deborah Voigt's voice received mixed reviews.
— Read more at The Associated Press

The drama following the 2004 dismissal of the soprano Deborah Voigt from a production of Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden here had many elements of the work itself: an opera within an opera that blends comic and tragic aspects and caricatures the lofty ideals of high art. Ms. Voigt's dismissal, because she was too large to wear the cocktail dress stipulated by the director or adhere to his staging concepts, prompted an avalanche of international interest that ranged from buffa laughs about fat ladies singing to ponderous editorials about the meaning of "sacred art" versus Hollywood ideals of beauty.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Okay class, pay attention. Here's today's business problem:
It's 2006. You're hired to run the largest performing arts organization in the world, a 125-year-old household name. Every year, you stage over 200 performances per year of a couple of dozen different operas. Your performances are heard by millions of radio listeners around the world. And until the year 2000, your ticket was the hardest to score in New York City.
— Read more at The Huffington Post

Soprano Deborah Voigt has returned to London's Royal Opera House, four years after she was fired for being too big.
The decision led to a debate in 2004 about weight discrimination in opera.
The slimmed-down American is now back in the Richard Strauss opera Ariadne auf Naxos, wearing the black dress originally chosen for the role.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Wasfi Kani has earned a reputation as the Robin Hood of the opera world, robbing from the rich to give to the poor by using her elite country house productions to help finance performances in prisons.
In June and July, the chattering classes will attend her festivals at the stately homes of Grange Park and Nevill Holt in southern and central England.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

With the National Performing Arts Convention taking place here last week, arts institutions in and around the city put on their best faces. For Opera Colorado, that meant a staging of John Adams's "Nixon in China," produced jointly with the Opera Theater of St. Louis (where it was first presented, in 2004, and reviewed by The New York Times) and companies in Minnesota, Chicago, Houston and Portland, Ore. It was performed in the Ellie Caulkins Opera House on Friday evening and, for the last time, on Sunday; performances were recorded live by the Naxos label for CD release next winter.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Deborah Voigt is back, in black.
The American soprano returns to the Royal Opera House stage Monday, four years after the company fired her for being too big for the little black dress chosen for the title character in Richard Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos." The decision sparked a fierce debate about weight discrimination in opera.
Now a slimmer Voigt is back in the same opera, the same role ? and wearing "that" dress.
— Read more at The Associated Press

It took 68 years for Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town," to become an opera.
Both Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein expressed interest decades back, but the playwright's estate didn't approve an operatic adaptation until a few years ago. American composer Ned Rorem and librettist J.D. McClatchy got the job, and their creation is receiving its Twin Cities premiere, courtesy of Skylark Opera.
— Read more at TwinCities.com

It reads like the setup to a New Yorker cartoon: eight of the opera world's leading sopranos squeezed into one not especially large room. Where, exactly, will they find room to fit their egos?
Such is the concentration of drama and coloratura in "The Sopranos," an exhibition of portraits of eight opera singers, including such celebrated figures as Deborah Voigt, Renée Fleming, and Angela Gheorghiu, all of whom are scheduled to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in the upcoming 2008-09 season, painted by the artist Francesco Clemente. The show, now on view at the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met at Lincoln Center, runs until September 26.
— Read more at The New York Sun

This is a week for summer opera, and there is not a single chestnut on the schedule, at least not yet. For the penultimate concerts of his tenure at the National Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin programmed another opera. Much of Tchaikovsky's showy instrumental music leaves me cold, but in his songs and operas the composer's melodic gifts and dramatic sense are in the right place. His masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, is an almost perfect work, in which no gesture is superfluous: every stroke is calculated to advance the story, a tale not of operatic clichés, but of gut-wrenching regrets.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

Anthony Freud, OBE, General Director and CEO of Houston Grand Opera, has been elected Chairman of the Board of Directors of OPERA America, the national service organization for opera. The election took place at the annual OPERA America conference 2008 in Denver on June 11th. Freud will serve an initial term of two years and succeeds Charles MacKay, General Director of the Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

Four years ago, Deborah Voigt, an extremely talented and dynamic soprano opera singer, was dropped from a production in London's Royal Opera House. The reason? She was "too big" for the black dress that the role called for.
Tonight, after shedding more than 100 pounds, Voigt makes her triumphant return, not only to London's Royal Opera House but to the very role that she was fired from so many pounds ago.
— Read more at ABC News

Opera's "it" couple has made a new recording - and it is a recording of a complete opera: "La Bohème." Do we need another recording of this Puccini hit? "Need" is not quite the question. A good new recording is always welcome.
You know who the "it" couple is: Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón. She's a Russian soprano, and he's a Mexican tenor. They're not a real-life couple - they have other partners. But they are paired onstage, and in recordings.
— Read more at The New York Sun

American composer Charles Wuorinen has been commissioned by New York City Opera to write a work based on Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, a short story about a romantic relationship between two cowboys.
— Read more at MiamiHerald.com

Long Leaf Opera's commitment to staging hidden gems and cutting-edge works written in English has been admirable, despite a vision often greater than its resources. But its revamp into a summer festival last year has brought it to a new level.
Marc Blitzstein's "Regina" began its impressive tenth season lineup Friday. This 1949 work, based on Lillian Hellman's popular play and film, "The Little Foxes," flummoxed critics and audiences in its initial run with its attempt to combine opera, Broadway, jazz, gospel and popular music.
— Read more at newsobserver.com

After the opening night of Covent Garden's new Don Carlos just over a week ago, the world of opera - managements, agents, record companies, audiences and, yes, even critics - will have to get used to a couple of inconvenient truths: Rolando Villazon's comeback, after five months of rest and regrouping last year, that greeted his curtain call. I don?t want to give too much credence to an isolated protester, but this is something I never expected to hear for such a popular star at the ROH.
— Read more at Times Online

Deborah Voigt chuckles when I ask her about the brouhaha over the skimpy frock she couldn't fit into that delighted the often dull world of grand opera.
In 2003 Voigt was obese, as she herself admits, and was dropped from a revival of Richard Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Royal Opera House in London. "Inappropriate casting in this particular production," said the house, and paid off her contract.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

It's not a perfect production. It's not a perfect cast. But in some scenes of Nicholas Hytner's Royal Opera House staging of Verdi's Don Carlo, orchestra, voices, design and movement unite so powerfully that you can almost believe that it is. Take the Act IV confrontation between Philip II (Ferruccio Furlanetto) and the Grand Inquisitor (Eric Halfvarson): one poisoned by doubt, the other made monstrous by certainty.
— Read more at The Independent

"The 'Ring? Without Words" has been one of Lorin Maazel's showpieces since 1987, when he assembled this orchestral overview of Wagner's four "Ring" operas for a recording project with the Berlin Philharmonic on Telarc Records. He has performed it in New York with the Pittsburgh Symphony (in 1990) and the New York Philharmonic (in 2000), and when the Philharmonic paid a rare visit to Carnegie Hall on Wednesday evening, he offered it again as the sole work on the program.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Metropolitan Opera's live high-def theatrical transmissions -- seen worldwide by more than 920,000 people during the 2007-08 season -- are creating new fans and sparking renewed interest among existing opera fans.
Findings were included in a poll conducted by trade org Opera America in cooperation with National CineMedia, the Met's distribution partner.
— Read more at Variety.com

Four years ago, Deborah Voigt hit the headlines by not singing in Ariadne auf Naxos at Covent Garden. The Royal Opera House dropped her from the cast, the reason being that Voigt, possessor of a fine dramatic soprano voice, was too large for the little black dress the production demanded she wear.
— Read more at The Independent

Bringing opera to the masses by way of the silver screen may be a boon to audiences, especially in the hinterlands, but it has its deleterious side for opera companies already concerned about their bottom lines. Further exacerbating the situation, the Graham Vick production of the Puccini's "La rondine," or "The Swallow," from Teatro La Fenice in Venice was shown at Symphony Space on Sunday afternoon.
— Read more at The New York Sun

Yes, the music is sweetly lush - in an Italian valentine sort of way, full of delicious waltzes, hummable melodies and one big hit tune cycled over and over. Yes, the heroine is simpatico to a fault and her swain is callow to the core. But Puccini, in all his re-workings of La rondine, never found satisfaction in this attempt at quasi-operetta form and it's easy to imagine why: The grand drama he thrived on is nowhere to be found.
— Read more at Los Angeles CityBeat

Binoculars at the ready: an opera version of Ang Lee's camping classic Brokeback Mountain is in the pipeline. The New York City Opera has commissioned composer Charles Wuorinen to write a non-stop singing version of the 2005 weepie about the love affair between ranch hands Ennis del Mar (the late Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal).
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Deborah Voigt is finally putting on that little black dress [see the YouTube video].
On Monday, Voigt, the acclaimed U.S. soprano, will star in Strauss' "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London: the very production from which she was fired in 2004.
— Read more at Seattle Times

A new study indicates that The Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD series, which more than 920,000 people attended worldwide this past season, is attracting newcomers to opera, as well as increasing interest in attending live opera performances. Highlights from this study, along with many other important topics, will be a subject at OPERA America's annual gathering of the field, Opera Conference 2008, taking place June 10-14 in Denver, Colorado. Six hundred representatives from nearly 100 opera companies will gather to discuss key issues and trends affecting the field. Hosted by Central City Opera and Opera Colorado, Opera Conference 2008 will be held at the Denver Marriott City Center, 1701 California Street, in the heart of Denver's Arts and Entertainment District.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

The Houston Grand Opera Association, Inc., plans to use a $5 million grant to bring affordable performances to new audiences next season, General Director and CEO Anthony Freud said Tuesday.
— Read more at Houston Chronicle

The Pacific Repertory Opera will give a group of performing arts students, ages 8 to 15, the chance to learn first-hand what it's like to star in or be a featured performer by participating in the repertory's 12th annual Youth Opera Day camp.
The two-week camp will be held weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, July 28 through Friday, Aug. 8 at Grace Church, located at 1350 Osos Street in San Luis Obispo.
— Read more at Atascadero News Online

Deborah Voigt is finally putting on that little black dress [see the YouTube video]. On Monday Ms. Voigt, the acclaimed American soprano, will star in Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos" at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in London: the very production from which she was fired in 2004. At the time, the director, Christof Loy, proclaimed her too heavy to wear a sleek black cocktail dress that he deemed integral to his concept. The dress has since become a symbol of skewed priorities among opera directors who value a singer's appearance over vocal artistry.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

American composer Charles Wuorinen (whose photo as a boy, from his website, was just too wonderful to pass up) has been commissioned by New York City Opera to write a work based on Annie Proulx?s Brokeback Mountain, the company announced. Obviously it's early in the game for firm answers, but we prodded the 70-year-old composer Monday for a few clues to what will be heard when the work arrives on stage in the spring of 2013.
— Read more at ArtsWatch

Simone Alaimo will sing the role of Dr. Dulcamara in "L'Elisir d'Amore" for the Met's 2008-09 season, replacing Bryn Terfel, who has decided to retire the role from his repertoire.
The cast includes Angela Gheorghiu and Nicole Cabell as Adina, Rolando Villazón and Joseph Calleja as Nemorino, and Franco Vassallo as Belcore. Maurizio Benini conducts. Performances are scheduled for March 31, April 4 matinee, 8, 11 evening, 15, 18 evening, and 22, 2009.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

Verdi's Don Carlo has special resonance at Covent Garden. It was here, 50 years ago, that a legendary production, directed by Visconti and conducted by Giulini, both vindicated a then little known work and brought the presentation of opera in London to a new level of splendour.
In the mid 1990s, we saw another fine staging, directed by Bondy and conducted by Haitink, which reverted to Verdi's earlier French versions of the score (he fiddled with it for nearly 20 years) and featured revelatory performances by Karita Mattila and Roberto Alagna as the unhappy lovers.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

It's going to be a very celebratory autumn for Irene Dalis, the founder and general director of Opera San Jose. Arts Council Silicon Valley announced last week that Dalis will receive a lifetime achievement award at the Silicon Valley Arts & Business Awards luncheon on Oct. 17.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

At almost 8,500 feet in the Rockies, it can take a few breaths to walk up Central City's steep granite hills lined with Victorian homes, souvenir shops - and an opera house that has served 19th-century gold miners as well as modern-day visitors.
For almost a century and a half, Central City and other Colorado mountain towns have been alive with the sounds of opera. Partly because of its opera house, Central City, up Clear Creek Canyon some 40 miles west of Denver, is a national historic district and such a marvel of local history one can almost hear the Cornish miners singing.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Tickets were changing hands for 900 pounds ($1,777) on the Internet. The Royal Opera foyers crackled with anticipation. Nicholas Hytner's new production of "Don Carlo" was clearly going to be the highlight of the London music season.
Partly this was because star tenor Rolando Villazon (Don Carlo) was returning to the house after a break in his career due to exhaustion. Partly it was because Verdi's spectacular opera demands huge stage resources, and it had been 50 years since Covent Garden had created a new production of the five-act version.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

The Sopranos, an exhibition of eight portraits by the renowned artist Francesco Clemente, just opened at Gallery Met. The exhibition, created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, features portraits of eight divas who figure prominently in the Met's 2008-09 season: Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renée Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, and Deborah Voigt.
— Read more at Artdaily.org

The New York City Opera commissioned Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera based on Brokeback Mountain, the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx that became the basis for a 2005 movie that won three Academy Awards.
The opera is scheduled to premiere in spring 2013, City Opera said Sunday. It will be City Opera's second Wuorinen premiere, following Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which was based on a Salman Rushdie novel and opened in October 2004.
— Read more at USATODAY.com

Cincinnati Opera's 2008 Summer Festival is all about the ladies, or, says artistic director Evans Mirageas, "Four great women who sacrifice everything for love."
The company's 88th season will open Wednesday in Music Hall with Puccini's "Madame Butterfly,"a production that aired live on PBS in March. The season includes the Midwest premiere of a new Spanish opera by Daniel Catán, "La Florencia en el Amazonas," Donizetti's "Lucie de Lammermoor" - in French - and a new production of Verdi's "La Traviata."
— Read more at The Enquirer

THE home of grand opera will soon be staging a different kind of tragedy. La Scala in Milan has commissioned a musical version of An Inconvenient Truth, the apocalyptic eco-documentary presented by Al Gore, the former American vice-president.
— Read more at Times Online

Once upon an operatic time (translation: about two years ago), there were three principal ways to hear Don Giovanni do his roguish thing, Turandot ask her riddles and Salome wield her perverse power: Go to a performance or listen to a recording or to the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts from New York.
— Read more at cleveland.com

New York's second-biggest opera company is closing up shop -- temporarily. Lincoln Center's New York State Theater, home of the New York City Opera, will be undergoing major renovations throughout City Opera's 2008-09 season. The company had originally planned to present a series of concert opera performances in various locations around the city, then decided to trim costs by cutting back to a single semistaged version of Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra" that will be performed at Carnegie Hall next Jan. 15 and 16. In addition, City Opera's orchestra will be giving five concerts of modern music, one in each borough of New York City.
— Read more at WSJ.com

Once upon an operatic time (translation: about two years ago), there were three principal ways to hear Don Giovanni do his roguish thing, Turandot ask her riddles and Salome wield her perverse power: Go to a performance, obtain a recording or listen to the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts from New York.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Gloriously vibrant singing, the kind that makes you sit up and take notice, marked the Cleveland Orchestra's concert performance of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak's fairy-tale opera Rusalka at Severance Hall on Thursday night. This is the first time the orchestra has performed the rarely played opera, best known for a single tune, Song of the Moon, which star soprano Renee Fleming made a calling card.
— Read more at Ohio.com

WHEN Los Angeles Opera opens its final offering of the season, Puccini's seldom-heard "La Rondine," tonight at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the offstage creative team will represent a curious coincidence. The director of the production, Marta Domingo, is married to the company's general director, Plácido Domingo. And giving the downbeat in the pit will be conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, whose husband just happens to be Peter Gelb, general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Francesco Clemente's exhibition of eight portraits called "The Sopranos" opened at Gallery Met at Lincoln Center on Thursday. Created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera, the exhibition features portraits of eight divas who are to figure prominently in the Met's 2008-9 season.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

"Benjamin Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia" might seem hopelessly complex, but it's really only "Cosi fan tutte" seen through a glass darkly.
...
But "Lucretia" is more, and the Central City Opera opened its 2008 season on Friday with a production of it that might well be the triumph of the company's 76 years.
— Read more at Boulder Daily Camera

In San Francisco Opera's re-imagined "Das Rheingold," Richard Wagner goes to Hollywood. Purists who refuse to utter the names "Wagner" and "Lucas" in the same breath might not like that. But this production of "Rheingold" - the first opera in Wagner's epic, four-part "Ring" cycle - is smartly spectacular.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

A NEW mini-opera about the history of coal in the South Wales Valleys receives its premiere tomorrow night and at the heart of the project are the people who lived through those experiences.
Carbon 12 spans centuries of history in just 50 minutes and receives its first performance at Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.
— Read more at icWales

Glimmerglass Opera recently announced its 2009 summer festival season, which will feature 39 performances of new productions of Verdi's "La Traviata," Rossini's "La Cenerentola," Menotti's "The Consul" and Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas."
The shows will run in repertory from July 18, 2009, to Aug. 25, 2009, in the Alice Busch Opera Theater, Route 80.
— Read more at The Observer-Dispatch

In five years, the Greenwich Music Festival has transformed itself from the new kid on the local arts scene to a seasoned yet cutting-edge presenter of world-class opera.
The festival, founded by Greenwich native Ted Huffman and conductor Rob Ainsley, will present a fully staged version of "The Return of Ulysses" June 11, 13 and 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the theater of St. Catherine of Siena Church in Riverside. "Ulysses" is one of three surviving operas from composer Claudio Monteverdi, considered the father of modern opera, who composed the work in 1640.
— Read more at The Advocate

Seats were sold out for the first-ever Washington National Opera staging of "Tamerlano" due to the participation of general director Plácido Domingo, whose every appearance here, onstage or in the pit, produces standing ovations. The tireless Domingo has given the company greater international recognition and certainly raised the casting bar, but until the quality of conductors and directors consistently employed undergoes similar improvement, WNO will remain a sub- "Top Five" company, albeit one capable of very fine performances.
— Read more at GayCityNews

Al Gore will finally get center stage -- no, not the U.S. presidency, but in an opera. The Associated Press is reports that La Scala has commissioned composer Giorgio Battistelli for an opera based on Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" for its 2011 season.
"Battistelli, 55, says he believes operatic treatment of Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" will help people see the world's environmental predicament from a fresh point of view.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

Die Soldaten runs for 5 days through the week of July 5 at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan. The production is an innovative adaptation of Jakob Lenz's 1776 play, juxtaposing visual elements of the past, present, and future with an extraordinary orchestral backdrop to provide a stunning dramatic environment. Hosting a gargantuan 110-piece orchestra and movable seating unit, Die Soldaten will certainly pit you in a visceral setting that will tickle every one of your senses.
— Learn more at lincolncenter.org

Peter Westergaard had five operas under his belt when he began work on "Alice in Wonderland," a straightforward if mildly quirky setting of the Lewis Carroll fantasy. Two years ago the Center for Contemporary Opera, which often presents workshop productions, staged the first half of the work, and on Tuesday evening the center and Princeton University's music department, where Mr. Westergaard is a professor emeritus, presented the complete opera at Symphony Space.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

In the thirty-seven years that EVE QUELER has served as its music director, OPERA ORCHESTRA OF NEW YORK has become a fixture of New York's music scene. Queler, seventy-two this year, occupies an unusual position in the city's cultural life - while critics admire her programming initiative, they are not so kind about her execution - few New York-based conductors have amassed as many negative reviews. (To be fair, The New York Times has been much kinder to Queler in recent seasons; perhaps they have granted her institutional status ? or perhaps their critics are just tired of making the same complaints over and over again.)
— Read more at Opera News

In San Francisco Opera's reimagined "Das Rheingold," Richard Wagner goes to Hollywood. Purists who refuse to utter the names "Wagner" and "Lucas" in the same breath might not like that. But this production of "Rheingold" - the first opera of Wagner's epic, four-part Ring Cycle - is smartly spectacular.
— Read more at ContraCostaTimes.com

You can lay odds that the Irene Dalis Vocal Competition is the only opera event on the planet at which poker chips are handed out at the door.
Saturday night, one chip was handed to each member of the crowd filing into San Jose's California Theatre, where 10 opera singers competed for $50,000 in prize money and, beyond that, the dream of winning something far more elusive: a career break, the real pot of gold.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

Finnish-born soprano Camilla Nylund knew two things about Cleveland before she arrived here last week: First, the city is home to one of the world's greatest orchestras; and second, we have a lot of people who ? in the Cliff's notes version of the story - can't afford their houses.
— Read more at The Cleveland Free Times

The most vibrant performing arts institutions strive to find a balance between hewing to a historic mission and branching into new territory. If done right, which usually means gradually, adventurous initiatives and dynamic change can be not just artistically enriching but smart business as well.
But the recent announcement from the New York City Opera about its plans for the next two seasons suggests that this essential 65-year-old company, called the People's Opera by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, is poised for a near-complete makeover. Its very identity could change under its new leader, Gerard Mortier, the brilliant, unabashedly provocative director of music festivals and opera companies in Europe.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa had to cancel his performances at the Vienna State Opera in June due to a slipped disk, the opera house announced Monday. Ozawa, the Vienna State Opera's principal conductor, must rest for five weeks and will be unable to conduct a series of performances this month of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame, the statement said.
— Read more at earthtimes.org

Keith Phares, Lubino in Una Cosa Rara at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis this month, started making music as a trumpet player in the pit orchestra of his New Jersey high school's annual musical. After the baritone and his family moved to North Carolina, Phares kept up his trumpet playing, but his senior year brought his first taste of center-stage stardom. "The school had no orchestra. They said, 'We need guys. Can you audition?' And believe it or not, I got cast as Emile de Becque in South Pacific."
— Read more at Opera News

Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera's general manager, has added a member to his brain trust. Lesley Koenig will become assistant manager for production starting Aug. 1.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Vale Rideout is nothing if not a distinctive name - it sounds almost like it might be a character on The Men from Shiloh or Lancer, or one of those other Westerns that used to be prime-time TV staples. As it turns out, Vale Rideout is no cowboy hero at all but a lyric tenor who has distinguished himself with a string of well-received performances at many of the U.S.'s thriving regional companies, including Tulsa Opera (Tamino), Boston Baroque (Ferrando in Così Fan Tutte), Lake George Opera (George in Rorem's Our Town) and Minnesota Opera (Atis in Keiser's The Fortunes of King Croesus).
— Read more at Opera News

"There is no stable matter, and as in Buddhism, there is no stable anything," muses the director Peter Sellars, as he reflects on the implications of splitting the atom in Jon Else's enthralling documentary "Wonders Are Many: The Making of Doctor Atomic."
— Read more at The New York Times

The New York City Opera will bring music to all five boroughs in 2008-09, its last season before the arrival of Gérard Mortier as general manager. A series of concerts, discussions, screenings, and master classes will be presented at various theaters throughout the city while the City Opera's usual home, the New York State Theater, undergoes renovations.
— Read more at The New York Sun

In the summer of 2007, Evans Mirageas was sitting in the audience at Cincinnati Music Hall, the 130-year-old, 3,400-seat institution that is home to the Cincinnati Symphony, May Festival and, since 1972, Cincinnati Opera. After a career that began in radio, wound through orchestra management, a long term as Decca's head of artists and repertoire and a number of high-level consulting stints, he was in his second season as artistic director of Cincinnati Opera.
— Read more at Opera News

It may only be a matter of time before Precious Ramotswe is operatically trilling her way through her private investigations. Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, has founded Botswana's first opera house, The No. 1 Ladies' Opera House. But the writer, who is himself no mean bassoonist, is keeping his plans for a future world premiere at the new venue firmly under wraps. He's brimming with enthusiasm, however, over immediate plans for his latest project which opens with "a grand-ish concert" on 21 June, sponsored by the Edinburgh-based author.
— Read more at The Independent

Love-struck artists from 1830s Paris will flash forward to the Roaring '20s in next weekend's production of Puccini's La Boheme.
Mercury Opera Rochester has transplanted this tale of passion and poverty to the heady era when Picasso, Chagall and many other celebrities were drawn to the City of Light. As the world's art capital, it also lured thousands of talents with bigger dreams than reputations. These might have included La Boheme's Rodolfo and Marcello - the penniless poet and painter who starve and find romance in a freezing Paris garret.
— Read more at Democrat and Chronicle

While its home is closed for renovations, New York City Opera will shrink its main dramatic offerings next season to one lonely opera: Samuel Barber's "Antony and Cleopatra." For two performances. Unstaged.
As part of a make-the-best-of-it operation, the company will also present a concert in each of the five boroughs by its orchestra, and a hodgepodge of lectures, opera movies and panel discussions in place of the 120 or so performances it normally gives, City Opera officials said in interviews this week.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

San Francisco Opera's summer season three-opera lineup has far more than hysterical opera queens cheering. Of course, it's always easier to wax ecstatic about a production before it occurs, when all you have to go by are words and photos. But judging from the star power of the principals, advance tickets are in order.
The season begins Tuesday with a new co-production of Wagner's "Das Rheingold," the first installment of Francesca Zambello's complete American "Ring" cycle.
— Read more at Examiner.com

For a man sometimes described as the world's most famous loser, Al Gore is quite a winner. Since the start of last year alone, he has picked up an honorary fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, prizes in Spain and Sweden, several honorary doctorates, the Sir David Attenborough Award for Excellence in Nature Film-making and an Emmy - not to mention the Nobel peace prize.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

[Award-winning Rebecca Evans is back in another leading role with Welsh National Opera. But she admits to Mike Smith that she worries about young singers entering the tough profession]
REBECCA Evans knows that just like the evil witch in Hansel and Gretel, in which she stars tonight , the world of opera can gobble up young singers and make them disappear without a trace.
— Read more at icWales

"What a fascinating world," sings the student Giovanni. "This garden is a nest of poisons."
Seduction and repulsion, fantasy and reality, beauty and horror -- that is the paradox of "Rappaccini's Daughter."
On Friday, the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music mounted "Rappaccini's Daughter," an opera in two acts by Daniel Catán, in the intimate Cohen Family Studio Theater. Although it was a stripped-down, studio series production (there was no orchestra or lavish set), it had an irresistibly seductive quality. Its afterglow lingered, whether for its poetic libretto or its shimmering score.
— Read more at The Enquirer