01 May 2013
It would seem a logical step for the mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey to take on
the role of the Composer in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. »
29 Apr 2013
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”. »
23 Apr 2013
When I spoke with Zandra Rhodes, she was in her large San Diego workspace, which she described as having walls decorated with her own huge black and white drawings. »
05 Mar 2013
Palm Beach audiences are famous for their glamour, but in recent years a special star has sparkled amid the jewels, sequins, feathers and furs (whatever the weather). »
03 Mar 2013
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera. »
02 Mar 2013
On Wednesday evening, February 20, Los Angeles Opera gave a press conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion featuring Music Director James Conlon. »
13 Feb 2013
It is another “What Could Have Been” moment. The debut of Brokeback
Mountain by Charles Wuorinen is part of Madridʼs Teatro Real coming
season. »
11 Feb 2013
Plans for July’s Aix-en-Provence Festival were announced and opera is, of course, at the center of the program with a particularly noteworthy Richard Strauss production. »
06 Feb 2013
Amsterdam enjoys a rare visit from Moscow’s Stanislavski Opera at the landmark Koninklijk Carre Theater, for three performances of Tchaikovski’s Eugene Onegin and a Sunday morning opera concert, on February 1st-3rd. »
01 Jan 2013
A new festival hall has been inaugurated in the small town of Erl in the Tyrolean mountains. »
28 Nov 2012
Yesterday, Conductor Riccardo Muti opened the Rome Opera, where he is “honorary conductor for life,” with a gala presentation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra. »
10 Nov 2012
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company. »
15 Oct 2012
One of the most noteworthy and controversial productions in recent memory
arrived in Belgium with hurricane force as Director Terry Gilliam’s inaugural
opera, an inspired interpretation of Hector Berlioz’s Le Damnation de
Faust, blasted into Ghent, followed by a run in Antwerp. »
09 Oct 2012
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide” »
05 Oct 2012
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience. »
28 Sep 2012
The recently released numbers for the past season at Barcelona’s opera Liceu gives some hope for the future. »
12 Sep 2012
A record 278,978 people attended events of the 2012 edition of the famed Salzburg Festival in Austria, the largest number since its founding 92 years ago. »
13 Aug 2012
Just after things were settling after the scandal of baritone Evgeny Nitikin supposed swastika tattoo at the Bayreuth Festival, another one seems likely to take its place. »
08 Aug 2012
Three quarters of the way through this discussion, a question that inhabits the mind of anyone putting any thought to the subject — but no one dare ask — was rhetoricised, “what is opera?” »
30 Jul 2012
The Glyndebourne Festival highlight this year could be the Ravel double bill - L’heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges. Laurent Pelly directs. Anyone who saw his brilliant Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel at Glyndebourne in 2008 will know what to expect - a staging of great imagination and verve, true to the spirit of the composer. »
18 Jul 2012
Effective July 30, Cassidy E. Fitzpatrick will be the new artistic administrator of Florida Grand Opera. a position open since the dismissal of Kelly Anderson last year. »
07 Jul 2012
A change of leadership has been announced today by Bratislava’s Slovak National Theatre. In the opera division, famed tenor Peter Dvorsky, the current artistic director, is to be replaced on August 1st by the Austrian conductor Friedrich Haider.
»
04 Jul 2012
Bayreuth’s opera house has been awarded the honor of UNESCO World Heritage status. If you think that means Wagner’s festival house in the same city, with its excellent acoustics and uncomfortable seats, you will be mistaken. »
04 Jul 2012
In his second season, intendant Dominique Meyer has chalked up increases both in tickets sold and earnings at the Vienna State Opera. »
03 Jul 2012
The fall-out from the very public display of anger on both sides continues in Cologne. Uwe Erich Laufenberg, 51, director of the city’s opera, one of the leading operas in Germany, was fired with immediate effect on June 22. »
26 Jun 2012
Nicolas Bachler, intendant of the Bavarian State Opera, has had his contract extended through August 2018. »
09 Jun 2012
Amidst crucial, ongoing financial concerns about future funding for opera
and ballet throughout Germany’s highly populous North Rhein-Westphalia
region, a diverse gathering at the Duisburg Theatre verified sincere grassroots
support for Deutsche Oper Am Rhein and the current partnership with nearby
Dusseldorf. »
31 May 2012
The re-opening of Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden has been set back for another year. »
30 May 2012
The Lyric Opera of Chicago announced their financial figures in their annual report and “balanced its budget” for the 2011-2012 season, according to general director Anthony Freud. »
30 May 2012
Conflicts like this usually remain inside opera house walls. The three Viennese daily newspapers carried headlines reporting that Oscar-winning director William Friedkin called the intendant of the Theater an der Wien a “liar.”
»
26 May 2012
Director David Freeman tells why this is an event worth experiencing in the Olympic year. »
09 May 2012
Casting changes continue at the Bayreuth Festival, now only three months
away. »
02 May 2012
This year’s Kathleen Ferrier Awards final was both a competition and a
celebration, marking as it did the centenary anniversary of the great singer’s birth. »
26 Apr 2012
Christopher Koelsch has been tapped Wednesday as the new president and chief executive officer of the Los Angeles Opera. Koelsch, 41, was the opera’s chief financial officer and will take the new post September 15. »
24 Apr 2012
Ignacio Garcia-Belenguer, 45, has been named as the new general manager of Madrid’s opera, Teatro Real. »
24 Apr 2012
The director of the Cologne Opera, Uwe Eric Laufenberg, has confirmed at the
press conference this afternoon that he will leave his post at the end of the
coming season. His contract runs until 2016. »
23 Apr 2012
Soprano Angela Denoke announced on Wednesday that she would not be appearing as Brünnhilde, one of the critically important roles, at the 2013 Bayreuth Festival Ring Cycle. »
18 Apr 2012
On Tuesday evening, Cologne Opera’s director indicated he was planning to cancel the next season, 2012-2013. »
17 Apr 2012
The Chinese conductor and pianist Xu Zhong will be the new artistic director
of an Italian opera house, the Teatro Massimo Bellini in Catania. »
17 Apr 2012
Tenor Johan Botha had just started carving his steak when his phone rang. A
director of Vienna’s Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde was on the line with an
emergency request. »
12 Apr 2012
The Royal Opera House started doing opera and ballet broadcasts before many other houses, and is now expanding its schedule. On April 17th, Verdi’s Rigoletto is being streamed live in over 600 cinemas in 21 countries.
»
31 Mar 2012
Irish composer Gerald Barry’s opera The Importance of Being Earnest
premieres at the Barbican, London on April 26th. It is a joint commission between the Barbican and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
»
24 Mar 2012
“Opera is an emotional fitness centre”, says Kasper Holten, new Director of Opera, announcing the Royal Opera House 2012-13 season which mixes daring with prudence. »
19 Mar 2012
A major part of the rejuvenation of opera in the 21st century is the cultivation of young singers. »
09 Mar 2012
Los Angeles is often identified as “tinsel town,” a cultural wasteland. The city has long been considered as artistically irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth, especially with the arrival of the Los Angeles Opera in 1984. »
29 Feb 2012
Barcelona’s opera, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, has reversed course and restored cuts in the current season made earlier this month. »
27 Feb 2012
One of the main performing arts venues for opera, ballet and modern dance is
Le Palais Garnier in Paris. »
26 Feb 2012
New Orleans native Bryan Hymel is singing the role of The Prince in Antonin Dvořák's Rusalka at the Royal Opera House, London. »
21 Feb 2012
Last night’s French classical music awards show, the Victoires de la Musique Classique 2012, awarded the “Best Composer of the Year” honors to Philippe Manoury, 59, for his opera, “La Nuit de Gutenberg” (“The Night of Gutenberg”). »
21 Feb 2012
French soprano star Natalie Dessay has announced that she is taking a sabbatical from opera during 2015. She is unhappy with her current work at the Paris Opera, a production of Massenet’s opera “Manon,” and had conflicts with the stage director, French filmmaker Coline Serreau. »
20 Feb 2012
Inaugurated in 1995, the Veronica Dunne International Singing Competition is a triennial competition, held in the National Concert Hall in Dublin, which takes place over a week in January. »
17 Feb 2012
Critics. Can you get along without us? It is possible to reflect on this when the production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is shown on television tonight. »
![Michele Mariotti [Photo by Amati Bacciardi (Pesaro) courtesy of Columbia Artists Music]](http://www.operatoday.com/Mariotti_MG_4200.gif)