Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot news.
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.
“Aim for excellence”, says Douglas Boyd, new Artistic Director of Garsington Opera at Wormsley, “and the audience will follow you”.
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.
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).
When the soprano Jessica Pratt first arrived in Italy, she had yet to learn the language or sing in a staged opera.
On Wednesday evening, February 20, Los Angeles Opera gave a press conference at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion featuring Music Director James Conlon.
It is another “What Could Have Been” moment. The debut of Brokeback Mountain by Charles Wuorinen is part of Madridʼs Teatro Real coming season.
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.
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.
A new festival hall has been inaugurated in the small town of Erl in the Tyrolean mountains.
Yesterday, Conductor Riccardo Muti opened the Rome Opera, where he is “honorary conductor for life,” with a gala presentation of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra.
When tenor Michael Spyres takes the stage at Carnegie Hall on December 5th, he will be in heady company.
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.
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”
Exciting developments at Glyndebourne ! Many new initiatives which could transform Glyndebourne from a summer festival to a truly international, year-round opera experience.
The recently released numbers for the past season at Barcelona’s opera Liceu gives some hope for the future.
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.
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.
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?”
Aiming For Her Very Top Note Tue Dec 14, 7:00 PM ET Curt Schleier Renee Fleming understands that natural talent isn't enough to assure success. In fact, Fleming said during a recent interview, natural ability can work against you. Take...
Aiming For Her Very Top Note
Tue Dec 14, 7:00 PM ET
Curt Schleier
Renee Fleming understands that natural talent isn't enough to assure success.
In fact, Fleming said during a recent interview, natural ability can work against you. Take the time she was still a student and scheduled to compete in a national contest sponsored by the Metropolitan Opera Co. of New York City. She decided to skip lengthy practice, figuring she could ride on her talent alone.
Wrong. She failed that audition largely for lack of preparation.
Despite that flop, Fleming refused to give up. She came close on occasion, but her love for singing won out and she kept reaching. It paid off. At just "about the time I decided I was not cut out for this job, doors began to open."
The doors opened for a reason. Fleming made it a point to audition for everything, even if she didn't think she had a shot at making it.
"It was a leave-no-stone-unturned kind of thinking," she said. "I have a lot of natural energy, and of course when drive and ambition are put into the mix, there was no stopping me. Add to that, I was an only child for whom there was always something to pursue."
Today Fleming, 45, is one of the world's most accomplished and renowned sopranos. But even the most exceptional singers need "an enormous amount of practice and experimentation, and you have to be very creative about mastering this instrument," she said.
It's not just a matter of putting in the time; it's a matter of putting in the time correctly, Fleming says. During practice, she focuses on every aspect of singing, from proper breathing techniques to learning the correct phraseology. It was during these practice sessions that she began to develop "my real passion for singing."
"It is a beautiful thing to sing in front of an audience, but singing to myself, alone in a room, breaking down phrases note by note, is even more satisfying somehow," she wrote in her just-published memoir, "The Inner Voice: The Making of a Singer."
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