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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We've added a new section to our site. It contains links to many of your favorite opera scores, libretti and guides. Check it out!
— Read more at AllAboutOpera.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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