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The idea loudly espoused in Mozart's Cosi fan tutte - that women can't help being unfaithful to their men - is hard to swallow under normal circumstances. Encountering the work while Gov. Sanford's confession of serial line-crossing is all over the news requires even more indulgence than usual.
Wolf Trap Opera's intriguing production, which had its final performance Tuesday night at the Barns, emphasized the darker side of Cosi fan tutte, treating the wager that sets the plot in motion as a kind of calculated scientific experiment, set in a pristine clinic.
— Read more at Tim Smith - The Baltimore Sun

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Is there a more beguiling place in the Midwest to experience high-quality opera during the summer than the Opera Theatre of St. Louis?
The company's 34th season marked the debut of a new troika consisting of general director Timothy O'Leary (succeeding Charles MacKay, who left St. Louis to helm the Santa Fe Opera), artistic director James Robinson and music director Stephen Lord.
— Read more at baltimoresun.com

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis tapped Timothy O'Leary, 34, to take over as general director last fall to, in part, attract new and younger audiences.
The ticket and revenue numbers show that he and his crew have been able to make that happen.
— Read more at St. Louis Business Journal:

Head to London, New York or Vienna if you're seeking Opera Mecca. Where operetta and musical theater are concerned, the prime destination is a small college town in Ohio.
An exaggeration? The world's great opera houses may field starry singers and extravagant productions, but Ohio Light Opera has been king in its field for three decades at the College of Wooster. No other American company comes close to the exploratory gusto the Wooster pros lavish on beloved and neglected repertoire.
— Read more at cleveland.com

Although Betty Allen is among the greatest black opera singers America has produced, she died in Valhalla, N.Y., on June 22 without the name recognition she deserved. She was 82.
Nonetheless, the mezzo-soprano, a favorite of conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, has had significant influence on voices molded and heard right here in Lexington.
— Read more at Kentucky.com

The Metropolitan Opera, struggling to make headway against large and looming deficits, has won a cost saving from its stagehands. The stagehands union, Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, said on Tuesday the workers agreed to forgo a 3 percent increase in salary and benefit expenses for the 2009-2010 season, the last in its contract. The union and the Met agreed to extend the contract for another year, when the full raise will go into effect.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Bayreuth's famous opera festival was threatened with strike action on Wednesday just over three weeks before it opens its doors to the public.
The German services union ver.di said it would not hesitate to call out its members employed at the event in a dispute over pay and working conditions.
— Read more at Monsters and Critics

The Sun Valley Opera was formed in a living room eight years ago by Marsha Ingham, Frank Meyer and Floyd McCracken. Founded to promote opera in Sun Valley, the small, grassroots arts organization reached a milestone on Sunday, June 28, with a sold-out performance at the Sun Valley Pavilion filling 1,400 seats.
— Read more at Idaho Mountain Express

At the Opera Comique in Paris, the theater where it was first performed, Bizet's Carmen has triumphed again. One of the most performed operas around the world, it has recorded nearly 3000 performances alone at the Comique. But a new production with a fresh perspective has given the old girl new life. Hugh Canning, of the Times of London, declares "Carmen has never sounded more revolutionary, romantic or thrillingly vibrant."
— Read more at PlaybillArts

Denyce Graves, Washington's homegrown opera superstar, and Robert Montgomery were married yesterday in a quiet ceremony at a chapel of the National Cathedral.
"An intimate thing, just the two of us," as she described it to us last week -- only a handful of guests and the cathedral's dean, the Very Rev. Samuel T. Lloyd III, there to administer the vows.
— Read more at washingtonpost.com

Long Beach Opera will stage three American operas for its 2010 season, the company has announced, including a new production of John Adams' "Nixon in China." Roberk Kurka's "The Good Soldier Schweik," based on Jaroslav Hasek's satirical novel, and a reprisal of Ricky Ian Gordon's "Orpheus and Euridice," staged in a municipal swimming pool, will also be produced as part of Long Beach Opera's 31st season.
— Read more at Timothy Mangan - OCRegister.com

The Royal Opera has announced the withdrawal of Deborah Voigt from the high-profile revival of Tosca, opening on 9 July. The American soprano has cancelled all her appearances as the title role of the opera due to 'acute colitis'.
In her stead, two oustanding Romanian-born sopranos will share the role of Floria Tosca: Angela Gheorghiu and Nelly Miricioiu.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

The Zurich Opera has named noted Italian conductor Fabio Luisi as its next general music director starting in 2012.
Luisi, the current director of Dresden's Semperoper, on Tuesday welcomed his appointment at a "wonderful house with an exceptional orchestra."
— Read more at sfgate.com

Lyndon Terracini has been appointed the new artistic director of Opera Australia.
Terracini, the artistic director and chief executive of Major Brisbane Festivals, will take up his new role in October. The appointment comes after a four-month international search following the death of music director Richard Hickox in November 2008 and a period of internal review and restructure.
— Read more at Yahoo!7 News

Want some popcorn with your opera? You can have it at the Riviera Theatre, where the new Nickel City Opera is in residence this weekend doing a bang-up job with Rossini's "The Barber of Seville."
With so much good news surrounding the company's first production, knowing where to begin is difficult. Friday's performance of the slapstick opera by Gioachino Rossini featured tremendous voices, fine comic timing, lovely sets, sumptuous 18th century costumes and a competent orchestra. It topped the opera productions I have seen at the Chautauqua Institution. That was how good it was.
— Read more at The Buffalo News

The charismatic French soprano Natalie Dessay is one of the most exiting opera singers on the stage today, equally celebrated for both her incandescent singing and her superb acting.
Now an admired interpreter of bel canto and lyric heroines such as Lucia di Lammermoor, Marie (La Fille du regiment), Amina (La sonnambula), Pamina (Die Zauberflote), Manon, Juliette and Ophelie (Hamlet), Dessay originally made her reputation with showpiece coloratura roles such as Offenbach's Olympia, Mozart's Queen of the Night and Strauss' Zerbinetta.
— Read more at PlaybillArts

U.S. soprano Renee Fleming will have more than the Royal Opera House audience to worry about on Tuesday night.
Her performance in Verdi's "La Traviata" is being beamed live into 178 cinemas across Britain and the rest of Europe, as well as to 15 giant screens in England, Scotland and Wales, in the company's biggest foray yet into real-time cinema tie-ins.
— Read more at Reuters

Mario Martone's production of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera has had a changeable history since it opened in 2005. Updating the work to the aftermath of the American civil war was deemed obfuscating when the staging was new. Then, before the first revival at the Royal Opera House, there was an outcry when it was discovered that one singer was intending to "black up" for her role.
— Read more at The Guardian

Lake George Opera artistic director Curt Tucker used a simple formula when he chose the operas for this season, which opens July 2.
"Make them laugh, make them cry, give them something new," Tucker said laughing. "You need to appeal to a broad audience."
— Read more at dailygazette.com

Massenet's opera "La Navarraise" was nicknamed "Calvelleria Espanola" after its 1894 premiere, starring Emma Calve, reflecting that the composer had jumped on the verismo bandwagon following the huge success of Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana." The two works were often staged together on double bills, but "La Navarraise" was eventually eclipsed by its predecessor and is now seldom performed.
New York City Opera offered a rare outing during a free concert performance on Friday in the World Financial Center's vast Winter Garden, one of three City Opera events this month during the River to River Festival.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

"I CONSIDER myself a young singer still," the 32-year-old Latvian mezzo-soprano Elina Garanca said last month at Cafe Mozart between performances at the Vienna State Opera, and few would disagree. Yet to add the adjective "rising" would be to miss the mark. In Central Europe, where the right opera star can still rock the tabloids, Ms. Garanca has been called "the blond Netrebko."
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Nearly 850 young singers applied for this summer's apprenticeship program at Lake George Opera. About 350 applicants were selected for live auditions -- three to five minutes each -- in New York City and Philadelphia, all competing for only 12 coveted spots.
— Read more at Times Union

This concert given at the Royal Opera House had a somewhat troubled genesis. Originally announced as a celebrity recital for Rolando Villazon accompanied on the piano by Antonio Pappano, Dmitri Hvorostovsky agreed to step in after Villazon was instructed by his doctor to cancel all his engagements for the rest of the year. Sadly, Hvorostovsky also had to cancel at far shorter notice, having sustained an injury last week.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

Kaija Saariaho is one of the foremost composers working in music today. Originally from Finland but based in Paris for the past twenty-seven years, Saariaho operates in a liminal idiom closely connected to spectral processes she adopted in her time working at IRCAM in the eighties, but also open to more traditionally conceived (but utterly fresh) treatments of colour, texture, and line. Her ravishing music always pivots on a belief in sound as such, in opposition to the abstract conceptions of tone that often characterised the generation immediately preceding her. Works such as Verblendungen (`84) and Du Cristal (`89) saw the composer developing a sensuous approach where shifting colours defined form, and electronic and acoustic textures slid in and out of one another in fluid motion.
— Read more at MusicalCriticism.com

As a contemporary critic put it: "Some come for the play and hate the musick, others come onely for the musick, and the drama is penance to them, and scarce any are well reconciled to both."
The words of Roger North, the 18th-century polymath who witnessed Italian opera's conquest of the London stage, hold true in Jonathan Kent's staging of The Fairy Queen. Written in an age of excess and uncertainty, of fascination with the exotic and the erotic, and bolted on to actor-manager Thomas Betterton's bowdlerisation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Purcell's score still dazzles and beguiles. Yet semi-opera is a tricky form. With no definitive script, the balance of speech to music remains contentious, open to modern rewrites, deft editing, or, as Kent has chosen, a kitchen-sink approach that will have those who have come for "the musick" itching to hear more of it.
— Read more at The Independent

New York City is at least a two-opera town, a cultural capital that needs and deserves the creative tension between the edifice of grand opera and the productions of a more iconoclastic opera company.
Those roles were long played by the grand Metropolitan Opera and the nimbler New York City Opera, just across the plaza from the Met at Lincoln Center. But in recent years, under the leadership of Peter Gelb, the Met has been electrified, while the City Opera has seen its fortunes dwindle to the point where real questions are being raised about its survival.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

When the sizzling Anna Netrebko appeared in Verdi's "La Traviata" last year, it gave the Royal Opera's comfortable old production a jolt of urgency.
Last week, the starry Renee Fleming made her U.K. debut in the same role -- same crinolines, same sets, different wigs. Everyone was thinking the same thing: Seconds out, round one.
— Read more at Bloomberg.com

Valerian Ruminski is the kind of rough, rakish guy who can call you "baby" and get away with it. And he does not care how his voice booms.
Out in public, having a cup of coffee, the Buffalo-born bass begins demonstrating in his big, deep voice the proper way for singers to sing vowels. "Ha, ha, ha," he sings. A passing postal carrier looks around in alarm.
— Read more at The Buffalo News

The Cache County Council has voted to provide an extra $150,000 to the struggling Utah Festival Opera Company.
The council had approved $255,000 in marketing and operation support for the opera company, but Michael Ballam, the organization's founder and general director, said it needed another $400,000 to stay alive.
— Read more at localnews8.com

While music lovers might claim that a soaring aria can stir one's heart, an Italian study has confirmed that it can.
Researchers analyzing how listening to classical music affected the study's participants found that songs that alternate between fast and slow sections - like opera - induced dynamic and somewhat predictable change in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems of the volunteers.
— Read more at cbc.ca

This week marked the start of the Washington National Opera's Opera Institute at American University, a program for young singers aged 15-18 who dream of opera careers. It's an intense three-week session of master classes, coachings, diction lessons, and, yes, performances: an Italian art-song recital on July 3rd, a program of opera scenes on July 10, and a culminating recital of opera scenes at the Millennium Stage on July 11th.
— Read more at Anne Midgette - washingtonpost.com

Operagoers are often surprised to learn that Bizet's "Carmen" is an opera comique. Its story of a young Spanish soldier's fatal attraction to a gypsy woman of uncommon magnetism is hardly comic. Yet what it means to be an opera comique is an issue more of form than of content - specifically, the linking of musical numbers by spoken dialogue rather than sung recitatives.
— Read more at NYTimes.com

Richard Eyre's staging of La traviata is one of the Royal Opera's cash cows. First shown 15 years ago, it is revived nearly every season and still commands a top price of pound210 ($340). A mere 35 minutes after taking their seats, patrons have half an hour to sample the theatre's bars and restaurants, and the second interval is nearly as long. The sets and costumes are spectacular enough to accommodate any visiting soprano. That's great business. It's not great art. But without La traviata there would be no Lulu, also in repertory this month. Berg's opera polishes Covent Garden's artistic laurels but struggles to find an audience.
— Read more at FT.com

Seattle Opera will begin selling single tickets to two of its 2009/10 season operas-Verdi's La Traviata and the world premiere of Daron Aric Hagen's Amelia-on June 20, in an online pre-sale. Phone and in-person sales begin on June 22. Single tickets for Verdi's Trovatore and Falstaff begin September 12 (online) and September 14 for in-person and phone sales.
— Read more at Seattle Fine Arts Examiner