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The New York premieres of Bernstein's "A Quiet Place" and Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon," the world stage premiere of John Zorn's "La Machine de l'etre" and the U.S. stage premiere of Morton Feldman's "Neither" highlight New York City Opera's 2010-11 season.
In its second season since returning to Lincoln Center, City Opera will focus on 20th century American composers as it presents another abbreviated schedule of just five productions.
— Read more at Deseret News

When I was in college, I hated Richard Nixon. Everyone I knew (except perhaps my father) hated Richard Nixon. My perspective was as a politically engaged undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley during the war in Vietnam - holding a low draft number.
I gradually stopped hating Nixon. But it wasn't until Oct. 22, 1987, in the company of bejeweled and Stetson-topped Texans, that I began to understand why. Houston Grand Opera had commissioned John Adams' "Nixon in China" to celebrate the opening of a new opera house.
— Read more at Mark Swed - PopMatters

Peter Gelb has had mixed results with risk-taking at the Met, but his latest gamble has paid off: The new production of Shostakovich's "The Nose" (1930) is a brilliantly conceived work of art that succeeds on every level. For this company premiere, the South African artist William Kentridge and the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev exploited the Met's formidable resources to create a huge, complex and highly original show that stunningly captured and communicated the opera's anarchic spirit.
— Read more at Heidi Waleson - WSJ.com

The Metropolitan Opera today announced the names of nine finalists who will sing in the 2010 National Council Auditions Grand Finals Concert on March 14 at 3:00 p.m., with the Met Orchestra conducted by Marco Armiliato. The finalists are: Leah Crocetto, soprano from Adrian, Michigan and Oxford, Connecticut; Lori Guilbeau, soprano from Golden Meadow, Louisiana; Rena Harms soprano from Santa Fe, New Mexico; Haeran Hong, soprano from Kang Won, South Korea; Hyo Na Kim, mezzo-soprano from Seoul, South Korea; Maya Lahyani, mezzo-soprano from Hod-HaSharon, Israel; Elliot Madore, Baritone from Toronto, Canada; Nathaniel Peake, tenor from Humble, Texas, and Rachel Willis-Sorensen, soprano from Tri-Cities, Washington.
— Read more at broadwayworld.com

The Royal Opera House has announced details of the resident companies' 2010-11 season at Covent Garden. In total, there are eight world premieres, two UK premieres, five new productions and fourteen revivals, as well as a major tour to Japan involving Anna Netrebko in Manon and Angela Gheorghiu in La traviata.
New productions of Wagner's Tannhauser, Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride, Massenet's Cendrillon and Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur provide several of the highlights of the new season, along with the world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

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The timing couldn't have been worse. Vancouver Opera made a bold decision to launch a new, lavish production of John Adams's opera Nixon in China. The Canadian premiere would coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, playing off those global events and taking advantage of an international audience. Such an exciting venture would no doubt attract another opera company to partner in the production, which would provide much-needed help with resources.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

As perhaps the best-known star in opera today, Renee Fleming could probably coast on her looks, voice and rapport with audiences.
And if ever there was an occasion to just mail in a crowd-pleasing series of arias by Puccini, Bellini and the rest, it was the concert Saturday at Festival of the Arts BOCA, an informal - if expensive - outdoor event at which her voice has to be carried over an amplification system.
— Read more at South Florida Classical Review

"War and Peace," the opera, arrived at the Kennedy Center freighted with expectations. Terms like "sprawling" and "masterpiece" are often applied to Prokofiev's score, in keeping with its literary model, Tolstoy's novel. Add in the curiosity value of the opera, seldom done in the West until the Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra began taking it on the road. Then there's the buzz surrounding the massive production, weighing in at 30 tons and costing $2 million to import. Saturday night's performance, conducted by Valery Gergiev, had an awful lot to live up to.
— Read more at Anne Midgette - washingtonpost.com

Before Stalin tightened his grip, the Russian avant-garde flourished in the 1920s. In a country that saw itself as the vanguard of a new world order, writers, painters, musicians and filmmakers felt free, indeed challenged, to find new expressive voices.
Toward the end of the decade, the 22-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich sounded his barbaric yawp in an absurdist opera called The Nose. Rarely seen since then, The Nose had its Metropolitan Opera premiere Friday night.
— Read more at Scott Cantrell - Dallas Morning News

Sarasota Opera's production of Engelbert Humperdinck's gorgeous 1893 fairy tale opera, "Hansel and Gretel," enjoyed a superb revival on Saturday night, bringing new wit and color to this classic fable of good versus evil. If, in this version, the evil part is not quite as scary as one might like, the good is so good that it matters little.
— Read more at HeraldTribune.com

Written for Karita Mattila and premiered in Lyon, the solo-voice opera Emilie opens with the fevered scratch of a pen.
Here is the Marquise du Chatelet, writing late into the night, her swollen belly hidden from society in the Queen of Poland's apartment at Luneville. Physicist, philosopher, linguist and astronomer, author of a dissertation on light, a discourse on happiness and the first translation of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, she has ordered her papers, fearing imminent death. At the age of 43, after 17 summers of accident-free amorous adventure, "la divine, la sublime Emilie" is about to give birth.
— Read more at The Independent

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Placido Domingo was discharged Sunday from Mount Sinai Hospital of New York City after successfully undergoing laparoscopic surgery to remove a localized malignant polyp in his colon, his representative Nancy Seltzer announced Monday morning.
The 69-year-old tenor is expected to make a full recovery. He is recuperating in New York.
Per doctor's orders, Domingo will rest for six weeks. His return to performing engagements will depend on how quickly he heals and returns to full strength, Seltzer said.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

The Met's new production of "The Nose" should be a hit with everyone except headline writers.
Had the Shostakovich comedy bombed, they'd quip "Met blows nose" or "Don't pick this opera!" But since this sassy, smart show is the highlight of the current opera season, they'll have to settle for something like "Breath of fresh air."
— Read more at James Jorden - NYPOST.com

Whether or not Placido Domingo's presence would have lifted the dynamics of this decidedly flaccid evening one cannot say. It's hard to imagine
him amidst the dispassionate chic of Richard Hudson's whiter than white gallery-like setting with its allusions to suns and moons and the universal orb of power. Indeed it is his character - the Ottoman ruler Sultan Bajazet - that we first see lying prostrate in defeat beneath the said orb. A giant foot bears down on it like a football, symbol of how mere mortals are but playthings of the gods. But Bajazet rises in defiance bearing this entire "universe" on his shoulders. And with four-and-half hours to go, that's just about as dramatic as it gets.
— Read more at The Independent

If you asked Laura Wilde in elementary school what she wanted to be when she grew up, she'd probably have told you a lawyer.
Wilde, whose initials spell out `law,' took a different path from courtrooms and case briefs.
— Read more at Indiana Daily Student

For better and for worse, the Metropolitan Opera has been in the headlines a lot since Peter Gelb became general manager four years ago. His initiatives have included live HD transmissions to movie theaters, new repertory and new productions. New directors and designers have been drawn from the worlds of film, architecture and fashion.
(Gelb, by the way, is married to conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, who was an assistant with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in the mid-1990s.)
— Read more at Scott Cantrell - Dallas Morning News

A new work by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, long resident in Paris, is an international event. Her third and latest opera, Emilie, was unveiled last week by the Opera National de Lyon and is soon to be staged at the Netherlands Opera, in Amsterdam, eventually arriving at the Barbican. She has a sort of international style, too.
— Read more at Times Online

Hansel and Gretel is a holiday tradition for families in Europe, not unlike The Nutcracker in the United States. But the Engelbert Humperdinck opera has never really caught on here, so it will be interesting to see how Sarasota Opera fares with its production, which is being billed as family friendly. The company is even offering free babysitting for one performance, making it easier for families and older children to take in the German "fairy tale'' opera.
— Read more at St. Petersburg Times

It has become commonplace at the Metropolitan Opera for directors and designers of new productions, especially modernist high-concept ones, to be lustily booed by a sizable contingent of the audience during opening-night ovations.
But on Friday night, when the Met introduced its production of Shostakovich's early opera "The Nose" based on the Gogol short story, the South African artist William Kentridge, who directed the production, helped design the sets and created the videos that animate the staging, received the heartiest bravos.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Dmitri Shostakovich composed his first opera, "The Nose," more than 80 years ago and based it on a short story written nearly a century before that.
Yet few works in the repertory seem more modern or musically challenging than this absurdist masterpiece that came to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time Friday night.
— Read more at Mike Silverman - The Associated Press

Tonight, young tenor Gordon Gietz makes his Metropolitan Opera debut in William Kentridge's highly anticipated new production of Shostakovich's The Nose, based on the satiric Gogol story about Kovalyov, a civil servant in St. Petersburg who wakes up one day to find that not only is his nose missing, but it has acquired a higher social rank than his own.
— Read more at nymag.com

On Friday afternoon four students from the University of Miami Frost School of Music had the dream opportunity to receive coaching from one of the opera world's superstars when Renee Fleming presented a master class at Gusman Concert Hall.
Fleming, who has done similar events at Harvard and Juilliard, was supportive and encouraging toward the young vocalists. "It takes so much courage to get up and do this," she said. "Master classes are hard."
— Read more at South Florida Classical Review

Even with their enduring popularity, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci are difficult works to bring off. While complementary in their unbridled vocal demands and tales of violent Sicilian love affairs, the operas are more distinct in their styles and requirements than it seems on the surface, one reason the two works rarely enjoy consistent success together.
— Read more at South Florida Classical Review

The mountains of Blacksburg will come alive with music this summer as luminaries from the opera and chamber music worlds gather to coach and mentor a new generation of superstar performers. The two-week festival -- Viva Virginia -- starts June 21 and includes concerts, lectures, and master classes open to the public.
— Read more at Virginia Tech News

It was a good week for new opera -- at least, there was an awful lot of it.
In Munich, Peter Eotvos's "Die Tragodie des Teufels" opened at the Bavarian State Opera, winning praise from Shirley Apthorp in the Financial Times and much fainter praise from George Loomis in the New York Times. The Suddeutsche Zeitung called it "mild, colorful, and above all puzzling and in the spirit of the times."
— Read more at Anne Midgette - washingtonpost.com

"Something definitely needs to be done about the end", says soprano Karita Mattila in plain Finnish after the last rehearsals of composer Kaija Saariaho's new opera Emilie at the Opera National de Lyon.
Saariaho agrees, and the famous film and opera director Francois Girard decides to change his direction. His merits as the auteur behind Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and Le violon rouge (1998) do not count for much when the two strong-willed Finnish women forcefully present their views.
— Read more at Helsingin Sanomat

Pavarotti started the ball rolling. On the occasion of a concert he gave in 1986 to a packed crowd of 10,000 Chinese at Beijing's Great Hall of the People, the tenor expressed a single regret, that "the capital of the world's most populous nation should be without a suitable opera theater."
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Faithfulness isn't just a virtue in relationships. It's also a plus in the realm of opera, and the Cleveland Orchestra's got it.
Just as the characters in Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte" engage in mischief but ultimately remain true, so, too, has the orchestra under music director Franz Welser-Most mounted a luminous production balancing interpretive liberties and fidelity to the score's essential nature.
— Read more at cleveland.com

The touring production of Porgy and Bess that opened Wednesday night at Bass Performance Hall certainly reminds us of the greatness of the work. Between stage director Charles Randolph-Wright and conductor Samuel Bill, the opening-night performance really crackled and sported turbocharged voices.
— Read more at Scott Cantrell - Dallas Morning News

She was learned and sexually liberated, a product of the 18th century but a role model for our time - "a great man whose only fault was being a woman", according to Voltaire, her sometime lover. History has tended to place Emilie du Chatelet (1706-49) in Voltaire's shadow, but she stole the limelight at Monday's premiere of a new opera by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho.
— Read more at FT.com

Operas dealing with the devil found special favor during the Romantic era, with early examples by Weber ("Der Freischutz") and Meyerbeer ("Robert le Diable") that catered to the age's fondness for the supernatural; later the vogue of Goethe's "Faust" spawned other well-known examples. Yet the subject has shown considerable staying power, as more recent operas by Stravinsky and Alfred Schnittke attest. Currently, the Bayerische Staatsoper is offering a devil opera for our time: "Die Tragodie des Teufels" ("The Tragedy of the Devil") by the Hungarian composer Peter Eotvos, which received its world premiere last week.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

For soprano Alyson Cambridge, the Washington National Opera's "Porgy and Bess" beginning March 20, is a "homecoming" in many ways.
Cambridge, who portrays Clara and sings "Summertime", the most famous in the renowned Gershwin opera, has studied and performed music from "Porgy" ever since she was a teenager growing up in the DC area. She studied at DC's Levine School of Music while attending Sidwell Friends School, and had always "dreamed of performing with the Washington National Opera."
— Read more at examiner.com

Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho made operatic history with her debut of an opera monologue. The demanding opera, whose sole character is Voltaire's enigmatic mistress Emilie, was performed by world-famous Finnish soprano Karita Mattila.
The opera, titled Emilie, opened Monday night at the Opera de Lyon in France.
— Read more at yle.fi

Is there anything more miraculous in all music than Le nozze di Figaro? The wealth of unforgettable melody, the wit and ingenuity of Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto, and, especially, the effervescent spirit and depth of Mozart's music. For all it's surface frivolity, 224 years after its premiere, Mozart's opera still has much to say about love, fidelity, forgiveness, and the eternal folly of the human heart.
— Read more at Chicago Classical Review

Those music lovers who were fortunate enough to hear one of the performances of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" offered this past weekend by Syracuse Opera now know the answer to the question "What's all the excitement about?"
For the first time in my 20 years in Syracuse, I experienced a performance in which all four of the leading roles were sung at a level that provided the kind of visceral excitement that well-schooled and powerful opera voices can produce. From the moment he opened his mouth, Greer Grimsley (the Dutchman) pinned the ears back of everyone at the Civic Center, even to the back rows.
— Read more at syracuse.com

It's amazing how an infusion of superior singing can freshen even the most venerable opera production.
Lyric Opera of Chicago is concluding its season with a revival of Peter Hall's celebrated staging of Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro," a production that has served as a kind of talisman for the company since it first graced the Civic Opera House in 1987. The show has been back several times over the years, with various casts, but when it returned to the company for the first time this season Sunday afternoon, there was a sparkle and vitality about it I don't recall having witnessed since this "Nozze di Figaro" was new.
— Read more at John von Rhein - chicagotribune.com

Madame White Snake begins with a borrowed umbrella and ends with a storm to drown the world. Opera Boston's international commission, composed by Zhou Long and librettoed by retired Boston trial lawyer Cerise Lim Jacobs, presents a rather structured, symmetrical argument between Love and Truth, with no clear winner but a vast body count. It's more conventionally pretty than some of the arrhythmic water-gong expat-Chinese compositions that you may have heard, but it's eerie and unhampered by resolution, musically and morally.
— Read more at Bostonist.com

Director Dylan F. Thomas sat slouched in the theater seat, murmuring instructions to those around him. But his hushed tones were overpowered by the bellowing voice of tenor Liam McLachlan as the dress rehearsal began for an updated take on Charles Gounod's classic opera "Faust"-- which transports 16th century Germany into the black-and-white world of TV's "The Twilight Zone" and opens Saturday. At times, Thomas pulled his headset off and scurried up to the stage, adorned with props he built himself, to offer more direction.
— Read more at Los Angeles Times

Hungarian composer Carl Goldmark (1830 - 1915) was something of a self-taught renaissance man. In addition to composition, he studied languages, philosophy, literature, and sciences, and continued on the path of learning throughout his life. By age 45, he had achieved worldwide fame for his first opera, Die Konigen von Saba and enjoyed friendships with many of the most important musical figures in Europe, including Johannes Brahms. Yet, for all his success, very little of his music retains a place in the modern repertoire, and Merlin is only the second of his six operas to be commercially recorded.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

[Seattle Opera moves its home-grown production of "Falstaff" to the big stage, where Peter Rose triumphs in the title role and Stephanie Blythe spreads infectious good humor as Mistress Quickly]
Giuseppe Verdi's remarkable final opera, Falstaff, composed when he was 80, has no great melodic lines, no triumphal marches, no vengeful heroes or consumptive heroines. At its center, there is only a drunken old man who imagines himself a seducer. Not the greatest material - but this is masterful Verdi, and Falstaff is one of Shakespeare's greatest creations.
— Read more at crosscut.com

If you look at the G. Schirmer vocal score of Mozart's "Die Zauberflote" ("The Magic Flute"), you'll see that it has only 167 pages of music. Yet some productions can seem interminable. Fortunately, the one presented by the Sarasota Opera positively flew by.
— Read more at yourobserver.com