Category: News

Leaflets distributed this week outside La Scala opera house in Milan announced the world premiere of “an opera of a few minutes (because that’s enough)”, composed by the theatre’s audience. The music consisted of loud heckling whenever members of La Scala’s orchestra appeared. The libretto was curt: “Don’t touch the maestro. Riccardo Muti belongs to art. He belongs to us!”

In all the years of its existence, the Golden Mask Festival has been nothing if not a study in contrasts—no other Russian festival embraces as fully the multiplicity of the performing arts. Once a year, for just over two weeks in the spring, the best Russian opera singers, ballet dancers, dramatic actors, directors, conductors, puppeteers and other sundry performing artists gather to show their stuff and compete for the coveted Golden Mask award.

As the limousines arrive at the premiere of an award winning film version of Carmen, U Carmen E Khayelitsha, they have to slow down for a group of barefooted children pushing shopping trolleys filled with scrap metal across the road.

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN)—Russia’s Bolshoi Theater has sparked outrage by putting on an opera that some lawmakers and a pro-Kremlin youth group say is pornographic.
The opera, “Rosenthal’s Children,” is about a scientist who clones five great classical composers—Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky and Verdi.
The scientist then dies, and the cloned musicians—unprepared for life on their own in the 1990s—end up on the street.

A new wave of distinctive 21st-century concert halls is changing the look and feel of classical music performance in the U.S. These halls have impressive architectural pedigrees and price tags—Frank Gehry designed the $275 million Disney Hall in Los Angeles; Rafael Viñoly, the $265 million Kimmel Center in Philadelphia; Santiago Calatrava, the coming $300 million Atlanta Symphony Center. Most of them, like architect William Rawn’s $99 million Strathmore Music Center in Bethesda, Md., shun the gilded, red-velvet opulence of traditional European models in favor of Modernist simplicity. They also strive for heightened spatial intimacy between audience and performer: Disney Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has terraced seating areas surrounding the stage.

FOUR operas, more than four reasons to go. The operas: Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, Péter Eötvös’s The Balcony, Wagner’s Parsifal, and Handel’s Semele.The reasons to go: great music, top performers, the best conductors, inventive directors, and two truly excellent performance spaces.

A month shy of the halfway point in the 26-month construction of its new Civic Center home, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music started the party early last week with a ceremony to “top out” the new building on Oak Street.

Soprano Susanna Phillips, a former Huntsville resident, is among the four top winners picked Sunday in the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in New York.
Phillips won $15,000 toward her studies and eligibility to be considered for the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.

Da ist einmal das quirlige künstleri sche Ego des neuen Mannes: Si mon Rattle, als Nachfolger Clau dio Abbados bei den Berliner Philharmoniker sozusagen naturgemäß auch Chef der Salzburger Osterfestspiele, ist schon von seinem Selbstverständnis her das Gegenteil des Festivalgründers Karajan. Der hatte 1967 die Idee, Richard Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk mit seinen Berliner Philharmonikern im Orchestergraben auf mustergültige Weise zu präsentieren, in eigenen Inszenierungen; eine Tragödie, ganz aus dem Geiste der Musik geboren, sozusagen.

THE opera world is eyeing two British-based conductors as potential saviours of La Scala opera house, which has cancelled this month’s programme amid a bitter power struggle and staff revolt.