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

American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato goes from strength to strength as an artist. In the last couple of years she's sung a total of seven new roles, including Romeo in Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi at the Paris Bastille, the title part in Massenet's Cendrillon in Santa Fe, Octavian in San Francisco, Handel's Ariodante in Geneva, the composer in Strauss' Ariadne auf Naxos in Madrid and the title role in Handel's Alcina in Milan. In this wide range of repertoire in houses all over the world, DiDonato has won critical praise and an increasingly large fan base.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

It's perhaps not surprising given the metamorphic theme of David Cronenberg's 1986 film "The Fly" (a remake of the 1958 original) that the story has recently been transformed into an entirely different art form: the opera.
After opening in Paris to mixed reviews, "The Fly" has flown into Los Angeles, where it opens Sept. 7 for six performances.
— Read more at jam.canoe.ca

Singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has dropped plans to write an opera for the Metropolitan Opera after the New York opera company rejected his plan to write it in French.
The Montreal-raised Wainwright has written most of the libretto for Prima Donna in French and says the language fits too well with the music to change it at this point.
— Read more at cbc.ca

Longtime Annapolis sailor Jason Stearns sailed into his debut role as that most famous sailor - Richard Wagner's The Flying Dutchman - at the prestigious summer opera festival in Savonlinna, Finland, last month.
Back home, the veteran opera singer recounted the rigors of performing in the Olavinlinna Castle, a 15th-century fortress.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

The 16th annual Bel Canto recital will be held Sunday, Sept. 7 at the Martin Lipscomb Performing Arts Center.
Baritone John Packard has been added to the lineup. A prominent contemporary performer, he has been characterized as a charismatic young "rich-voiced" baritone.
— Read more at MaconNews.com

The Cleveland Museum of Art is going operatic. It will screen five admired opera films in September, starting with Ingmar Bergman's seminal 1975 version of Mozart's "The Magic Flute."
The Bergman film, which features baritone Hakan Hagegard as Papageno, will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5 and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 7. The work is sung in Swedish.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Mais non! The singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has dropped plans to compose a work for the Metropolitan Opera in a dispute over the language of the libretto.
Mr. Wainwright wants the opera, "Prima Donna," to be in French; its would-be commissioners - the Met and Lincoln Center Theater - insisted on English.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Gerard Mortier says his application to run the Bayreuth Festival in Germany will not change his plans to run the New York City Opera starting with the 2009-10 season.
Mortier, former head of the Salzburg Festival and current boss of the Paris Opera, agreed in February 2007 to become the City Opera's general manager and artistic director. He said he rejected "propositions from different opera houses in Spain and Germany."
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The most successful Asian American novelist of her generation, Amy Tan tests her penmanship as an opera librettist this fall, when the San Francisco Opera presents the world premiere of The Bonesetter's Daughter, the operatic adaptation of the Oakland native's 2001 Putnam bestseller with a score composed by Stewart Wallace.
— Read more at San Francisco Bay Guardian

Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf on Tuesday presented the 2008 Polar Music Prize to American soprano Renee Fleming and Pink Floyd band members Nick Mason and Roger Waters for their contributions to popular music and opera.
Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt said the British rock band had made "a monumental contribution ... and captured the mood and spirit of a whole generation in their reflections and attitudes."
— Read more at The Associated Press

Gerard Mortier, the new general director of the New York City Opera, and Nike Wagner, a great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, said on Tuesday that they were joining forces to seek control of the Bayreuth Festival.
The effort is a direct challenge to another branch of the composer's family, which is also lobbying to run the hallowed precincts, where Wagner's operas are reverentially presented each summer.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Hot on the heels of its announcement that it will present the Canadian premiere of the John Adams opera Nixon in China, Vancouver Opera is set to reveal today that it will also present the Canadian premiere of John Corigliano's The Ghosts of Versailles.
The move is part of Vancouver Opera's new emphasis on contemporary work, commissions and slight gambles that may not guarantee full houses the way Carmen or La Bohème do - but certainly guarantee some notice.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

Tenor Luciano Pavarotti died on September 6, 2007, and now, almost a year after his passing, the tributes are coming. Next month, two important celebrations of the King of the High C's will bring his legacy to the public.
— Read more at The New York Sun

THE lack of a major sponsor is threatening the long-term future of the Faenol Festival, Bryn Terfel revealed last night.
The world-famous Pant Glas-born bass baritone established the festival in 2000 as a "thank you" to the people of North Wales for their support as he made his way from teenage singer to opera superstar.
— Read more at Daily Post North Wales

David Cronenberg's sci-fi terror movie "The Fly" has taken on a new life in the Canadian director's first foray into the world of opera.
"The Fly", described as a classical re-imagining of the 1986 movie about an eccentric scientist who turns into a massive fly, will open the new season at Los Angeles Opera in September with LA Opera director Placido Domingo conducting the orchestra.
— Read more at Reuters

Amy Tan couldn't have known it at the time, but when she wrote the screenplay adaptation of her novel "The Joy Luck Club" in the early 1990s, she was preparing for another kind of transformation later on. She just didn't realize she was ready for it when the idea of creating an opera based on her 2001 book "The Bonesetter's Daughter" took shape.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The second San Francisco Opera season planned by General Director David Gockley continues his determination to mix standard fare with rarities and new work.
As ever, advance exposure to the music can enliven the experience for even a practiced operagoer. So here is our annual guide to the fall's operas on CD and DVD, all available online or through local retailers.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Metropolitan Opera and National CineMedia are expanding their successful partnership to bring more operas into more movie theaters in the upcoming season.
The number of theaters and performing arts venues nationwide will hit 440, up 30% from last year, and the number of operas is rising from eight to 11. The 2008-09 season will be the third featuring the "Live in HD" simulcasts.
— Read more at Variety

From offensive lineman to opera singer, Lawrence Harris lived a unique life.
The former professional football player, who has been an opera singer since 1989, will be presenting "From Football to Opera" at the Centre for Performing and Visual Arts on Lower Fayetteville Road on Tuesday. Today, he travels the United States mesmerizing audiences with his magnificent voice.
— Read more at The Times-Herald

ALTHOUGH serious composition was not considered an indispensable trade in mid-20th-century England, Benjamin Britten, with characteristic understatement, always expressed the hope that his music would at least be thought of as useful. By the time he died in 1976, loaded with honors and elevated to a peerage, Britten was generally considered Britain?s most important composer since Henry Purcell.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

There are times when William Cole can hardly contain himself.
Opera Cleveland's executive director often can be found rushing down the hallway at company offices in the Hanna Building to share an idea with artistic director Dean Williamson or to visit Carl, the opera chicken (more on fowl matters later).
— Read more at Cleveland.com

It began as a 50th birthday gift for a friend. When composer Stewart Wallace wrote a swatch of music for three female voices six years ago, all he meant to do was celebrate San Francisco novelist Amy Tan on the joint occasion of her big birthday and the publication of her book "The Bonesetter's Daughter." The two had first met in 1994 at the upstate New York artist colony Yaddo.
— Read more at sfgate.com

Opus Arte, the DVD company owned by the Royal Opera House, is to release Covent Garden's acclaimed production of Sir Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur on 1 October 2008.
Given its world premiere in April of this year, The Minotaur opened to almost universally positive reviews: The Independent described it as 'a glittering success', while Stephen Graham, writing for this site, said that it was 'a moment in which contemporary music could demonstrate its vitality and pertinence'.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

The third season of "The Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD," the popular program that broadcasts Met performances to movie theaters and performing arts centers across the country, will reach 30 percent more venues this season than in 2007-08, the opera house announced Wednesday.
— Read more at The New York Sun

WHEN Giacomo Puccini died at 65 in 1924, he left behind an estate estimated in today's currency at roughly $250 million. Has any living classical composer come close to amassing such a fortune?
Since Puccini's death his popularity has grown exponentially. At 1,200 performances, "La Bohème" heads the list of the Metropolitan Opera's most-performed works, with two other Puccini favorites, "Tosca" and "Madama Butterfly," among the Top 6. ("Carmen," "Aida" and "La Traviata" complete the list.)
— Read more at NYTimes.com

We'll be away on holiday til August 25th. See you then!

[Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission to rediscover Russian opera. He tells Ismene Brown why]
When Edinburgh International Festival director Jonathan Mills set this year's festival theme - that of shifting borders - he could not have imagined that a shifting border in the Caucasus mountains would become a bloody arena of 21st-century war as the festival opened, nor that two of his best attractions would be natives of that area.
— Read more at Telegraph.co.uk

Regional opera companies are hard to come by these days - but not in Lancaster.
Opera Lancaster (formerly, the Lancaster Opera Company) has the distinction of being one of the few nonprofit, all-volunteer opera companies in the country.
Because of that, Rick Repkoe, the company's creative director, said Opera Lancaster has the potential to draw more visitors to the city.
— Read more at LancasterOnline.com

Most American operas nowadays deal with baddies, saddies or losers: the Joads of Oklahoma, Gatsby of Long Island, Dreiser's tragic pawns. What we need, and all too seldom get, is a rip-roaring comedy in the manner of Mozart or Rossini, with characters delightfully sozzled and the plotline just a hairline out of control.
Such an opera, praised be, is William Bolcom's "A Wedding," which capped the Music Academy of the West's summer festival at Santa Barbara last weekend, superlatively delivered by an all-student cast.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Opera veteran Christopher Alden will direct Mozart's "La clemenza di Tito," the opening production of Chicago Opera Theater's 2009 season.
He replaces Diane Paulus, who withdrew from the production because of scheduling conflicts arising from her new position as artistic director of American Repertory Theatre.
— Read more at CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

David Edgar said of my opera Manifest Destiny that "the writer Dic Edwards and the composer Keith Burstein presented a complex view of the motivations, ambitions and doubts of those attracted to suicide bombing".
He went on to describe a legal action I brought against the London Evening Standard, which had carried a review claiming that I had made suicide bombers appear heroic. "Unsurprisingly, Burstein took [the reviewer] to mean that he was glorifying terrorists, and thus - once the Terrorism Act 2006 came into force - at risk of prosecution should the opera be revived."
— Read more at The Guardian

Portland Opera General Director Christopher Mattaliano has named Ms. Clare Burovac as the Company's first Director of Artistic Administration.
"This is a key position in our Company," he said. "The success of every aspect of our operations, from ticket sales to fundraising, is driven by the artistic quality of our opera productions. Bolstering our artistic team is an important part of our determination and dedication to continued artistic growth. Clare brings us the talent, the operatic experience, and the relationships within the opera world to help us reach a new artistic level."
— Learn more at portlandopera.org

George R. Steel said on Tuesday that he was resigning as executive director of the Miller Theater at Columbia University, which he has turned into a vital and adventurous part of New York's music scene, to become general director of the Dallas Opera, starting on Oct. 1.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Picture this: Your life has just gone down the drain, so you swallow a lethal dose of poison. Just as your nervous system begins to fail, you sing a moving and beautiful song.
Crazy? Not at all; just another summer night at the opera.
As an opera fan, I'm used to hearing, "How can you like opera?" Friends complain that opera is unrealistic: "Who sings when they are dying?" They imagine, as I once did, that opera is for the old or the rich.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

This year's first disinterment at the Rossini Opera Festival is the composer's 1819 Ermione, which flopped at its Naples première and has languished in comparative neglect ever since. Historians consider it one of the composer's most startling masterpieces and, on Sunday night, it was easy to see why.
— Read more at FT.com

Karita Mattila is internationally renowned as one of the world's foremost sopranos, and she has headlined at venues as prestigious as the Metropolitan Opera Theatre and Carnegie Hall. However, this month she has chosen to reunite with an orchestra from her homeland, Finland, to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival.
— Read more at The Independent

It wasn't quite a riot, but it could have passed for one on Monday at the Metropolitan Opera House, where normally genteel opera lovers spent up to five hours in line sputtering over new policies on ticket exchanges.
"This is an insult, what we are being put through today," said Wanda Flickinger of Bronxville, N.Y., a Met subscriber for more than 40 years. She stood behind a strip of yellow security tape with hundreds of others in the bowels of Lincoln Center, waiting to get to a door leading into the Met's Founders Hall - and from there to join another line that snaked up the red velvet staircases of the house toward the box office. Security guards brought out chairs for the many elderly people in line.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

[The idea behind Edmonton's Mercury Opera is simple: Do away with the binoculars and get up close and personal by staging shows in unorthodox but accessible spaces, Marsha Lederman writes]
Darcia Parada was having dinner at a friend's loft in New York when she noticed that the acoustics in the apartment were fantastic. It gave the Edmonton native - a long-time opera student and singer - an idea: Why not perform opera in smaller, unorthodox spaces where people who might never venture out to the Met would feel more comfortable and more involved?
— Read more at globeandmail.com

In a surprise move, the Dallas Opera has ventured outside the world of opera for its next general director.
George Steel, 41, executive director of Columbia University's Miller Theatre in New York, will take the Dallas job Oct. 1. The job has been vacant since Karen Stone stepped down in September 2007.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Paradigm has signed soprano Renee Fleming with the goal of expanding her profile beyond the opera world and into pop culture.
Tenpercentery will scout out opportunities in thesping, endorsement, publishing and digital media for the singer, a two-time Grammy winner and one of opera's best-known stars.
— Read more at variety.com

In recent years nothing has inspired the select young singers and instrumentalists of the Tanglewood Music Center, the prestigious training institute run by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at its summer home here, more than working with James Levine on challenging operatic repertory.
So it was a major disappointment when emergency surgery forced Mr. Levine to withdraw from most of his commitments at Tanglewood this summer, including a full production of "Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny," the 1930 opera by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, performed by fellows of the institute.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Wagner's mature operas have created an image of him as the high priest of a cult based on a severe sort of German aesthetic mysticism. But "Das Liebesverbot" ("The Ban on Love"), from 1836, provides rare insight into a period when he was a young man searching for both style and substance. The opera, Wagner's second, is being performed at Glimmerglass Opera here, in what is billed as its North American fully staged premiere.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

In the scene playing out in his mind, Arnold native Matthew Rzomp is having coffee with his famous uncle, the late Metropolitan Opera star Andrea Velis.
"Sometimes, it really does make me sad, because I picture in my head the two of us sitting there talking about opera," says Rzomp, who made his New York operatic debut in May, singing principal roles in the Bronx Opera Company's 40th anniversary season performance.
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

On a recent night, Red Bennett sat grinning as he watched eight musical actors, a stage director, a stage manager, a musical director and a pianist bring his imagination to life.
All are participants in "What They Seem," the 18-year-old's first original work of opera, which plays Friday through Sunday at the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco. It is a witty adventure story about a girl named O'stella (played by Bola Origunwa, 10) who is kidnapped, forcing her brother O'stello (played by Yomi Origunwa, 8) to rely upon the eccentric people of a small fictional town for help. The libretto is by Sherry Boschert.
— Read more at sfgate.com

MOZART, it almost goes without saying, was a phenomenon: a composer whose startling abilities and mature insight into the human condition have earned nearly universal admiration. For composers, on the other hand, Mozart can be a problem. Kaija Saariaho, a Finnish composer who is in residence at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center this summer, will be sharing the stage - figuratively at least - with a forebear whose example nearly stifled her own creativity.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

In the spring Santa Fe Opera announced its 2009 season, the first after retiring General Director Richard Gaddes (shown at right, as in the season program, riding off into the sunset) is succeeded by Charles MacKay, who comes from Opera Theater of St. Louis, as did Gaddes -- as Anne Midgette put it, "In opera, the incest isn't only onstage." MacKay will be in charge, but folks at the opera made clear that next season was mostly the work of Gaddes, his last one rather than MacKay's first.
— Read more at Charles T. Downey - Ionarts

For a few more weeks, Charles MacKay is still the general director of Opera Theatre of St. Louis. He won't officially take over at Santa Fe Opera until Oct. 1, but he's been booked solid since arriving here in early July.
"I'm planning (future seasons) and getting up to speed with board activities and donor events," he says. "I've had a lunch, dinner and-or a cocktail party every day since I've been here."
— Read more at STLtoday

Cincinnati Opera says a slower economy might be why attendance to its Summer Festival slid nearly 12 percent this year.
A survey of opera patrons found that some people curtailed the number of operas they attended, while others shunned the season altogether due to higher gas prices. So far, 600 people have responded.
— Read more at Cincinnati Enquirer

For Chicago opera lovers, the dog days of summer usually stretch from early June when Chicago Opera Theater winds up its season to mid-September when Lyric Opera of Chicago revs up its schedule. Not this year. Next week opera fans will be in Valhalla, with top-flight performances in abundance.
— Read more at CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Lesley Dill discovered the intoxicating power of Emily Dickinson's telegraphic verse as a 40-year-old artist with little interest in poetry.
When her mother gave her a book of Dickinson's work as a birthday present, Dill was so overcome by the imagery that the words seared into her mind. Dickinson's poetry has served as her muse ever since, surfacing again and again in her innovative, text-infused multimedia projects encompassing sculpture, painting, photography, performance art, and now opera.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

The 1986 horror film The Fly is now an opera, and while Paris critics swatted it flat at its premiere last month, the young Ottawa-area baritone who landed work in the production says it could be a boost to his career.
For one thing, Luc Lalonde has been busy working with singer Placido Domingo, who is conducting the production.
— Read more at canada.com

They sing in the aisles. They milk every humorous line for laughs. And they perform where a suburban audience can easily reach them. Since its founding in 2006, Opera del West performers have done all they can to make the world's great operas fun and accessible for area residents. But now this upstart troupe has a new trick for luring both diehard opera fans and the opera-wary: the choose-your-size performance.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

Nicola Rescigno, a conductor who seized advantage of a new interest in opera after World War II and helped found two major American opera companies, died on Monday in Viterbo, Italy. He was 92.
He died in a hospital awaiting surgery after falling and breaking his femur about a week ago, Jeanne Rescigno, wife of the conductor Joseph Rescigno, Nicola's nephew, said.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Porgy, who cannot walk, somehow drags himself to his feet on the wrecker's ball that has half destroyed his township. As he staggers to the back of the stage, determined to find Bess in New York, it is as clear that he will fail as it is heart-rending that he must try.
The light fades to black, and the cheering begins. Soon, the audience at the Deutsche Oper Berlin is on its feet. A standing ovation in this house is rare. Premieres here are more commonly greeted with boos and heckling.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Trading caresses, the emperor Nero and his lover Poppea bade erotically charged farewells as continuo chords rippled from a piano. The opera director gave murmured guidance about when to kiss, when to push away, when to draw forward. The Manhattan skyline loomed, and the Hudson River gleamed outside the floor-to-ceiling windows in a studio at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in Clinton.
It was the second day of rehearsal last week of Monteverdi's "Coronation of Poppea" and the initial salvo in New York's latest stab at creating an opera company: a Baroque one at that. The group is called Opera Omnia. It has shown an unconventional bent from the start.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Santa Fe Opera, like most US opera companies, casts a wary eye on Regietheater, or director's theatre, but it does not shun it. Representing the radical front this summer are the deconstructive talents of David Alden, as trained on Handel's Radamisto.
Although the production is replete with idiosyncratic detail, some of it thought-provoking, the essence of this drama about a marriage's ability to withstand assault by a tyrant, who orders a city stormed to possess the married woman he craves, emerges strongly.
— Read more at FT.com

It happens to the best of us: you announce to the world your intention to direct an opera within the next three years, working on the theory that you'll be dead by the time you have to make good on your promise. And then, gadammit! You find yourself still very much alive and in a dreadful bind.
That is exactly what seems to have happened to Woody Allen, who has finally begun work on his long-promised opera, a collaboration with The Exorcist director William Friedkin.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Dallas Opera co-founder Nicola Rescigno died in a hospital in Viterbo, Italy, on Monday. He was 92.
The conductor had fallen and was awaiting surgery for a broken leg. He had maintained a residence in a Roman suburb for most of his adult life and had lived there full time since his gradual retirement in the 1990s.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Mozart fans want desperately to be enthusiastic about "La Clemenza di Tito," his final opera, completed just over two months before his death in 1791. And performances as polished and lucid as the one Edward Gardner led in concert on Sunday afternoon at the Rose Theater as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival give the work a needed push.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The countertenor David Daniels reportedly had a little trouble adjusting to the high altitude of the Santa Fe Opera. It's understandable that some singers, however fit, might find oxygen a bit wanting at the company's open-air theater in the mountains, just north of the city at 7,500 feet.
But Mr. Daniels seems to have adjusted just fine, because on Friday night, in the title role of Handel's "Radamisto," the Santa Fe Opera's first presentation of the work and Mr. Daniels's company debut, he sang magnificently. All six cast members are exceptionally fine Handelians.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Sixteen years after it was last seen and heard here, Verdi's "Aida" returned to the Seattle Opera stage on Saturday in a production of spectacular musical quality.
— Read more at Seattle Times

The Sarasota Opera is joining with the Florida West Coast Symphony for five November performances of the Rossini opera "The Barber of Seville."
The production marks the start of the opera company's 50th season and its first foray into the fall, outside its usual four-show season in February and March.
— Read more at HeraldTribune.com

Blood vs. sense, female nurture vs. male violence and, finally, coming to terms with the past: In a "mere" two hours and 45 minutes, with one intermission, Adriana Mater certainly raises Big Issues.
Premiered two yeas ago in Paris, Adriana Mater is the latest operatic collaboration between Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho and Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. Santa Fe Opera is giving its American premiere, in an adaptation of Peter Sellars' Paris staging.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

WE DEBATED for days about the best place to meet Kate Valentine and Jane Irwin, the two female leads in Scottish Opera's The Two Widows. But we end up (at their request) in a pub in Glasgow's Merchant City, because - stereotypes be damned! - these are opera singers who like their real ales.
Pints in hand, Valentine (soprano) and Irwin (mezzo soprano) begin to wind down after a long day in the rehearsal room. Directors Tobias Hoheisel and Imogen Kogge, they tell me, were introducing one of the dance sequences. "We're exhausted!" says Valentine, cheerfully. "Singers and dancing is always quite an iffy combination. It's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time; as soon as you concentrate on one, the other goes completely pear-shaped."
— Read more at redOrbit

OPERA NEWS today announced the winners of the fourth annual OPERA NEWS Awards. Designed specifically to recognize distinguished contributions from leading figures in the world of opera, the OPERA NEWS Awards are the highest honor given within the opera industry. These prestigious awards salute some of the most admired and successful individuals working in the field. Sopranos Natalie Dessay and Renée Fleming, mezzo Marilyn Horne, baritone Sherrill Milnes and composer John Adams have been selected by the editors of OPERA NEWS as the five honorees for 2008.
— Read more at Opera News

There were many heroes and heroines in Tanglewood's concert performance of Tchaikovsky's "Eugene Onegin" Saturday night. Not least of them was the student Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, which played with passion and beauty in an opera of surpassing passion and beauty.
But the biggest hero had to be conductor Andrew Davis. He not only substituted for James Levine but also fitted the rehearsal and performance schedule around a Beethoven concert he was previously committed to conduct Wednesday night at Chicago's Ravinia Festival.
— Read more at Berkshire Eagle Online

I couldn't help lingering -- and salivating -- over a recent e-mail from Cincinnati Opera announcing details of its 2010 season. Mostly because the company will mount a new production of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg" conducted by James Levine, the Cincinnati native who now leads both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
— Read more at The Courier-Journal

What Mozart is to Salzburg and Wagner is to Bayreuth, so, once upon a time, was Richard Strauss to Munich. The composer was born in the Bavarian capital, where his father was a horn player in the State Orchestra. Even though only two of his operas, Friedenstag (Day of Peace, an optimistic title for 1938) and Capriccio (1942), were first performed there, Munich has always ranked with Dresden and Vienna as one of the Strauss cities par excellence.
— Read more at Times Online

Commissioned as a companion piece to The Nutcracker and saddled with a lopsided libretto, Tchaikovsky's Iolanta was premiered in the same year as Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande. History has judged the opera with pettish condescension; applauding its bewitching orchestration while dismissing the vocal writing as uneven. Ostensibly a fanciful, even fey work, a thing of its own century and not the next, it is, in Annilese Miskimmon's unrelentingly taut production for Opera Holland Park, an electrifying drama of sexual repression, guilt and release.
— Read more at The Independent

Many opera lovers have mixed feelings about the increasing attention paid to the appearance and acting ability of singers. Naturally, it enriches the dramatic impact of an opera to have singers who are involving actors and look like the roles they portray. Still, singing comes first in opera. Acting with the voice is an honored art.
In casting the title role of Britten's "Billy Budd," however, a company is in a bind. Just as in the Herman Melville novella on which the opera is based, Britten's Billy must be beautiful. When we meet Billy, an illiterate foundling who does not know his age, he has been taken from a British merchant ship and pressed into service aboard the HMS Indomitable in 1797, in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. Throughout this all-male opera, Billy's shipmates and even the officers refer to him continually as "Beauty," "Baby" and the like.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Wagner finished three operas before he composed the first of the 10 works for which he is famous. "Das Liebesverbot," which is receiving an exceedingly rare production here at the Glimmerglass Opera Festival, was second in the trio of scores he produced before the 1843 "Flying Dutchman," which set the great Wagnerian juggernaut rolling.
— Read more at A washingtonpost.com

Growing up in Dallas, Laura Claycomb was no stranger to Santa Fe.
"My parents and my great-uncle collected a lot of Southwestern art," she says. "So we came here a lot when I was young."
But only this summer, amid gigs with major opera houses and orchestras around the world, is the Corpus Christi-born soprano making her debut with Santa Fe Opera. She's singing the role of the long-suffering wife Polissena in Handel's Radamisto.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

Kevin Maynor, the artistic director of Trilogy AOC (Artists of Color) company, was rushing off to rehearsal for the latest incarnation of "Emmett Till."
The Newark-based opera company will present a free staged performance of the work by Charles Lloyd Jr. tonight in the Science Theater at Science Park High School in Newark. "Emmett Till: The Opera" marks the world premiere of Lloyd's first opera; he's best known for his jazz compositions with Cannonball Adderley and others.
— Read more at NJ.com

The Ash Lawn Opera Festival is vacating its home of the past three decades, relocating to the by-then-renovated Jefferson Theater on the Downtown Mall.
Since its inception in 1978, the festival has been held on an outdoor stage at Ash Lawn-Highland, the Albemarle County plantation of James Monroe.
— Read more at Charlottesville Daily Progress

Contemporary composers looking for an easy way to create a big effect often turn to what could be called the orchestral pileup technique. Want to wallop your audience? Just add pummeling percussion, thick chords and more to create a barrage of noise. Or if the desired effect is ruminative, then lay on hazy harmonies and doodling melodic bits, though the result can sound like the mindless music a massage therapist employs to get clients to relax.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

In our age of political correctness, maybe it's thought gauche to laugh at a fat old man who imagines himself an irresistible Lothario. But surely Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff is a stand-in for all our follies and self-deceptions and, yes, overeating.
Verdi's operatic Falstaff was onstage Tuesday night at the Santa Fe Opera. In the title role, Anthony Michaels-Moore certainly looks and acts the part ? until his emergence after being dumped in the river with the dirty laundry.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

The Vancouver Opera has reached a five-year deal with its orchestra musicians that involves a major change to the orchestra's structure. The deal creates a fully tenured 54-member orchestra. A tenured orchestra is the standard for major orchestras around the world.
— Read more at globeandmail.com

According to tradition, a bride's wedding-day wardrobe includes items that are old, new, borrowed and blue. As it happens, those adjectives can also be applied to William Bolcom's effervescent opera A Wedding, which the Music Academy of the West will stage next week at the Lobero Theatre.
— Read more at The Santa Barbara Independent

One of the grandest spectacles in the lyric theater, Verdi's "Aida," returns to Seattle Opera this weekend after an absence of 16 years. Eleven performances are scheduled.
According to an eminent English critic, the opera "is a summation of all that Verdi had hitherto achieved, brilliantly combining the strengths of Italian Romantic melodrama with those of French grand opera. No work epitomizes more splendidly the qualities the world admires in grand opera."
— Read more at nwsource.com

In one respect, Undercroft Opera is the boldest company in Pittsburgh. It presents great operas using volunteer singers and instrumentalists. Whatever the level of talent and training, none earns his living as a performer.
Undercroft Opera presents Giacomo Puccini's "La Boheme" in performances Friday through Sunday at Bethel Park High School and Aug. 8 through 10 at Synod Hall in Oakland. Woody Brown is the conductor and Sally Denmead the stage director
— Read more at Pittsburgh Tribune-Review