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

Waltraud Meier topped a remarkable cast in Wagner's "Tannhäuser" here the other night, although the current talk of the opera season in Europe is the promiscuous new production of Wagner's "Parsifal," not too far away, that opened the Bayreuth Festival on Friday: it comes a jackboot shy of "Springtime for Hitler," but its ambitions soar, and so do many of the voices.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

[Next month, the Bayreuth Festival will announce its first new director in 57 years - and the battle between the glamorous young Katharina Wagner and two elderly relatives for the coveted post has revealed ambition, treachery and grief worthy of the juiciest opera]
The Bayreuth Festival opened last Friday with the premiere of the Norwegian director Stefan Herheim's production of Parsifal that also closes proceedings on 28 August. This new staging of Richard Wagner's final opera - written specially for the Festspielhaus (Festival Theatre) he founded in the small Bavarian town ? is the major artistic event in the month-long celebration of the composer's works that has been held most years since 1876.
— Read more at The Independent

According to director Kelly Robinson, the staging of Henry Purcell's 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas is often done in conjunction with a ballet company, "because there's a great deal of dance music in Purcell."
— Read more at canada.com

The public viewing area for the prestigious Bayreuth Festival, a sort of Richard Wagner "fan mile" similar to those seen at major football championships, was a runaway success, attracting crowds of up to 38,000 on Sunday night, organisers said.
The idea was originally dismissed by critics, who predicted that the first-ever live transmission of a performance from Bayreuth's legendary "Festspielhaus" theatre to a gigantic outdoor screen would not interest anyone.
— Read more at AFP

On Sunday, for the first time, an opera performance was streamed on the Internet live from the Bayreuth Festival. Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg" was made accessible to the first 10,000 people prepared to part with the sum of $77. Joe Public's chance of buying a "real" ticket for this event is virtually nil - the waiting list for Bayreuth runs into many thousands - so this is a significant extension of its outreach.
— Read more at The New York Sun

Sportscasters are a dime a dozen. But "operacasters" are so rare that there isn't really a word for them.
OK, well now there is.
"It's not a common career," says Margaret Juntwait, a Ridgewood native who since December 2004 has been the voice of the Metropolitan Opera's live Saturday broadcasts on WQXR-FM (96.3) radio - most start at 1 p.m. - and Sirius Satellite Radio's channel 78, Metropolitan Opera Radio (various weekday evenings).
— Read more at NorthJersey.com

There isn't much Tijuana is known for that has ever made its residents proud. But in recent years, one of Mexico's most daring art scenes has emerged in the city. Opera is part of that.
— Read more at Sam Quinones - Los Angeles Times

Opera Holland Park often succeeds best when challenging itself with pieces totally unsuitable for its al fresco situation and modest resources. So it goes with this vastly enjoyable bash at Ponchielli's La Gioconda, a thumper of a melodrama set in Renaissance Venice complete with ballet, gondolas, phials of poison and five principal roles requiring star singers with charismatic presence as well as barnstorming voices.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

The great 20th-century Polish opera "King Roger" is not about some great Polish king named Roger. It is not about much of anything at all, in the traditional narrative sense, but it unfolds as a series of sumptuous religious and regal tableaux. It is almost never staged and is only occasionally heard in concert or on recordings.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

Success has begotten success for Nicole Cabell. No sooner had the lissome California beauty completed her three-year term at Lyric Opera's Ryan Opera Center artist-development program in 2005 when she took top honors in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition in Wales. She immediately landed a recording contract with Decca. Critics praise both the beauty of her lyric soprano voice and keen musical intelligence, noting the vivacious stage presence that also make her a hot property in today's image-conscious opera world.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

It seems to be all about opera all around the Bay in the waning days of summer, and current and former participants in San Francisco Opera's Merola training program are everywhere you look.
Having just concluded their first fully staged operatic production, Benjamin Britten's comic "Albert Herring," in the Cowell Theater at Fort Mason last weekend, this year's crop of trainees is hard at work on its second. Mozart's "Don Giovanni," at the Cowell at 8 p.m. Aug. 1 and 2 p.m. Aug. 3, will also draw on the developing talents of these young people, who are now two-thirds of the way through an intensive 12-week program of training in voice, diction, foreign languages, acting and stage movement.
— Read more at Inside Bay Area

The Bayreuth festival took opera to the masses -- screening a live public performance of "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg" -- and proved that if you show it, they will come.
Sunday's seven-hour outdoor screening of the Richard Wagner classic, a first-time effort that was free of charge, drew an estimated 38,000 people to a square in this Bavarian city -- although local regulations kept the crowd to 15,000 at any one time.
— Read more at Yahoo! Finance

One of the many annual events that makes Madison such a fantastic place to live rocked Garner Park Saturday night, combining classical music, picnics and beer in a celebration of summer and superior singing.
Opera in the Park has been attracting crowds for seven years, and Saturday's attendance topped them all at approximately 13,000 people.
— Read more at madison.com

Some lonely aficionados prefer their opera in the intimate solitude of their own homes, cocooned in high-quality headphones, eyes closed, swooning. Others love the intensity and spectacle of the live event, dressing up, rubbing elbows, feeling the sound with their bodies, weeping openly and publicly.
And then there's the rest of us. Opera is great, but it can be a little too intimidating, a little too expensive, and a little too indoors.
— Read more at WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL

Opera doesn't get any grander than this.
In the typical operatic duet, according to George Bernard Shaw, who was a brilliant music critic before he turned to the relatively undemanding trade of playwright, the tenor and the soprano "repeatedly call attention to the fact that at last they meet again." There certainly are operas as simplistic as that. But in the works of Giuseppe Verdi you will generally find a much more complex and challenging setup.
— Read more at Seattle Times

It's a long way from Britpop and Blur, but Damon Albarn's first opera - a cartoon-like Chinese fable performed in Mandarin - proves an astonishing and spectacular piece of cross-cultural music theatre.
It started out in Manchester last year, and now arrives at Covent Garden, via Paris and Charleston, for a don't-miss run of only seven performances as part of London's celebration of the Beijing Olympics. It deserves to journey farther.
— Read more at Mail Online

A highly intellectual and visually-packed reading of Richard Wagner's final opera "Parsifal" by Norwegian director Stefan Herheim, was rapturously received by the first-night audience of the prestigious Bayreuth Festival on Friday.
This year's only new production on the town's legendary "Green Hill" took the audience on an intriguing time journey through German history, from the 19th century of Kaiser Wilhelm through to the 1930s and the rise of Nazism.
— Read more at AFP

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" comes complete with a classic life-imitating-art story.
The opera, which the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra will perform in concert this Saturday, is derived from Alexander Pushkin's celebrated poem. The heroine Tatiana - in one of the most famous scenes in all Russian literature - pens an impulsive love letter to the bored dandy Onegin, who perfunctorily rejects her; years later, filled with remorse for having killed his friend Lensky in a hasty duel, Onegin encounters Tatiana, now a society beauty in a sensible though loveless marriage, and it is his turn to be rejected.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

[Last night, Bayreuth Opera streamed Wagner live over the internet for the first time - a sign of the times, as opera houses leap into the future with HD cinema screenings and web downloads. Rupert Christiansen was watching]
It used to be so simple. In the old days, if you couldn't get to see opera on stage, you waited a few months for the telly to broadcast one. The sound may have been boxy and the picture small, but the performance came free to every licence-holder's home at the flick of a switch.
— Read more at telegraph.co.uk

By far, the most exciting event of the Santa Fe Opera season is the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho's new opera, Adriana Mater. Santa Fe introduced American audiences to the extraordinary L'amour de loin, the Finnish composer's first opera, and it was naturally expected that she would return to New Mexico with her second. Saariaho was reunited with the "dream team" of L'amour de loin, librettist Amin Maalouf and director Peter Sellars, for a story that is as unlike that medieval romance as possible. Set in an unspecified country at war, the parallels with the Bosnian-Serbian conflict are overpowering, but its story of a woman being raped, giving birth to a child, and the inevitable chain of violence that follows that child is found, unfortunately, in many places.
— Read more at Ionarts - Charles T. Downey

For a new opera, this is off-the-chart success: More than 50 productions around the world in a decade. And that's without a famous composer or performer for a PR boost.
Then again, Mark Adamo's opera does have a great name attached: "Little Women," the Louisa May Alcott novel that inspired it.
— Read more at Charlotte Observer

The nation's second-oldest opera company is making big plans to celebrate 90 years.
Cincinnati Opera's 90th anniversary season in 2010 will include a star-studded gala concert, a new production of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger" conducted by acclaimed Cincinnati native James Levine, Verdi's "Otello" and Puccini's "La Boheme."
— Read more at Cincinnati Enquirer

Tickets for the opening night of the new Royal Opera House season will only be available to readers of the Sun newspaper, it has been announced.
Details on how to book tickets for Mozart masterpiece Don Giovanni will be published in the paper on 30 July.
A ballot will then take place for tickets - priced from £7.50 to £30 - for the 8 September London performance.
— Read more at BBC

On August 21, 22, 25, 26, and 27, at 7:30 PM, some of New York's finest young singers will perform Claudio Monteverdi's masterpiece The Coronation of Poppea, fully staged, in English translation at Le Poisson Rouge, the "multimedia art cabaret" on former site of the historic Village Gate, 158 Bleecker St., New York, NY.
Wesley Chinn, General Manager and Artistic Director of the new company, says of its inaugural production, "Our production will find a perfect home at Le Poisson Rouge ... the fact that drinking during the opera is historically appropriate is just a bonus."
— Learn more at operaomnia.org

London's Royal Opera House triggered an energetic debate about "culture for the masses" Wednesday after limiting tickets for a prestigious premiere to readers of a tabloid newspaper.
The respected venue will open its autumn season with a performance of "Don Giovanni" on September 8, but only for readers of The Sun, which is more famous for its Page Three topless models than its coverage of Mozart's masterpieces.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

[Birmingham Opera Company is preparing to make an international splash alongside the canal in Ladywood. Terry Grimley meets artistic director Graham Vick.]
For a man used to working in grand opera venues like La Scala and Venice's restored 18th century jewel La Fenice, Graham Vick seems remarkably excited to be directing an opera in a disused rubber factory in Ladywood.
The derelict complex is only a few hundred yards from another where Birmingham Opera Company, newly reconstituted from the former City of Birmingham Touring Opera, made its debut with Votzek in 2001.
— Read more at Birmingham Post

A season of performances from the Royal Opera House is to be screened live at cinemas in Britain and across Europe.
The autumn programme of 16 ballets and operas will be shown in at least 112 cinemas, including the Empire Leicester Square, the Vue and Odeon multiplex chains, and independent venues on the Continent.
— Read more at The Independent

The Boston Symphony and Metropolitan Opera music director James Levine, 65, is recovering favorably from successful kidney tumor surgery, his spokesman said Tuesday.
Levine was hospitalized from July 15 until last weekend to have the tumor removed, spokesman Mark Volpe said without naming the hospital.
— Read more at AFP

Declarations of independence don't get much more enchanting than the personal jaunt - odyssey would be too strong a word - taken by the title character of Britten's chamber opera "Albert Herring." Within one night, with the help of plenty of liquor and some scrupulously unspecified erotic companionship, the repressed young grocer snips his mother's apron strings and emerges, finally, as his own man.
— Read more at sfgate.com

When Opera Holland Park launched in 1996 there was no declared intention to strike out into uncharted artistic territory - but there was a very distinct desire to do something different. In our second year in existence, a conversation in the office led us to a CD of Mascagni's Iris, an oriental schlockhorror opera.
— Read more at This is London

It is everybody's right to fall in love with bad opera. August Everding, the late stage director and a leading light of the German theater world, who was responsible for plenty of bad opera in his day, said this to me many years ago. He was offering support for the provincial opera houses in German cities like Pforzheim or Passau, where people outside metropolitan centers have a chance to experience live opera for themselves.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

True story: After catching Sunday's matinee opening of the Summer Opera Theatre Company's eminently enjoyable "Carmen" in Washington's Harman Center for the Arts, my wife and I had dinner at a downtown restaurant.
Later, as we were leaving, a twentysomething hostess asked what we had just seen. Eyeing our programs, she answered her own question. "Eew, opera. I don't like opera."
— Read more at Washington Times

If you couldn't get to the New York Metropolitan Opera, and missed the broadcasts in cinemas, never fear.
EMI is to issue six recent live opera performances from the Metropolitan Opera - Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, Verdi's Macbeth, Tan Dun's The First Emperor, Puccini's La boheme and Manon Lescaut, and Britten's Peter Grimes. Each was filmed in high-definition, has been screened at cinemas worldwide and features Met celebrities conducting interviews backstage. Many also contain other bonus features.
— Read more at Gramophone

Although Santa Fe Opera generally holds the lead in presenting contemporary opera to American audiences, it has been playing catch-up with the major Britten operas. The company finally staged Peter Grimes in 2005 (the production by Paul Curran will come to Washington National Opera this season) and, as we expected, takes up Billy Budd this summer. The Francesca Zambello production from Washington National Opera in 2004 was a blockbuster, but Santa Fe has turned again to Paul Curran for this new production. Whatever else the staging has in store, the company has notified its outdoor theater's neighbors that three cannon shots are fired during the performance.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

If part of the aim of free, informal outdoor concerts is to lure new listeners to a genre, the New York Grand Opera Company's enjoyable performance of Verdi's "Traviata" on Wednesday surely won a few new devotees.
The amplified, fully staged performance at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park was conducted by Vincent La Selva, the Grand Opera's indefatigable artistic director, who founded the company in 1973. A Verdi specialist, Mr. La Selva staged productions of all 28 of the composer's operas in chronological order from 1994 to 2001.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The opera season doesn't start for another five months. We're still in the midst of the summer doldrums, for heaven's sake.
So why were 400 opera fans packed into the Harriet Himmel Theater Tuesday night? Why, getting their booster shots, of course. After all, one can't be expected to survive an entire summer without one's Verdi.
— Read more at palmbeachpost.com

A weekend in Santa Fe was a cultural delight - highlighted by two superb opera performances by the Santa Fe Opera company.
Large, lecherous, greedy, incorrigible and comical, Sir John Falstaff, playing the buffoon in Verdi's "Falstaff," gets his comeuppance in the end.
— Read more at El Paso Times

It's opera on a grand scale -- times three.
Hours before Opera New Jersey opens its summer season at Princeton's McCarter Theatre Center, interns in the costume shop are hem ming and pressing for that night's performance of "La Traviata," while onstage some 40 singers and dancers are sweating their way through the first tech rehearsal for "The Merry Widow."
— Read more at NJ.com

Europeans call it Regietheater, or director's theatre. Americans call it Eurotrash. It's a matter of priorities and perspectives.
Once upon a time, opera performances were essentially about singing. Scenery was something decorative in the background. A tree looked like a tree. If it was wrinkled or faded, no one cared as long as the tenor sounded loud and the soprano sounded sweet. Drama became part of the equation only if the singer on duty happened to care about acting. The stage director was a traffic cop, often anonymous.
— Read more at FT.com

The Sarasota Opera has canceled a world premiere for the Sarasota Youth Opera planned for next year because the composer is unable to complete it in time.
Noted composer Ned Rorem was commissioned to write the music for "Little Nemo," based on Winsor McCay's comic strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland," which appeared in newspapers in the early 20th century.
— Read more at HeraldTribune.com

After all his years in the business -- the acting classes, the academic degrees, the bit parts in small productions and the bigger roles in bigger shows, the highs and the lows, the yeses and the nos, the disappointments and the triumphs and the accolades -- the burning career question of the moment for Lawrence Redmond is this:
Can he be a Jerry Springer for the ages?
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

It was the kind of story handed down from generation to generation. Johannes Rath remembers hearing it told, over and over, when he was growing up in an apartment above the family's workshop in Vienna in the 1980s.
The story was that the first ovation in the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center erupted when the chandeliers rose toward the ceiling on opening night, Sept. 16, 1966.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Smaller opera companies try to mix their offerings between the unusual fare that keeps things lively and the tried-and-true repertoire that brings subscribers in. For the Festival Opera in Walnut Creek - which has largely mastered that delicate balancing act - the point of interest is coming next month, with Britten's Shakespearean charmer "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Wolf Trap Opera is in the midst of a season that, it should be said, is a wild success. After appropriately performing a concert version of Candide in the Filene Center, the company has focused on three unusual choices in the more suitable Barns, beginning with Verdi's early comedy Un Giorno di Regno, continuing this month with Handel's Alcina, and next month with Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

[Opera director Laurent Pelly talks to Rupert Christiansen about bringing his 'brutal, greedy and obese' Hänsel and Gretel to Glyndebourne]
Laurent Pelly suddenly looks very solemn when I half-jokingly ask him if he is someone unusually in touch with that popular psychobabble phenomenon, the inner child. "This is something very important if you work in the theatre. It's about understanding the double meaning of the word 'play'; it's about feeling joy, too."
— Read more at Telegraph

The brother of conductor James Levine says the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera music director has had surgery in New York to remove a kidney.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Frank Matcham's masterly opera house is certainly getting a lively workout at this year's Buxton Festival. After the Teutonic whimsy of Lortzing's The Poacher on opening night, four more operatic rarities were staged on the next two evenings. True, Handel's Samson is neither rare nor an opera. But it's unlikely that this turbulent oratorio has been presented before as a gloss on modern-day Gaza, with the chorus required to quick-change from Zionist settlers into gun-toting Palestinians, and Samson portrayed as an imprisoned terrorist - a ?suicide bomber? who uses his strength as his explosive.
— Read more at Times Online

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of "Don Giovanni," he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera "La Grotta di Trofonio," premièred two years before "Don Giovanni," contains some strikingly similar demonic noises.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

For all of this community's affluence, superb venues, and ample IQ points, opera hasn't been the most dependable presence here, though this fifth season of Opera New Jersey may be a positive turning point. The opening-weekend productions of La Traviata and La Cenerentola filled the niche of quality summer opera in a congenial chamber setting more successfully than ever before.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Women of various statures and dispositions have figured prominently in opera - the strong, the weak, the resolute, the uncertain; without them, opera surely would not have evolved into the grand exercise in art that has emerged over more than 300 years.
For the opening salvo in Berkshire Opera's 24th season Friday evening at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center, the company focused on some of those heroines, none of them obviously unsung.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

The composer of an opera who unsuccessfully sued the London Evening Standard for libel was declared bankrupt yesterday after failing to pay £67,000 in legal fees to the newspaper.
Keith Burstein's attempts to get a stay against the costs order made at a previous hearing by the court of appeal were rejected as he failed to convince the chief registrar, Stephen Baister, that payment should be delayed until he has a chance to take his case to the European court of human rights.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

The Metro Lyric Opera celebrated 50 years of Shore productions Saturday night without any fanfare from founder and director Era Tognoli.
Tognoli, who joins the 80-and-up club this year, was rumored to not be feeling up to speaking onstage, but was said to be in attendance behind the scenes. Regardless, her tireless influence was felt by every soul, audience and performers alike.
— Read more at Asbury Park Press

"Carmen" is not new to the Hollywood Bowl. On July 8, 1922, three days before the first season of "Symphonies Under the Stars," the Los Angeles Philharmonic, itself only 3 years old, mounted a lavish production of Bizet's opera. The cast numbered nearly 500. Massive sets of Seville surrounded the brand-new amphitheater. When soprano Marguerita Sylva, who starred, rolled into Union Station five days earlier, reporters were there to greet her as if she were a movie star. Proceeds from the performance financed the installation of the Bowl's first benches.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Taking opera to the regions is no easy task, but after a strong spring season with Don Giovanni, Susannah and Anna Bolena, English Touring Opera has now announced the two productions for its autumn tour.
Dvorak's underrated masterpiece Rusalka will be presented alongside La tragédie de Carmen, Peter Brook's revision of Bizet's Carmen.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Grand Rapids arts community will soon enjoy a new facility, for a long time group of performers.
Opera Grand Rapids is making plans for a new home. The group officially closed on a piece of property on Fulton Street on Thursday, July 10, 2008.
— Read more at wzzm13.com

Nobel literary laureates Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott are collaborating on a new opera due to be unveiled this fall at the Globe Theatre in London.
The piece, according to the Guardian newspaper, is based on Heaney's acclaimed play The Burial at Thebes and will be set in a South American republic.
— Read more at cbc.ca

The first opera company in the history of central Appalachia will open with a comedy reminiscent of the wry and wacky humor made famous by Monty Python. Gilbert and Sullivan's famous operetta, "The Pirates of Penzance" will be presented by Highlands Light Opera in six performances throughout the region.
— Read more at The Herald-Dispatch

In Theodor Adorno's famous dictum, writing poetry "after Auschwitz" was a barbaric notion, but what about opera after the war? The genre was pronounced dead by modernists who wanted a clean break from the past. Pierre Boulez called for the destruction of all opera houses as relics of an obsolete tradition. Some went as far as implicating music itself in the great German plunge into the abyss. This bountiful well, they suspected, had been poisoned.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

It's a small world after all.
Who would have thought that folks from New Zealand, Serbia, Russia, England, China, Spain, Denmark and Vernal would all converge this summer in beautiful little Logan?
"We have eight nations represented. We truly are an international opera company this summer - and we need to be because of the works we've chosen," said Michael Ballam, founder and general director of Utah Festival Opera, which is celebrating its 16th birthday this season.
— Read more at Deseret News

Behind the world-class opera singers, impeccably designed sets and jubilant orchestra at Glimmerglass Opera in Cooperstown is a scene audiences have yet to see up close. Frantic and chaotic, but precise, the company's backstage workhorses scurry around to move sets and lighting and change costumes and props.
— Read more at Democrat and Chronicle

When Indianapolis Opera relocates next spring to a Greek Orthodox church building on Pennsylvania Street, the move will put the company less than half a mile from its current headquarters.
But the relocation could revolutionize the opera's performances, adding edgier shows to the standards it will continue to perform at Clowes Hall.
— Read more at The Indianapolis Star

In order to be funny, even a good joke has to be told just right. This general principle applies to comic opera as well. And for musical felicities, comic vitality and sheer entertainment, Rossini's "Barbiere di Siviglia" may be the funniest opera ever written.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

A battle was won at Glyndebourne yesterday, and not one involving Tatiana's tortured emotions as she rejects Eugene Onegin in Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera, which was performed there last night. This was a very modern battle, and it involved a wind turbine.
The communities and local government secretary, Hazel Blears, yesterday ruled in favour of the Sussex opera house in its long battle to put up a 70-metre-high turbine on the South Downs. The £750,000 turbine, it says, will supply the opera house with clean renewable energy and reduce its carbon emissions by 70%.
— Read more at The Guardian

Cindy Sadler stands next to the piano in her living room, opens her mouth and lets fly with a firestorm of booming opera music.
Her two wirehaired dachshunds, Samson and Delilah, howl in protest. They aren't opera fans. They are, however, fans of Sadler's new healthy lifestyle, which includes daily walks along the neighborhood greenbelt. Sometimes, they get to go along.
— Read more at austin360.com

The delightful doggerel and toe-tapping tunes of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are all but singer-proof. And they're time-honored fare for community opera companies like the Living Opera, which opened a short run of H.M.S. Pinafore Thursday evening.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

It looks like soprano Renee Fleming will have a running start to rule the fashion pages next gala season.
For the first time in the Metropolitan Opera's history, Karl Lagerfield, John Galliano, and Christian Lacroix will design costumes, for Ms. Fleming to wear in a concert of fully staged scenes at the season opening gala on September 22, the Met announced today.
— Read more at nysun.com

Alan Stone adored singers and singing and was in the thick of opera practically all his life.
The Chicago native traced his lineage on his mother's side back to the German operatic composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. At various times he made his living as a singer of opera and musical theater, a member of the Chicago Symphony Chorus and a vocal coach.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

The one compelling reason to see "La Cenerentola," the Aspen Opera Theater Center's first offering of the summer, is the mezzo-soprano singing the title role.
Beg, borrow or steal to get a ticket for Julie Boulianne's final performance at 7 p.m. Sunday in the Wheeler Opera House. She is the real deal.
— Read more at AspenTimes.com

There are moments when an artist, seduced by the nuzzle of a radio mike, utters something so astonishing that the interviewer holds his breath and hopes to heaven that he has not misheard. 'I got rid of my high notes,' confides Natalie Dessay, in a backroom of the Theatre des Champs Elysees. 'They were getting in the way.'
— Read more at scena.org

The great tale of "Faust", has fascinated, inspired, and daunted artists since the 16th century when Johann Spies' Historia von D. Johann Fausten first put the legend in print. Marlowe and Goethe, Rembrandt and Delacroix, Oscar Wilde, F.W.Murnau, Thomas Mann, Václav Havel, and Radiohead have all created works based on or around Faust.
— Read more at Ionarts

[Rupert Christiansen reviews Abbas Kiarostami's Così fan tutte at the Aix Festival]
Importing celebrated cinema directors is one of the riskier tactics favoured by opera managements today.
Although it generates plenty of initial press and audience interest, the odds on solid success are long, not least because the process of rehearsing singers and collaborating with conductors is so different from working behind a camera.
— Read more at Telegraph

James Levine opened the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer season at Tanglewood here exactly as he closed its formal season at Symphony Hall in Boston, with a concert performance of Berlioz's biggest, meatiest and most hair-raisingly passionate score, the opera "Les Troyens." As a concession to its five-hour duration, he adopted a time-honored way of presenting it, with Part 1 (the first two acts, "La Prise de Troie") on Saturday evening, and Part 2 (the final three acts, "Les Troyens à Carthage") on Sunday afternoon.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Lincoln Center will rename the New York State Theater - home of New York City Ballet and New York City Opera - for business executive and philanthropist David H. Koch.
— Read more at Playbill

Among his many duties as artistic director of Cincinnati Opera, Evans Mirageas sends CDs of contemporary operas he considers "a stretch" to the board members advising him on programming.
— Read more at City Beat

Asbury Park has seen ups and downs like the waves off its boardwalk. But opera has been a constant there for a half-century and counting, thanks to Era Tognoli's guiding spirit and loyal friends.
This summer marks 50 years that Tognoli's Metro Lyric Opera has been staging old favorites on a shoestring at Asbury Park's Paramount Theatre, a rite the former singer started when she was just 30. On Saturday, it will be the earthy strains of Bizet's "Carmen" that once again come to life.
— Read more at NJ.com

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 Salt Lake Tribune

The Michigan Opera Theatre now offers a budget-friendly opportunity for families to enjoy ballet and opera. It's called the Children's Discovery Subscription Series.
The series includes the Joffrey Ballet's "The Nutcracker" on Dec. 7, the Grand Rapids Ballet Company's "Aladdin" on Feb. 28 and the Michigan Opera Theatre Children's Chorus' performance of "Brundibar" on March 21.
— Read more at detnews.com

The Park Avenue Armory is the site of "Die Soldaten," Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1965 12-tone opera in a gargantuan production imported to Manhattan from Germany for the Lincoln Center Festival. It fills out what used to be the Drill Hall of the elite Seventh Regiment, whose drills may have been more musical than Zimmermann's opera.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Falstaff and Figaro.
They're the two F's of opera, among the form's most famous characters.
The ever-appealing personages - an aging knight who fancies himself as something of a Casanova, and a servant trying to outwit his lustful master - were the stars of the opening weekend of the Santa Fe Opera.
— Read more at The Denver Post

It always goes by too fast: Each spring's season at Opera Theatre of St. Louis seems to flit away as swiftly as a much-anticipated vacation.
The end of the 2008 season, which concluded last Sunday with Walton's "Troilus and Cressida," was also the end of an era. Charles MacKay - for 23 years the gracious, witty, dapper and budget-balancing general director of the company - is leaving his spot in the Levy Opera Center. His new office will be the spacious general director's quarters in the vintage ranch house that's home to Santa Fe Opera.
— Read more at stltoday.com

Opera legend Joan Sutherland is recovering well after breaking both legs during a fall at her Swiss home, her agent said Monday.
"She had an accident while doing the gardening, and somehow managed to break both her legs," agent David Sigall said.
— Read more at CNN.com

Seattle Opera is looking to build its audience by reaching out to lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender music fans. The arts organization announced three LGBT Nights at McCaw Hall during the upcoming 2008-09 season.
— Read more at Seattle Times

[New York's Metropolitan Opera has pioneered a new model]
"WHEN I took over, the Met was on a declining slope toward extermination," says Peter Gelb, who took charge as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in August 2006. Attendance figures were falling and patronage was dwindling, even as running costs and competition for the cultural dollar were on the rise. But perhaps the biggest problem of all was the product itself: opera has an eminently elitist image. And the 125-year-old Met was the stuffiest of the musical temples for the rich.
— Read more at Economist.com

The opening note of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Die Soldaten" has to be the most moving in opera when heard in David Pountney's production: The 974-seat bleacher containing the audience slowly starts to roll down train tracks in the Park Avenue Armory's Drill Hall, passing over a football field-length runway where most of the action takes place.
— Read more at startribune.com

When the curtain rises on The Rake's Progress at Covent Garden today, there will be no whiff of 18th-century London low-life as seen in the Hogarth engravings on which this musical morality-tale is based. This Rake traverses the American Midwest in the Fifties, with oil-derricks pumping in the background, and he progresses towards his madhouse finale via raunchy scenes in a LA cabaret, and high jinks round a swimming pool.
— Read more at The Independent

When composer Brian Irvine wanted to set an opera in a venue where young people gathered what did he come up with? Forget cinemas, concert halls or nightclubs. He tells Victoria Richards all about his new opera based in a call centre
— Read more at WalesOnline

American soprano Nicole Cabell's rise to prominence in the last few years has been astronomical. On winning the BBC Singer of the World in Cardiff Competition in 2005, she went on to make various important debuts around the world and signed an exclusive recording contract with Decca. Her first album, Soprano, was superbly received and won the 2007 Georg Solti Orphée d'Or from the French Académie du Disque Lyrique and an Echo Klassik Award in Germany.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

A musical trio transformed Culpeper County Library into a classical harmony haven Sunday afternoon.
Inside the dimly lit meeting room, nearly 60 people watched the Charlottesville-based Ash Lawn Opera Festival performers deliver seven songs.
— Read more at Culpeper Star-Exponent

DURING a long career in North America, Lotfi Mansouri, the Iranian-born opera director and manager, ran two prestigious houses, the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto and the San Francisco Opera; commissioned works; directed scores of productions; cultivated singers; and still had time to make his mark in Europe.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

From Monteverdi's "Orfeo" through Wagner's "Ring" cycle, the supernatural has been a constant in opera, an art form that more than most thrives on the suspension of disbelief. In that sense the idea of an opera inspired by David Cronenberg's science-fiction horror film "The Fly" fits comfortably into the mold.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

A FOREST of aluminum greets a visitor to the normally cavernous drill hall of the Park Avenue Armory. The thicket of metal forms the backside of what is essentially a giant, horseshoe-shaped set of bleachers filling much of the space.
...
It is on this stage that a 40-member cast of singers, dancers and actors will play out "Die Soldaten," Bernd Alois Zimmermann's dark and brutal opera steeped in post-World War II despair, starting on Saturday as part of the Lincoln Center Festival's opening weekend. The audience periodically travels back and forth, at a top speed of seven and a half inches a second - the rate of a slow creep - as the scenes evolve onstage.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

"La Bohème" is updated to a world of "wild and crazy guys" at the Washington National Opera; a video of a decomposing rabbit appears in "Parsifal" at Bayreuth. Some people call this kind of opera production Regietheater (director's theater); others, Eurotrash opera. The basic idea is that it puts as much emphasis on the direction as on the music, and it's led to all kinds of strange productions: Aida as a cleaning lady, Simon Boccanegra as a Mafia don, "Nabucco" with a swarm of bees in lieu of a chorus.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

After three decades at James Monroe's historic estate, the Ash Lawn Opera Festival is searching for a new home.
Held since 1978 at Ash Lawn-Highland, Monroe's 535-acre farm in Albemarle County, the festival is expected to relocate to an as-yet-to-be-determined indoor venue by next summer's opera season.
— Read more at Charlottesville Daily Progress

How often do you hope, with all your might, to be wrong? The feeling is powerful as I review the resumé and consider the remarks of Alexander Neef, the 34-year-old German who has been named the next general director of the Canadian Opera Company.
— Read more at canada.com

The enterprising Peter Gelb decided to jazz up the Metropolitan Opera in the Parks series this summer by substituting a celebrity duo concert for the full-length operas in concert they usually present.
— Read more at GayCityNews

Peter Gelb earned $1 million in his first year as general manager of New York's Metropolitan Opera, where he's recruited theater directors and begun simulcast performances in movie houses to expand the audience for the five- century-old art form.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

When Carlisle Floyd finished his first opera, Susannah, in 1954, the composer had no idea he'd created a work that would receive more than 1,000 performances in the years following.
"I was young and inexperienced," said Floyd, now 82. "I really didn't think of things like that. I just wanted to do what Douglas Moore was doing - bridge the gap between the American people and opera."
— Read more at The Rocky Mountain News

After all the fuss about the Little Black Dress in Ariadne auf Naxos, I have to report that said dress is a long-sleeved, ankle-length, opaque and voluminous gown. Flatteringly cut for best cleavage effect, but still not precisely 'little'.
— Read more at Jessica Duchen's classical music blog

The illustrious Théâtre du Châtelet has witnessed an array of artistic endeavours in its time - it is where Stravinsky unveiled Pétrouchka to the world, and Erik Satie and Jean Cocteau's Parade received its world premiere. Classical drama, light operetta, Russian ballet and even contemporary music have all played their part on its stage.
Body horror, however, has not. Until now. Last night an eclectic crowd of thousands gathered for a bizarre spectacle: the world premiere of David Cronenberg's operatic remake of The Fly. With a score written by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore, an orchestra conducted by tenor Plácido Domingo, and Cronenberg himself directing, La Mouche is the brainchild of three creative greats.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

How much would opera fans be willing to pay for an exclusive online viewing of Wagner's Die Meistersinger of Nuernberg from the Bayreuth Festival?
Germany's annual opera festival devoted to the works of Richard Wagner has set a price and it's a high one - $77.
— Read more at cbc.ca

In a sneak peek to an all-Spanish 2009 season, the Cincinnati Opera presents its first-ever main-stage production in Spanish, "Florencia en el Amazonas."
"This opera is wondrous," said artistic director Evans Mirageas. "If Puccini had lived and worked in South America, this is the opera he'd have written."
— Read more at daytondailynews.com

After a season of song cycles, minimal opera productions and a solo recital, Long Beach Opera will celebrate its 30th season next year with four full-fledged operas.
"I don't want to take the 30th anniversary too much into consideration because our aim remains the same -- to do things that are rarely done or not done at all," company General Director Andreas Mitisek said Tuesday.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

One of Toronto's newest opera companies has a unique twist.
Not only does it take requests, but the people making the requests star in the production as well. Opera by Request, as it's called, will next produce Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurydice at the Heliconian Hall on Saturday, July 5, 8 p.m.
— Read more at insidetoronto.ca

It's not easy getting eight superstar divas in a room together. But that's effectively what Francesco Clemente has achieved with his new solo exhibition, The Sopranos, currently on view in Gallery Met.
The acclaimed painter has created a series of portraits of high-profile women singers starring in Met productions next season. Diana Damrau, Natalie Dessay, Renee Fleming, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Karita Mattila, Anna Netrebko, and Deborah Voigt all posed on the same brown velvet sofa, in character, while Clemente painted from a scaff old constructed just for these sittings.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Be afraid, be very afraid: David Cronenberg's 1986 horror flick, "The Fly," has undergone a bizarre metamorphosis. It's now an opera.
The new incarnation, with tenor Placido Domingo conducting a score by Oscar-winning composer Howard Shore ("The Lord of the Rings"), isn't as gory as the movie. Audiences will be spared close-ups of the title character's fingernails falling off as he makes the transition from mild-mannered scientist to giant insect.
— Read more at CNN.com

Conductor George Manahan will remain a music director of the New York City Opera under incoming general manager Gerard Mortier, agreeing to a four-year contract through the 2011-12 season.
Manahan, 56, was hired as music director in 1996, effective with the 1997-98 season. In 2009-10, Mortier's first season, Manahan will conduct Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress" and Britten's "Death in Venice." He is to conduct Szymanowski's "King Roger" in 2010-11, the company announced Tuesday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Workers at La Scala opera house in Milan are threatening to stage a strike next week that would cancel the first three performances of "La Boheme."
But union representative Giancarlo Albori said Wednesday that talks with management were still going on. He said a decision on whether to strike would be made at the end of meetings, possibly on Friday.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Germany's annual Bayreuth opera festival is going digital, streaming video and audio of its opening performance of "Die Meistersinger von Nuernberg" live via the Internet. The catch is the price - $77.
Organizers hope the online screening will draw new fans to an annual event devoted entirely to the 10 mature stage works by Richard Wagner, where fans often wait seven years or more for the opportunity to buy tickets.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Armonico Consort Opera is a bit of a misnomer. This flexible team of singers, instrumentalists and all-round entertainers has had its biggest hits with masterpieces that fall between the cracks - works that aren't quite opera, but are rather more than mere music theatre.
Purcell's astonishing 'semi-operas' King Arthur and The Fairy Queen received dazzling, physical-theatre transformations. Mozart's The Magic Flute became the world's greatest pantomime.
— Read more at Metro.co.uk

There are a couple of reasons West Side Story represents a huge gamble for Central City Opera: It's not really an opera, and it demands a cast of skilled dancers as well as singers.
On the other hand, it remains a fresh, vital, inspired theatrical treasure, and, most significant, this production unveiled on that tiny stage is positively brilliant.
— Read more at The Rocky Mountain News

Edgar Vincent, a veteran press representative for a starry roster of opera singers dating to Ezio Pinza, notably as the publicity agent and a close adviser to Plácido Domingo for more than 25 years, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 90.
He died of a blood clot while recuperating from a partial hip replacement at Lenox Hill Hospital, said Patrick Farrell, his longtime professional partner in the management company Vincent & Farrell Associates.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Luciano Pavarotti's estate has been settled "fairly," a lawyer said in an interview published Monday after reports of a dispute between the opera legend's second wife and three daughters from his first marriage.
"The property was shared fairly," Anna Maria Bernini, the lawyer of Pavarotti's second wife Nicoletta Mantovani, told Il Resto del Carlino, a daily of Pavarotti's native Emilia Romagna region.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Canadian director David Cronenberg has caught the opera bug. Literally. Rehearsals are under way for the operatic adaptation of Cronenberg's 1987 horror flick "The Fly" for Paris' Chatelet Theater and the Los Angeles Opera.
Run-throughs are being held at the theater, which will set the stage for the five performances running Wednesday through July 13.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

Roger Honeywell can be forgiven for feeling he is "on a conveyor belt" these days. Since being engaged by Opera Theatre of St. Louis a couple of years ago to sing Troilus this month in the first production of Sir William Walton's Troilus and Cressida mounted on this continent in half a century, the peripatetic tenor from Toronto has tackled 14 different roles.
— Read more at TheStar.com

We hear through the grapevine that the Washington Post has appointed Anne Midgette as its new classical music critic. Since January, she has been serving as interim critic during the sabbatical of Tim Page. After many accomplishments in Europe, she became the first woman to review classical music for the New York Times.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

Edgar Vincent, the longtime press representative and right-hand man to Placido Domingo and a host of other opera stars, died June 26 at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. He was 90 years old.
A resident of New York, he died of a blood clot while recovering from hip-replacement surgery, said his professional partner, Patrick Farrell.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com