Category: News

When David Gockley became business manager at the Houston Grand Opera in 1970, the company, like most regional troupes in the U.S. at the time, was doing “instant opera.” “There was a guy in north Jersey who had acquired all these old painted drops from Europe,” Mr. Gockley recalls. “He would rent out a generic ‘Tosca’ or ‘Trovatore.’ They came in bags — you stretched the drops on frames.” There was no rehearsal period — singers arrived, performed and left. Mr. Gockley became HGO’s general director in 1972 and immediately changed all that. One of his first productions was “The Marriage of Figaro,” with specially designed sets, a director, and a three-week rehearsal period. “We had a nice cast, including the young Frederica von Stade as Cherubino,” says Mr. Gockley. It cost more than instant opera, but it paid off.

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands, June 12 – Antonio Vivaldi returned to his hometown, Venice, early in 1733, eager to reclaim his place as the Venetian republic’s most popular composer. During his five-year absence, younger Naples-trained musicians had come to the fore with their own “dramas with music,” but now, at 55, Vivaldi was ready to take them on with a daringly modern opera inspired by Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztecs.

Sie war begabt und privilegiert wie ihr Bruder Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Sie schuf in ihrem kurzen Leben weit über 400 Werke. Die Universität der Künste feiert nun den 200. Geburtstag von Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn.

Selbst Giuseppe Verdi hat nie eine Realisierung seiner Vertonung von Schillers “Don Carlos” in ihrer Gesamtheit erleben dürfen. Bereits vor der Generalprobe zur Uraufführung in Paris musste er aus banalem Grund – die Gäste sollten die nächtlichen Züge noch erreichen – Teile seines Werkes streichen, vor der Premiere setzte er noch einmal der Rotstift an.

AN early-music festival might not seem the likeliest place to witness a world premiere. But that is what the audience at the Cutler Majestic Theater on the campus of Emerson College will do this week when, after a 295-year delay, the Boston Early Music Festival presents the first fully staged production of the opera “Boris Goudenow, or The Throne Attained Through Cunning, or Honor Joined Happily With Affection,” by the German Baroque composer Johann Mattheson.

Banned in Ireland. The phrase still has some weight, at a time when talking about banning anything is to align yourself with dogmatic mullahs and evangelists. It’s hard to imagine how Brian Merriman, living in an Irish hamlet in the late 18th century, managed to write a literary work shocking enough to be untouchable for nearly two centuries. But the satiric bite of his 1,000-line Gaelic poem The Midnight Court is still something to wonder at, and thanks to Toronto’s Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, something to sing about as well.

BERLIN (AFP) – Des partitions jusqu’ici inédites des compositeurs allemands Jean-Sébastien Bach (1685-1750) et Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1750) ont été découvertes dans des archives à Weimar et Munich, selon les archives de Bavière et de la Fondation Bach.

Every few decades, audio formats change, and libraries rebuild their music collections. We’ve gone from 78s to LPs, then from LPs to CDs. While CDs stand to be produced for quite some time, it’s not clear how long large library CD collections—with many recordings going back to the mid-1980s—will last. Today, the format shift is on again as librarians attempt to offer patrons what they really want: online audio.

Before he jets off to take the lead in John Adams’s new opera, Gerald Finley faces a challenge nearer home. He talks to Rupert Christiansen

Edward G. Wallace Jr., an oilman, has observed and supported the arts in Houston for several decades.
His great passion is opera, especially bel canto opera.