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American Opera Projects, the Brooklyn-based company "known for bringing cutting-edge vocal productions to the masses" (New York Magazine), presents the final New York workshop of Stephen Schwartz's new opera Séance on a Wet Afternoon at the end of November in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Manhattan performance (The Angel Orensanz Center, 172 Norfolk St.) will be at 8:00pm on Friday, November 21, 2008. The Brooklyn performance (South Oxford Space, 138 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn, NY) will be held at 8:00PM on Saturday, November 22, 2008. Tickets to each performance are $50. AOP will honor Mr. Schwartz and the company's own 20-year history with post-show receptions available to the public with an additional donation.
— Learn more at operaprojects.org

Modest Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov keeps with the un-official theme of the San Francisco Opera's Fall season: Presidenting is hard work. Well, Godunov is not presidenting as much as Tsaring, but he comes on the tail of Idomeneo, who has to sacrifice his son to avoid his city's destruction by a giant monster, and Simon Boccanegra who has to fend all these nasty homicidal traitors.
— Read more at SFist.com

Must every Michael Berkeley opera be born with an accompanying drama off-stage? Nine years ago his half-completed score for Jane Eyre was stolen and never recovered; it had to be rewritten virtually from scratch. This year, the first performances of Music Theatre Wales's For You, his collaboration with Ian McEwan and the author's first libretto, were cancelled when the singer playing the antihero withdrew at the last minute.
— Read more at Times Online

After an absence of more than 15 years, maestro Seiji Ozawa returns to the Met to conduct six performances of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, from November 21 to December 13, 2008. Tenor Ben Heppner reprises the role of the obsessive gambler Ghermann, which he first sang at the Met in the 1995 premiere of Elijah Moshinsky?s production.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

Bowling Green State University's Opera Theater will open its season with two performances of Albert Herring, Benjamin Britten's 1948 chamber opera, at 8 p.m. Nov. 7 and 3 p.m. Nov. 9 in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center. Set in the imaginary English town of Loxford, the comic work is about a grown man still dependent on his mother who sets out to gain independence.
— Read more at toledoblade.com

One of the thorniest current sartorial debates comes to a head when I interview Royal Opera House Chief Executive Tony Hall.
After discussing the credit crunch and a recent high-profile project to attract patrons, we talk about the opera's dress code. The laid-back Hall, who often appears in an open-necked shirt during day hours, says people should dress however they want to.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

An opera featuring a libretto by Booker prize-winning novelist Ian McEwan has had its first performance in London.
For You, about an arrogant composer who yearns for the thrills of his youth, is being staged at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

['Crossover' singing star Alfie Boe talks to Rupert Christiansen about his thrilling Covent Garden debut.] Should you wish to reduce the Daily Telegraph's opera critic to apoplectic rage, just casually mention your enjoyment of the "opera singing" of Katherine Jenkins, Russell Watson or Paul Potts. Such people, I will inform you as acrid smoke gushes from my ears, have never performed in an opera professionally, and their reliance on amplifying microphones is the equivalent of Joe Bloggs outshooting Wayne Rooney by using a bionic boot. Accomplished musical entertainers they may be; opera singers they are not.
— Read more at Telegraph.co.uk

A two-act chamber opera by Martin Halpern of Brooklyn Heights, The Siege of Syracuse, receives its world premiere this weekend at the Brooklyn Music School Playhouse, 126 St. Felix Street (around the corner from the Brooklyn Aacademy of Music ? BAM).
— Read more at Bay Ridge Eagle

A new opera now making its appearance on the Internet, "The Devil and George Bush," is racking up a number of firsts.
It is the first opera composed expressly for the Internet and intended for download to an MP3 player or mobile phone. It is also the first opera ever written about a sitting President. It is also the first opera to include Presidential candidates (Obama and McCain).
The opera is the brainchild of composer Roger Rudenstein of Portsmouth, who conceived, wrote, composed and directed it.
— Read more at seacoastonline.com

No clowns in Detroit, no pops in Pasadena.
Michigan Opera Theatre has canceled a production of Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" because of the economy's southward plunge. The Pasadena Symphony Orchestra has abandoned plans for three pops concerts.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The odd proportions of the Oakland Opera Theater's scrappy new all-Stravinsky double bill begin to make perfect sense once you think in culinary terms. The show, which opened over the weekend in the company's bare-bones warehouse space near Jack London Square, comprises a 70-minute main course followed after intermission by a quick 25-minute dessert.
— Read more at sfgate.com

In remarks during the annual Richard Tucker Music Foundation gala concert on Sunday, Barry Tucker - the president of the organization named after his father, the eminent tenor - said that audience members might have noticed the absence of flowers on the Avery Fisher Hall stage. In this challenging economic environment, he said, "we would rather use the money to support our young singers than decorate the stage."
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Ever since the announcement in February 2007 that Gerard Mortier would head the New York City Opera, aficionados have looked to the Opéra National de Paris, where he is currently in his final season as director, for clues on what to expect. Now at Opéra Bastille comes not just a clue but hard evidence, in the form of a new production of Janacek's "The Cunning Little Vixen" unambiguously designated in the program as a co-production with the City Opera.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

Gianni Raimondi, a tenor with a pure and powerful voice who sang many times with Maria Callas, died Oct. 19, La Scala opera house said. He was 85.
— Read more at sfgate.com

The Metropolitan Opera led all U.S. arts organizations in fundraising from private sources with $128.1 million in 2007, according to a survey of 400 nonprofits by the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

[Opera inevitably deals with characters caught in larger-than-life emotional or political turmoil. But in the case of John Adams's Doctor Atomic - which had its Met premiere on October 13 - the subject matter is particularly compelling.]
The opera, in a new production by acclaimed filmmaker Penny Woolcock, conducted by Alan Gilbert, dramatizes a modern-day event of truly epic implications: the inauguration of the nuclear era with the first atomic bomb test during the tense final summer of World War II.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

The peasants, if not revolting, were certainly agitated as they crept through the auditorium. The Royal Opera Orchestra, under the pointed baton of Carlo Rizzi, had already set the tone of jaunty militarism, the trombones and side drum spurring on the inevitable Rossini crescendos. One of his great rarities ? Matilde di Shabran ? had arrived from Pesaro, his home town, in probably less time that it takes its anti-hero, the dastardly Carradino (Iron Heart), to appear.
— Read more at The Independent

The Royal Opera House and Manchester City Council have announced that they are in talks with the Palace Theatre in Oxford Street about the possibility of the ROH's establishing a base there for the Royal Ballet and Royal Opera.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Two years ago Anthony Minghella's new production of "Madama Butterfly" served as a calling card for the newly arrived general manager Peter Gelb's vision of the Metropolitan Opera as a place not only for great singing but also for theatrical innovation. Minghella, a gifted English filmmaker who died in March, offered a gorgeous cinematic spectacle. Dancers and puppeteers made for a lively bustle, but Michael Levine's spare, elegant sets focused attention on the principals by surrounding them with vast, empty space extended with a mirrored ceiling.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Betty Jane Packer, who lent her light soprano voice to the Pittsburgh Opera for nearly a half century and her administrative abilities to it for decades also, died last Monday at LifeCare Hospital in Wilkinsburg. The death came from a pulmonary embolism seven years after she had a stroke.
— Read more at post-gazette.com

Opera fans are a famously passionate bunch. On a recent Saturday at noon, a crowd of about 50 lined up outside the Regal Fenway 13, a full hour before the Metropolitan Opera's high-definition simulcast of Strauss's "Salome." When allowed through the doors, they streamed into the lobby and some kept going, right past a bewildered ticket-taker and into the theater, not yet officially open.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

British novelist Ian McEwan, known best for the book "Atonement," says his first opera does not use traditional devices such as fantasy elements.
McEwan said when he was creating his text for the opera "For You," which is set for performances at London's Royal Opera House, he purposefully avoided adding anything too silly to his creation, The Sunday Times of London reported.
— Read more at UPI.com

Wichita Grand Opera hopes familiarity will breed contentment from Wichita audiences. The company's seventh season, which opens next weekend, will offer a familiar mix of grand opera and ballet performances and the casting of young Kansas singers alongside established stars.
This season will feature the Kansas debut of Kansas native and Wichita State alum Joyce DiDonato, who will sing Rosina in "The Barber of Seville" next April -- continuing a company tradition that saw bass Samuel Ramey (from Colby and WSU) perform the last two seasons.
— Read more at Kansas.com

With "Salome," the first of 10 full-length operas that New York's Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting live to more than 800 theaters around the world, the audience at Pacific Place Theater got its money's worth before the music even started.
— Read more at Seattle Times

Gianni Raimondi, 85, a tenor with a pure and powerful voice who sang many times with Maria Callas, has died at his home near Bologna, Italy, La Scala opera house said.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

Forgoing orchestras, brass sections and choirs, Rufus Wainwright has announced that it's soon back to basics. After his opera opens next summer, the singer hopes to release a pared back collection of songs.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

The financially troubled New York City Opera furloughed employees for two days last week because it feared it would run out of money to pay them, a spokesman said Wednesday.
The staff, except for finance officials, was told in meetings on Oct. 15 to take the days off. They returned to work this week after the company tapped "board members, private donors and other sources" for money, said the spokesman, Pascal Nadon.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Facing falling ticket sales, decreased contributions and a gloomy economic forecast, Michigan Opera Theatre has canceled its spring production of "I Pagliacci," eliminated three full-time jobs and made other cuts designed to save $800,000 during the next eight months.
— Read more at Detroit Free Press

Can opera function surrounded by popcorn, Pepsi and jeans? The Metropolitan Opera, managed by the entrepreneurial Peter Gelb, has no reservations about transmitting its productions to a few select multiplex movie theaters across the country, trimming the operatic experience of all bowties, overpriced brownies and glib expressions.
— Read more at middleburycampus.com

[Review: Opera Pacific's production of Rossini's masterpiece soars.]
It's never good to try to be funny. The strain shows. Better to just let it fly, get in a rhythm, don't think about it too much.
Rossini couldn't have had much time to think about his comic masterpiece, "The Barber of Seville," written on a deadline in two weeks in 1816, and as funny today as it must have been then. Imagine writing an opera in two weeks. The composer must have been wolfing pasta (for the carbs), chocolate, caffeine, nicotine - anything to keep his pen moving. The strain doesn't show. "The Barber of Seville" is Rossini on a roll. I'll have what he's having.
— Read more at OCRegister.com

People who may be a bit hesitant about attending an opera may find some magic in the first production of the 2008-09 Syracuse Opera season.
"It's a great first opera," Catherine Wolff, general and artistic director of Syracuse Opera, said about "The Magic Flute."
— Read more at Watertown Daily Times

A definitively upbeat group of nine musicians calling themselves the East Village Opera Company stumbled on what could become a gold mine when they decided four years ago to become a performance group.
When you enter the venue where they are performing, the person handing out programs also offers you a small box with two disposable ear plugs -- "just in case you need them," she says politely.
— Read more at inRich.com

Even after repeated viewings, the Act II Spanish soirée in Franco Zeffirelli's production of Verdi's "Traviata" at the Metropolitan Opera doesn't fail to startle with its eye-popping cacophony of glitter, streamers and gaudy Technicolor costumes. By the time the dancers wearing cow costumes prance into the fray, most guests at a party this bizarre would be wondering whether someone had spiked the punch.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The radio audience that heard the opening night of Opera Carolina's "Faust" on WDAV-FM missed out on seeing the stage, of course, but I'm betting there was a compensation: Between scenes, when we in the Belk Theater were looking only at a black curtain and listening only to the clunks and thuds of sets being changed, the audience at home Saturday night presumably had the voice of the radio host to keep them company.
— Read more at Charlotte Observer

The University of Oklahoma Opera Theatre is collaborating with the OU School of Dance to present Leo Delibes' "Lakme" beginning Thursday. Performances are set for 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday in the Donald W. Reynolds Performing Arts Center in Holmberg Hall, 540 Parrington Oval.
— Read more at NewsOK.com

Today, the Metropolitan Opera debuts its subscription-based online video experience, making its extensive catalog of historic performances and recent high-definition productions available online.
— Read more at Yahoo! Finance

The Chamber Music Society will present distinguished Polish contralto Ewa Podles in a fascinating program titled "Dreams of Fancy, Tales of Loss," Sunday, October 26 at 5pm and Tuesday, October 28 at 7:30pm at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.
— Learn more at ChamberMusicSociety.org

Virginia Opera's season-opening "Il Trovatore" is a milestone: Artistic Director Peter Mark's 100th production in 34 seasons. As Mark's conducting propelled the music with feverish intensity Friday night, stage director Lillian Groag went all out to make Verdi's over-the-top melodrama memorable at George Mason University's Center for the Arts.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

American Opera Projects will present two workshop performances of Stephen Schwartz's first opera, Séance on a Wet Afternoon, in November.
The two-act opera by the composer of Wicked and Godspell will be performed by Lauren Flanigan, Hila Plitman, Caroline Worra, Jessica Miller, Ory Brown, Michael Zegarski, Daniel Hoy, Madeline Marquis, John Kimberling and Maeve Hoglund, who will be accompanied by pianists Charity Wicks and Chris Cooley. Valéry Ryvkin will be the music director.
— Read more at Playbill News

The second cast of Seattle Opera's "Elektra" had a hard act to follow, given that Saturday's opening night had been as compelling and indeed thrilling a performance of this challenging masterpiece as one could hope to witness. Sunday afternoon was excellent too, but not comparably revelatory.
— Read more at Seattle Times

David Angus will become music director at Glimmerglass Opera in upstate New York on November 1. He replaces Stewart Robertson, who left Glimmerglass in 2006 after almost 20 years.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Gail Robinson, a soprano who sang with the Metropolitan Opera for nearly two decades starting in 1970 and who went on to a career as a teacher and guide to emerging singers, notably as a director of the Met's Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, died on Sunday in Lexington, Ky. She was 62.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

I first heard John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" - an opera set in the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear test, on July 16, 1945?while driving toward the patch of New Mexico desert where the detonation took place. In the course of chronicling the first production of "Atomic," at the San Francisco Opera in 2005, I had arranged to visit the Trinity site, and brought with me the composer's computer realization of his score.
— Read more at Alex Ross - The New Yorker

Doctor Atomic, an opera by composer John Adams, examines the conditions and attitudes in Los Alamos leading up to the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" atomic test. Much of the libretto is made up of actual statements from scientists and military and government officials.
— Read more at NPR

Korn/Ferry Opera Holland Park has announced that Richard Bonynge will conduct their new production of Donizetti's Roberto Devereux in June 2009.
Working alongside him on the staging of the bel canto classic will be double-Olivier-Award-winning Director and former Associate Director of the Royal Court Theatre, Lindsay Posner.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Concerned about how people have tightened their belts in response to the souring economy, a struggling San Diego arts company is eyeing budget savings and urging the community to step up its support.
The Lyric Opera, which owns and occupies the Birch North Park Theatre, saw last quarter's donations fall by more than 20 percent, a drop that has left general director Leon Natker concerned about meeting the group's large expenses.
— Read more at SignOnSanDiego.com

If it had been merely bloodcurdling, Seattle Opera's "Elektra," which opened at McCaw Hall on Saturday night, would be a less astounding achievement. What this stunning production manages to do, without shortchanging the violence of the action or the uncompromising vehemence of Richard Strauss' music, is to reveal the humane and lyrical side of both in their full glory.
— Read more at Seattle Times

In popular mythology, opera is elitist. If only people knew how much opera fans love performances that satisfy less exalted desires.
One is the visceral thrill of hearing singers with searing power, especially if they add great artistry to the vocal punch. Houston Grand Opera delivered that combination almost defiantly in opening its 54th season Friday with a favorite double bill.
— Read more at Houston Chronicle

By Wexford standards, Richard Rodney Bennett's gothic thriller is about 100 years out of date. I don?t mean old-fashioned. Quite the opposite: The Mines of Sulphur is too modern. It fails all the tests associated with this quirky festival. It lacks 19th-century roots, it sounds dissonant and has not suffered undue neglect. Even if you weren?t around for the 1965 Sadler's Wells premiere under Colin Davis, you could have snapped it up at Glimmerglass in 2004 (now on CD) or New York the following year.
— Read more at FT.com

The cult American "post-minimalist" John Adams has the knack - like Janacek, say, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber - of choosing intriguing subjects for his work in the theatre. At Houston Grand Opera in 1987, he wowed the opera world with the premiere of his first large-scale work, Nixon in China. I was there, and Nixon remains, for me, Adams's most successful theatre piece to date, much performed in the original staging by his longtime collaborator Peter Sellars. Nixon in China is a pioneering work, a docu-opera with comic and often touching elements, set to a score of dizzying virtuosity and theatrical energy, enhanced by an important dance element (the original choreography is by Mark Morris, then, like Adams, on the threshold of international celebrity).
— Read more at Times Online

Noted director Robert Lepage makes his Met debut with a technologically innovative new production of Hector Berlioz's masterpiece, La Damnation de Faust, opening on November 7. Music Director James Levine will conduct the first staging of the work at the Met since 1906, with Marcello Giordani in the title role, Susan Graham as Marguerite, and John Relyea as Méphistophélès. La Damnation de Faust will be transmitted worldwide as part of The Met: Live in HD series on Saturday, November 22 at 1 p.m. (EST).
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

[With a roster of star sopranos and mezzos taking over the stage, the opening months of the Met's 125th anniversary season are offering a festival of the art of the diva.]
Of all the aspects that make an opera performance exceptional - the right conductor, creative design, innovative direction - one facet of the art form has reigned supreme from the first operatic performance to the most recent: a great soprano or mezzo-soprano, at the top of her form, can electrify an audience like nothing else.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

[A quarter-century after their first collaboration, Ian McEwan and Michael Berkeley have created a new opera. Following a false start, their tale of sexual obsession is finally ready for the stage. ]
The published version of Ian McEwan 's libretto for Michael Berkeley's opera For You became a collector's item even before its launch in June. There is a signed limited edition hardback, but the standard paperback contains the same bibliographic oddity: on the first page, it proudly announces that the opera received its first performance on "31 May 2008 at Theatr Brycheiniog". It didn't. The opera will be premiered at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio later this month, having been postponed just a few days before the planned premiere in Brecon, an event that should have been one of the highlights of this year's Hay festival.
— Read more at The Guardian

The small crowd didn't know what to expect at the East Village Opera Company's Friday night debut at Proctors.
With stage smoke swirling about and the nine-member band silhouetted against a blood red background, who knew that opera arias would not only be turned on their ears but actually sound fantastic in the process?
— Read more at dailygazette.com

It's easy to see why Jules Massenet's opera, Thaïs, is not performed a lot today. The story, of an ascetic monk in fourth-century Egypt who becomes obsessed with the salvation of an Alexandrian courtesan only to discover his own lust for her, is not one with much resonance for modern audiences. The two leads, the monk, Athanaël, and the courtesan, Thaïs, must have extraordinary chemistry to bring any sort of verisimilitude to the piece, and to get past the weaknesses in the libretto (party scenes that go on too long; love songs with no love object; a conversion accomplished with only a few moments of tough talk).
— Read more at globeandmail.com

Not so long ago, making a fanfare about big frocks and fancy sets in opera was the preserve of that crowd-pleasing impresario Raymond Gubbay. Heaven forbid that you uttered the words "authentic" or "spectacular" inside a "serious" opera house.
But take a look around ... Welsh National Opera's new production of Verdi's Otello comes "with opulent, traditional costumes". Scottish Opera is promising "an authentic take" on La traviata from David McVicar next month. And this week Zandra Rhodes's so-flashy-it's-trashy Aida - a "lavish theatrical spectacle" - returns to ENO. Trad is back.
— Read more at Times Online

In a star-studded opening week at the Metropolitan Opera, a highly-touted opera hunk fizzled, but a veteran diva delivered the goods. Make no mistake about it, bass-baritone Erwin Schrott is a gorgeous man with a classic profile and the bronzed, toned torso of a soap star. Curiously, though, in the title role of "Don Giovanni" (seen October 1), he fails to generate sex appeal or, for that matter, much sense of danger.
— Read more at GayCityNews

[Baltimore Opera Company delivers a compelling and musically dazzling version of Verdi's 'Aida']
Verdi's Aida, perhaps the most iconic of grand operas, doesn't demand too much. Only half a dozen or so amply gifted singers with an unusual capacity for technical and interpretive depth, a big-league chorus and orchestra, scenery that can live up to the visual expectations of a work set in ancient Egypt, and an all-encompassing sense of style. No wonder the piece doesn't come around every day. And when it does, chances for disappointment invariably run high.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

Full marks to the Canadian Opera Company for serious aims. The season in the Four Seasons Centre has begun not only with Mozart's surefire (though not foolproof) Don Giovanni, but Prokofiev's vast and seldom-seen War and Peace.
Make that Bore and Peace, or maybe Bore and War. The standard explanation for the absence of this 1942 opera from the repertoire is its extravagant roster of more than 60 roles. The Friday premiere made clear also that Prokofiev was more inspired by the military elements of the Tolstoy doorstopper than its high-society romantic entanglements.
— Read more at canada.com

In the Metropolitan Opera's relentless quest to exploit all media, the company next Wednesday will start making many video and audio broadcasts available for Internet streaming on demand.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Following the glittery opening gala with Renee Fleming, the Met in HD season came up with a real blockbuster - Karita Mattila in the title role of Salome. The Finnish soprano created a sensation at the Met in 2004 when she took it all off at the end of the Dance of the Seven Veils.
— Read more at La Scena Musicale

Chamber Opera Chicago has selected composer/conductor Victoria Bond to conduct the Chicago premiere of Samuel Barber's Pulitzer Prize-winning American masterpiece Vanessa, marking the 50th anniversary year of the opera's premiere. Chamber Opera Chicago's production is staged by Francis Menotti, son of Gian-Carlo Menotti, the librettist and director of the original 1958 Metropolitan Opera production. Victoria Bond conducts Marcy Stonikas and Sarah Gartshore in the double-cast title role; the company's Artistic Director, Barbara Landis, sings the part of Erika. Anatol is sung by Frederick J. Joseph III, and Lyric Opera of Chicago's Philip Kraus appears as The Old Doctor, all accompanied by a 33-piece orchestra.
Two performances take place at the Athenaeum Theatre: Friday, October 17 (7:30 pm), and Sunday, October 19 (3:00 pm).
— For more information call: Chamber Opera Chicago at 312-951-7944

The Diablo Light Opera Company (DLOC) announced that its 51st season, beginning in the fall of 2009, will be highlighted by the Northern California premiere of the recent Broadway hit CURTAINS and three other major musicals, one in concert.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Acclaimed young opera company Second Movement will be presenting the world premiere of a new opera entitled Fade by New York composer Stefan Weisman and librettist David Cote at Hoxton Hall, an old Victorian music hall in the heart of London's vibrant Shoreditch from 22.10.08 - 25.10.08. This piece is Second Movement's first commission.
— Read more at secondmovement.org

A Drake University professor is about to debut an opera she wrote to chronicle the Holocaust. Cathy Lesser Mansfield said it's a project she's been working on for most of her life.
— Read more at KCCI Des Moines

Mezzo-soprano superstar Stephanie Blythe, who plays the femme fatale in Pittsburgh Opera's "Samson and Delilah," leads a master class for the Resident Artists of Pittsburgh Opera on Wednesday, October 22 at 7:00 PM. The public is invited to this free event at the Company's new headquarters at 2425 Liberty Avenue in the Strip District. Reservations are recommended; call Lynette Vybiral at 412-281-0912 x240.

John Adams' intense and fascinating "Doctor Atomic," given its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera three years ago, made it to the Met on Monday night. Rather than use Peter Sellars' original production, which also was seen in Chicago and Amsterdam, the Met created a new staging - a rarity for a work this new - by Penny Woolcock.
— Read more at Yahoo! News

The Dicapo Opera Theatre presents Puccini's Turandot, directed by Michael Capasso and conducted by Pacien Mazzagatti. This production is the final presentation of Dicapo's Puccini Project. Since its founding in 1981, the Dicapo Opera Theatre has been dedicated to the music of the great Italian composer. With this production, Dicapo will have performed every piece of music Puccini ever wrote- all his operas, as well as his instrumental and vocal works.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Richard Strauss' "Elektra" opens at McCaw Hall Saturday night with American soprano Janice Baird making her Seattle Opera debut in the title role. In the latest Seattle Opera magazine, Paul Schiavo describes Strauss' vocal writing, especially for this role, as an "extreme sport."
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

Dolora Zajick is one of the world's leading dramatic mezzo-sopranos, but few people outside opera circles know that.
She's had no posters in New York's Time Square. No T-shirts. No splashy promotional campaigns for her latest CD.
But Zajick, who returns to Houston Grand Opera Friday to sing Santuzza in Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, says that was her choice.
— Read more at Houston Chronicle

In an age when opera tends to be pretty much the same from one major city to the next, there is something gratifying about the way Paris has warmed to the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Baroque composer whose five-act "lyric tragedies" from the age of the Sun King form the cornerstone of French opera. Revivals on the order of "Thésée" last season and, currently, "Armide" at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées have made it possible for people to experience here, at least intermittently, something altogether different from the fare at home, just as they did in the 17th and 18th centuries.
— Read more at International Herald Tribune

After the premiere of John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005, the original staging by the director Peter Sellars made its way to the other two companies that produced the work: the Netherlands Opera in Amsterdam and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Most composers would consider that a terrific send-off for a new opera.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

It's hard to believe that Samuel Barber's opera "Vanessa" had to wait 50 years to receive its first professional performances in Chicago. Hats off to Chamber Opera Chicago for reminding us of the intrinsic merits of a work that was so lavishly praised at the time of its 1958 Met premiere, then all but disappeared.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

For anyone looking for a break from the grim economic news, I can think of no better remedy than one of the four remaining performances of the Livermore Valley Opera's jolly production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville," continuing this week in that city's impressive two-year-old Bankhead Theater. Such a break could seem more like a holiday.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

Bremen's theatre was full to bursting on Saturday. It was the ultimate media coup: Katharina Wagner stages Rienzi, the opera her great-grandfather later regretted having written.
Richard Wagner was 29 when Rienzi received its Dresden premiere in 1842. His inspiration was a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, of "It was a dark and stormy night" fame. A literary prize for bad writing still bears his name. Katharina, who with her half-sister Eva has been so rashly handed the reigns of the Bayreuth Festival, is 30.
— Read more at FT.com

Sting, Andrea Bocelli, Placido Domingo and other stars of popular and classical music honored late Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti at a star-studded concert in Jordan over the weekend.
— Read more at Reuters

For Inland Northwest opera lovers, the Fox was the place to be Sunday afternoon, as 16 of the area's best young voices got their chance at a big-time career.
The Metropolitan Opera National Council held its district competition in Spokane, and the arias filled the Martin Woldson Theater.
— Read more at seattlepi.nwsource.com

A production of Verdi's "Aida" by "stage and visual director" Paolo Micciche opened the Baltimore Opera's new season Saturday. It's conspicuously similar to his Washington National Opera production at DAR Constitution Hall a few years back -- from the hyperactively mobile scrims scooting about the stage to the swirl of cheesy computer-generated imagery projected on them. It's as if some PowerPoint presentation on "Aida" had gone berserk, piling on Day-Glo renderings of ancient Egypt until Verdi's opera didn't stand a chance against all the visual noise.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

AS love duets go, this one places an unusual premium on the life of the mind. A wife recites Muriel Rukeyser. Her husband comes back with Baudelaire. He pushes her down on the bed. She tugs his tie. Then he notices the time, adjusts his clothes and leaves for work.
At the Metropolitan Opera the Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley, as J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the American mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, as Kitty Oppenheimer, recently replayed these moments over and over, improvising dance moves, whisking aside a notebook, perfecting the sweep of their prop cigarettes. "I just want it to be him," Mr. Finley said, visibly in the grip of a gentle obsession, loosening his collar yet again.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

The Met's acclaimed production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, directed by the late Academy Award-winning film director Anthony Minghella, returns to the stage for twelve performances beginning Friday, October 24, 2008. Reprising their portrayals in the production this season are sopranos Patricia Racette and Cristina Gallardo-Domâs in the title role, tenors Roberto Aronica and Marcello Giordani as Pinkerton, and baritone Dwayne Croft as Sharpless. Patrick Summers conducts the opera for the first time at Met.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Screenings draw silver-haired patrons, mezzo wannabes
Linda Oliver isn't put off by lyrics in another language.
For her, opera is about elaborate costumes and beauty, symphony and emotion.
— Read more at The State

Daniel Abrams' Opera For Piano concert on Oct. 15, at the Mannes College of Music, will include the American premier of his Musical Portraits from Wagner's 'Ring' (each"Portrait" is based on the musical motif of that character, a particular scene of importance, and/or a verbal statement of consequence).
The program also includes ABRAMS' Chaconne on "Dido's Lament" from Dido And Aeneas , Variations on "Voi Che Sapete" from The Marriage of Figaro, and Variations on "Ein Engel Leonora" from Fidelio.
— Learn more at Daniel-Abrams.com

As far back as Karen Fitch can remember, The Grand theater in Ellsworth has never been so full as when they screened the high-definition, live transmission of the Metropolitan Opera's gala opening performance on Sept. 22. The show featured world-renowned soprano Renee Fleming singing selections from Verdi's "La Traviata," Massenet's "Manon" and Strauss' "Capriccio."
— Read more at Bangor Daily News

Giacomo Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" has the distinction of being one of the most produced operas in the United States. It's a crowd pleaser, with its beautiful melodies and heart-wrenching story of passion and shattered love.
...
Utah Opera is bringing "Madame Butterfly" back to the Capitol Theatre starting Saturday, its fourth production of the opera in two decades.
— Read more at Deseret News

I HAVE seldom been as rattled by a question as I was last month, when I visited an arts criticism class at the University of Southern California. A thoughtful student asked me why I dislike most new operas.
What? I consider myself a proselytizer for new opera, I said, someone who has urged companies to commission works and attended every premiere I could get to, always with hopeful anticipation. I rattled off a list of significant operas from recent years, including Thomas Adès's audacious adaptation of Shakespeare's "Tempest," Poul Ruders's fantastical and harrowing "Kafka's Trial" and John Adams's grimly humane and musically intricate "Doctor Atomic," which comes to the Metropolitan Opera in a new production on Monday.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

That hugely talented, arch-romantic balladeer Rufus Wainwright has written his first opera. It's called Prima Donna, and it will be given its premiere at next summer's Manchester International Festival, after plans to stage it at New York's Metropolitan Opera fell through.
— Read more at Telegraph

John Copley's production of Puccini's La boheme, now in its twenty-second revival at the Royal Opera House, is a bit like an old BBC costume drama. It's produced with care, it's directed with an eye for detail and it's a favourite with audiences, as the rapturous reception afforded to the first night of the current revival showed.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

It's a banner year for San Jose's first lady of the arts, Irene Dalis.
Dalis, the general director of Opera San Jose, celebrated last month the 25th anniversary season of the company she founded after finishing her career with the New York Metropolitan Opera.
— Read more at San Jose Mercury News

Damnation was the dominant theme Saturday in a new Vienna State Opera's production of Charles Gounod's Faust. But redemption triumphed in the form of wonderful singing and a powerful orchestral performance.
— Read more at The Associated Press

Just a few years ago, the movie marquee now overlooking busy Columbus Boulevard would have read like a prank, a mistake or science fiction: Right below "Free Popcorn Every Tuesday" at the United Artists Riverview Cinema, it says "Advance Tickets Now on Sale - Met Opera Series."
That's right: opera.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

Opera, let's face it, is not realistic. Not unless the people you know conduct their conversations in song, accompanied by a 40-piece orchestra.
...
Or the smuggler's den and bullfighting arena of the grand-mere of all verismo operas, the 1875 French masterpiece "Carmen" - the appropriate 2008 fall offering of the Fort Lee-based New Jersey Association of Verismo Opera.
— Read more at NorthJersey.com

Rufus Wainwright's plangent, melancholic pop songs, pulsating with emotion and drama, might be said to have an operatic perfume about them. And now the singer-songwriter is going the whole way - composing a two-act, two-hour opera for four singers and full orchestra, to be premiered in Manchester next year.
— Read more at The Guardian

Last year, Manchester international festival produced Monkey: Journey to the West, by Damon Albarn and designed by Jamie Hewlett. It proved a great success on its premiere, and the Royal Opera House hired it in this summer. Again, in London it was a huge success, with sell-out performances and new audiences tempted in to Covent Garden. Next month, it will start a run at the huge O2 in London. It recalls the kind of success that opera had in Italy in the late 19th century - when operas such as Pagliacci and Cavalliera Rusticana first hit the stage.
— Read more at guardian.co.uk

Following a triumphant Opening Night Gala to kick off its 125th season, the first production to open at the Met was Richard Strauss' Salome, which began performances Sept. 23.
With German libretto by the composer and Hedwig Lachmann (translated from Oscar Wilde's play) this 1905 retelling of the biblical tale is a well-established and frequently-performed part of the operatic repertoire. The one-act piece is perhaps most famous for its "Dance of the Seven Veils."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

What exactly do we get from a staging today of Bizet's second produced opera, "The Pearl Fishers"?
Is it all the wrapping around one of the most popular duets in opera? The rare opportunity to hear a great "B-side" tenor aria? An exercise in music history letting us examine an 1863 work written when the French composer was just 24, 12 years before he capped his brief life with "Carmen"? A chance to inhale "exotic" opera of the type that inspired many a 1930s RKO island movie? Or the latest showcase for barihunk Nathan Gunn to strut and flex without a shirt?
— Read more at CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Ponchielli's should-be-six-star vehicle "La Gioconda" lumbered back onto the Met stage September 24 in the creaky but fun 1967 production designed by Beni Montresor. Two apt stars were aboard, the lower-voiced women Olga Borodina and Ewa Podles. Deborah Voigt is certainly a legitimate star, but despite earnest efforts, she proved not much of a Gioconda.
— Read more at GayCityNews

Opera expert and composer Damon Ferrante will present "The New Golden Age: American Opera in the 21st Century" at the Paramus Public Library on Tuesday, October 14th at 7:00pm. Mr. Ferrante will speak about such operas as Mark Adamo's "Little Women", Robert Aldridge's "Elmer Gantry", and Damon Ferrante's "Jefferson and Poe." The Paramus Public Library is located at 116 E. Century Rd. in Paramus, NJ 07652. For more information please call 201/599-1300.

"The Pearl Fishers" is the opera the 24-year-old Georges Bizet had to get under his belt before going on to compose the masterpiece everybody knows, "Carmen."
John Mauceri, the conductor for Lyric Opera of Chicago's new-old revival, got it right when he described "Les Pecheurs de Perles" as "opera as ritual rather than opera as drama." Nothing much happens in the course of this exotic pageant about forbidden love, but it takes nearly three hours to do it.
— Read more at chicagotribune.com

Artist Francesco Clemente worked quickly. Karita Mattila on Feb. 18, 2008...Renée Fleming on March 5...Natalie Dessay just five days later on March 10.
Five more portraits of acclaimed sopranos would follow, ending with a watercolor of Anna Netrebko painted on June 4 in a Paris hotel room.
— Read more at The Oneida Daily Dispatch

It seems that being a sports fan has paid off for Peter Gelb, general manager of New York's famed Metropolitan Opera.
"When I was a child, I used to be very disappointed when I would turn on the TV and a game would be locally blacked out because it wasn't sold out," Gelb says recently from his office in New York.
— Read more at The Canadian Press

Karita Mattila. Naked. Those three words have been on the mind of practically every New York opera fan for the last month as the Finnish soprano strips bare in the Metropolitan Opera's revival of "Salome" by Richard Strauss. On Saturday, the company will broadcast the opera live in HD to movie theaters around the country. While those at the Met will see Mattila go full frontal during the Dance of the Seven Veils, those of us at the movies will see something, well, much more restrained.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Giuseppe Verdi's classic "La Traviata" made a seamless transition from Parisian opulence to the everyday reality of Switzerland's busiest train station Tuesday night - a challenging experiment in live television designed to bring opera to a wider audience.
— Read more at CANOE -- JAM!

Marthe Keller's production of Don Giovanni , first seen in 2004, is back, and, despite conscientious resuscitation by Gina Lapinski, it still looks grim. The characters still stalk the stark stage in a frantic quest to avoid stereotyping. The antihero still rides down to an anticlimactic hell in a mirrored elevator. Michael Yeargan still frames the action with faux-brick walls that slide back and forth in lazy abstraction. Christine Rabot-Pinson's perverse costumes, vaguely Byronic, still make everyone inelegant; everyone, that is, except the peasant-girl Zerlina.
— Read more at Martin Bernheimer - FT.com

It lasted just a moment, but oh what promise.
Cio-Cio-San made her entrance, rapturously, down a long curved ramp at the back of the stage. Her family entourage, dressed in colorful, modern-styled kimonos, formed a long hedge with umbrellas twirling. Circular rings painted on the floor evoked ripples in a Japanese garden pond. The brilliant twilight sky bled from fuchsias to deep reds.
— Read more at accessatlanta.com

Indianapolis Opera opens a new season with one of the freshest, most vibrant productions it has offered in years, largely with a cast making company debuts.
"Il Trovatore" is a demanding piece, what with its need for several strong lead singers and its potentially confusing simultaneous subplots that include a love triangle, a gypsy's plans to avenge her mother's death and questions about the identity of the title character, a troubadour.
— Read more at Indy.com

Miriam Ramaker, a singer and voice teacher so determined to keep opera alive in Indianapolis that she helped start a company, died Sunday at St. Vincent Hospital after a long illness.
— Read more at The Indianapolis Star

New York City Opera opened what is going to be a modest season, devoid of staged productions, with a very fine concert of notable 20th-century works at St. George Theater on Staten Island on Saturday night. For longtime supporters who have been worried that the challenges the company is now facing are threatening its existence, this concert was reassuring evidence that City Opera's musicians, singers and choristers are still around and eager for something to do.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

As one of the Three Tenors, Luciano Pavarotti helped to bring opera to the masses. Now, the two surviving members of the musical trio are to fulfil the late maestro of Modena's ambition to perform at one of the world's great historical sites.
Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras will take to the stage next weekend in the ancient Jordanian city of Petra for a £5,000ahead charity concert celebrating Pavarotti's life.
— Read more at Times Online

No opera has music more gorgeous - more brilliantly colored, more lusciously textured, more passionately yearning - than Die tote Stadt. So why is it so rarely performed?
Well, the title, "The Dead City," may be a little off-putting. And Erich Wolfgang Korngold's youthful masterpiece needs two lead singers, a soprano and a tenor, who can sing - and sing and sing - over high-cholesterol orchestrations that make Wagner sound like Mozart. The soprano also has to be visually plausible as a dancer. With Korngold mainly remembered for his second career as a film composer, we seem to have settled on Richard Strauss as the representative of late-romantic Austro-German opera.
— Read more at Dallas Morning News

"Lucia" lovers are in luck at the Metropolitan Opera these days.
A year after French soprano Natalie Dessay opened the season to acclaim in a new production of Donizetti's "Lucia di Lammermoor," a very different kind of singer scored her own triumph as the Scottish maiden driven to madness and murder.
— Read more at Seattle Times

The stunning new Oslo Opera House, an architectural masterpiece on the waterfront, rivals its famed counterpart in Sydney.
Covered with slanting white marble and granite, the huge futuristic structure resembles a ski slope from a distance. Some have likened it to an iceberg, and indeed the building slopes into Bjorvika, the harbor in central Oslo from which the neighborhood takes its name.
— Read more at The Boston Globe

The board of New York City Opera was taken aback last month by news that Gerard Mortier, who is to become the company's general manager and artistic director next fall, had teamed up with Nike Wagner, one of Richard Wagner's great-granddaughters, to seek the directorship of the prestigious Bayreuth Festival in Germany.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Thanks to the generosity of one of its board members, the Metropolitan Opera announced today that a number of prime orchestra seats, usually $175 - $220, will be available for $30 for all nine performances of John Adams's Doctor Atomic. Agnes Varis, a managing director of the Met board, and her husband Karl Leichtman, have purchased $500,000 worth of some of the best orchestra seats for Doctor Atomic, so that they can be redistributed at this lower price.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Over the last 200 years, Beethoven's Fidelio has been the bearer - however haphazardly - of some of the most monumental music heard in the opera house. But perhaps only with its new Opera Company of Philadelphia production will it also become a living, breathing, singing piece of sculpture.
— Read more at Philadelphia Inquirer

New York City Opera has laid off 11 members of its administrative staff because of financial pressures and a lack of work caused by the cancellation of most of its season, a spokesman said on Friday.
The employees, mostly in junior positions, were dismissed on Wednesday and given severance packages, said the spokesman, Pascal Nadon. "There is no plan for them to be rehired," he said in a telephone interview.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Marthe Keller's production of Mozart's "Don Giovanni" at the Metropolitan Opera opened in March 2004, several months before Peter Gelb was named the company's next general manager, and it was revived a year later, many months before he actually took control. But in its current revival, which opened on Saturday afternoon, this production stands as a plausible representative of the Gelb aesthetic that elevates theater to a near par with music.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Nashville Opera opens its new season Oct. 10-11 with artistic director John Hoomes' vividly re-imagined production of Mozart's Don Giovanni. With a libretto written by Lorenzo da Ponte, the opera tells the tragicomic tale of the fabled seducer Don Juan. It is scheduled to be performed at 8 p.m. at Jackson Hall in the Tennessee Performing Arts Center (505 Deaderick St.) both nights.
— Read more at The Tennessean

John Adams may be one of the few prominent American composers of opera, but he doesn't much want to hear about it. If you raise the subject, he will protest, with the self-deprecation that is a basic part of his persona, "I don't think of myself, 'Here I am, the American Composer, sitting down to his desk this morning.'" He does have a point: his five operas have as many differences as similarities.
— Read more at Opera News

As the house lights dim and the maestro lifts his arms, a hush comes over the crowd. It's opening night at The Metropolitan Opera - only we're 2,800 miles away.
Retiree Ellen Gifford sits with popcorn and a soda inside the AMC Burbank 16 theater. For $22 a ticket, she doesn't need to wear an evening gown, pay hundreds for a seat "in the boonies" or fly to New York to take part.
— Read more at The Associated Press

For someone still very new to opera, Penny Woolcock has led a decidedly operatic life: while she was in her teens, she was arrested for appearing in a so-called radical play in Buenos Aires, ran off with a man in the theater troupe and had a baby on her own in Barcelona. Those are just some of the personal underpinnings of her professional life, which took off, quite unexpectedly, when she was in her mid-thirties.
— Read more at Opera News

Alberto W. Vilar, the opera lover and disgraced patron of the arts, took center stage in a federal courtroom on Monday, when his trial for securities fraud opened with a prosecutor describing him as a lying fraudster who finagled money out of clients.
Defense lawyers gave a contrasting view, portraying him as a top-rated investment adviser who made millions for big pension funds and individuals and returned "every penny" to his clients.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

[On Oct. 4 New York City Opera presents the first performance of Looking Forward - a celebration of twentieth-century music - at Staten Island's historic St. George Theatre.]
While its home venue, the New York State Theater, undergoes a yearlong renovation, the company has launched a new initiative to perform in venues throughout the city in the future, in addition to giving performances at its home at Lincoln Center.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Switzerland's busiest train station has been transformed for a special performance of Giuseppe Verdi's classic opera La Traviata.
Hundreds of people turned up to watch the performance at Zurich train station on Tuesday night.
Verdi's drama was also screened live on national TV and the internet.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

Barre has almost always been home to Italians and French-Canadians, and consequently opera. So, it is no surprise to find opera in a Barre home. But live and at this level?
On Sunday afternoon, a young Montreal soprano and a veteran Canadian tenor filled the home of Chris Maloney and Paul Guiffre with the sounds of grand opera and Broadway to an intimate and enthusiastic paying audience. It was what is called a "house concert," but the level of performance was world-class.
— Read more at Times Argus

At its recent annual meeting, Cincinnati Opera announced newly-appointed members and officers to the Board of Trustees and Guild for the 2008-2009 fiscal year, and awarded the fourth annual Charlotte Shockley Volunteer Award to devoted volunteer Peggy Kahn.
— Read more at Community Press

A New York patron of the arts known for his largess to the Metropolitan Opera is on trial, charged with swindling clients of his investment firm.
Alberto Vilar and Gary Tanaka, his partner in Amerindo Investment Advisors, allegedly diverted clients' money to their own purposes, including Vilar's donations to opera companies, and robbed some victims to repay others, the New York Daily News reported.
— Read more at UPI.com

Classical composer Philip Glass has been commissioned to produce an opera that imagines the final months in the life of the late Walt Disney.
The opera, which will honour the musician's 75th birthday, will be based on the novel The Perfect American.
— Read more at BBC NEWS

La Gioconda is a wonderfully terrible opera, a compendium of shameless clichés cloaked in glorious melody. On Saturday, the Met mustered a wonderfully terrible performance, populated with fine singers and compromised by an unintentionally comic production.
— Read more at Martin Bernheimer - FT.com

The Metropolitan Opera triumphantly kicked off its 2008-09 season on Sept. 22 with a gala performance starring Renée Fleming in three fully-staged scenes and including some of her most acclaimed portrayals.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Franco Zeffirelli's lavish production of Verdi's poignant masterpiece about love and sacrifice, La Traviata, returns to the Metropolitan Opera stage on October 20 for nine performances through November 20, 2008. Anja Harteros sings the title role for the first time at the Met.
— Read more at BroadwayWorld.com

Woody Allen, Miss Piggy and a trio of cross-dressing divas were among those who appeared at a tribute to Plácido Domingo at the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday for the 40th anniversary of Mr. Domingo's Met debut, The Associated Press reported.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Bryant Park Corporation announces the inaugural season of a series of early fall classical music concerts featuring musicians from the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera, Orchestra of St. Luke's, the Metropolitan Opera Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, and The New York Pops.
— Learn more at bryantpark.org