tagged w/ Opera
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A fierce melodrama set to magnificent music, Tosca brings to life a tempestuous world of cruelty and deception through the tragic story of Floria Tosca, a beautiful yet volatile singer; Mario Cavaradossi, the idealistic painter that she loves; and Baron Scarpia, an amoral police chief who uses his power to satisfy his lecherous appetite. This production, which was first conceived by Lotfi Mansouri and Production Designer Thierry Bosquet, is a re-creation of Armando Agnini’s Tosca production that opened the War Memorial Opera House in 1932.
San Francisco Opera presents Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, tonight at the War Memorial Opera House. The opera will play three more performances: Saturday (6/20), Tuesday (6.23), and Friday (6/26).A fierce melodrama set to magnificent music, Tosca brings to life a tempestuous world... more
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Opera has just blatantly rolled out a new product from their Labs department. Currently called “Opera Unite”, the new web browser will turn your machine into a server and a client, allowing you to share files, live video, entertainment, games, and almost anything else that can be embeddable into a webpage. Think Myspace on Crack, but quick, functional, and probably useful. Check out more details inside the post.Opera has just blatantly rolled out a new product from their Labs department.... more
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Last week, Opera released the first beta of Opera 10 with a visual refresh and a number of enhancements and new features. The question is, can Opera make a dent in the desktop or is Opera on the desktop just a Quixotic effort in the face of Firefox and Internet Explorer?
It’d be silly to say that Opera isn’t doing well — the Opera mobile browser is one of the most popular around. But Opera on the desktop has less market share than Chrome or Safari according to some measures, consistently around 2.2% in the reports from W3Schools.com.
Can 10 change that? Let’s have a look.Last week, Opera released the first beta of Opera 10 with a visual refresh and a... more
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The Santa Fe Opera is reviving a program to attract New Mexicans who have never attended the world-famous music venue.
The Opera is offering a 40 percent discount on tickets bought between June 12 and 24 for residents who have never purchased tickets before. First-time buyers can purchase up to four tickets per opera for four of this season’s offerings: Donizetti’s “The Elixir of Love,” Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” Gluck’s “Alceste” and the world premier of Paul Moravec’s “The Letter.” Verdi’s “La Traviata” is not part of the offer.
Tickets may be selected in any available price range for any available performance. There is a $4 fee per ticket unless buyers get them in person at the Opera box office. Tickets must be ordered by phone at (505) 986-5900, or in person. The box office is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Joyce Idema, spokesperson for the Santa Fe Opera, said the venue is doing better than many others around the country, but it’s still facing declining ticket sales.
“The program is a good way to remind New Mexicans about the opera,” she said.The Santa Fe Opera is reviving a program to attract New Mexicans who have never... more
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Six professional performers spent the past two weeks visiting every school in the Palm Springs Unified School District.
Their goal was to teach about 12,000 students the basics of opera, from “O” to “A.”
“This is the most exposure we've ever had,” said George Klauss, president of the Palm Springs Opera Guild.
This is the fourth year the Opera Outreach program has led assemblies in Coachella Valley schools and the third year the program has been a part of the district.
The singers used humor, audience participation and vocal performance in the elementary school presentations — all the while teaching students opera vocabulary, vocal variations (and their titles) and opera house etiquette.
They performed “arias” (an opera term meaning “songs,” which were taught to the students) written by Mozart and pieces from productions such as “Carmen.”
The high school band and choral classes were given a concert presentation, said Andrew Eisenmann baritone, who was also the emcee and program coordinator for the program.
“It's (the program) going to open a lot of doors for them They might Google opera tonight when they go home,” Eisenmann said.Six professional performers spent the past two weeks visiting every school in the Palm... more
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BEIJING (AFP) — Peking opera is considered one of China's national treasures -- an art form more than 200 years old made famous abroad by films such as "Farewell My Concubine" and the more recent "Forever Enthralled" starring Zhang Ziyi.
Once hugely popular, it fell from grace following the 1949 civil war victory by the communists who frowned on -- and tried to destroy -- traditional culture.
Fearing that a distinctly Chinese art form was in its death throes, the government began the school trial in Beijing and nine other provinces and cities.
The No. 171 middle school -- is one of 22 in Beijing that have introduced regular voluntary classes as part of government efforts to ignite interest in Peking opera among young Chinese.
The lessons aim to explain the stories of the centuries-old operas, and inspire a fascination for what can seem, to lovers of modern music, a tuneless cacophony of falsetto trilling set to clanging drums and out-of-time percussion.
As the show prepared to kick off, hundreds of students took their places in the school auditorium, alongside several grandparents who came to hear a new generation present the music of their youth.
The students performed extracts from eight operas to the enthusiastic cheers of fellow students delighted to see their classmates in colourful robes with long flowing sleeves, platform slippers and surreally bright make-up.
Tian Jiaxin, a spokeswoman for Beijing's Chang'an Grand Theatre said the school trials had led to increased numbers of younger people coming to see traditional opera performances.BEIJING (AFP) — Peking opera is considered one of China's national... more
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Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" remains one of the most popular operas ever performed because, despite the comedy's 18th century birth and setting, it portrays real people in timeless situations of love and betrayal.
"'The Marriage of Figaro' opens the door to a new world of opera," wrote the legendary New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg. "It is a scintillating work with real people in it, and the music exposes them for what they are - lovable, vain, capricious, selfish, ambitious, forgiving, philandering. Human beings, in short, all brought alive by the alchemy of a surpassingly inventive and sympathetic musical mind."
The Green Mountain Opera Festival will present this masterpiece on Friday and Sunday, June 19 and 21, at the Barre Opera House, with an international conductor and perhaps the most lavish staging seen in Vermont to date.Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro" remains one of the most popular... more
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North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has directed a staging of Yevgeny Onegin, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's opera of the classic Pushkin novel, the KCNA news agency reported on Monday.
According to the agency, Kim Jong Il assisted at the rehearsal of Tchaikovsky's famous lyric opera at Pyongyang's Kim Won Gyun Conservatory and gave instructions to the director and actors.
The staging of the opera comes upon the instruction of Kim Jong Il to give the Korean people "better understanding of the world culture." North Korea has five revolutionary operas which were all created in the early 1970s.
Kim Jong Il was satisfied with the work and praised the performers for having "produced the admirable opera of high artistic value perfectly meeting the requirements of the original work by devoting all their creative wisdom and enthusiasm."
The opera was first performed at the Bolshoi Theater in 1881, with Tchaikovsky as conductor. Alexander Pushkin's novel, written as a poem and published in the 1830s, is one of the most loved works of Russian literature.North Korean leader Kim Jong Il has directed a staging of Yevgeny Onegin, Pyotr... more
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A breakthrough of sorts took place on Sunday night at the Guggenheim Museum with the premiere of “Green Aria: A ScentOpera.” This beguiling 30-minute work was the result of a two-year collaboration initiated by the writer and director Stewart Matthew with the composers Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurdsson and, critically, the French perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, who has created fragrances for Ralph Lauren, Estée Lauder and other companies.
The Peter B. Lewis Theater was packed for this premiere, part of the museum’s adventurous Works & Process series. In the piece the creators meticulously paired prerecorded music with an orchestrated array of more than 30 distinctively named fragrances. Indeed, the scents, whether subtle, pungent, intoxicating or stinky, became this opera’s characters, with names like Absolute Zero, Runaway Crunchy Green and Shiny Steel.
The technological challenge was coming up with a way to deliver the scents to audience members. As Mr. Laudamiel explained during a preperformance panel, if the scents were just dispersed from the stage, even aided by a big fan, they would take up to 50 seconds to spread through the auditorium, making it impossible to coordinate a specific fragrance with a musical phrase.
The problem was solved by affixing to each seat in the theater its own scent microphone, as it was called, an adjustable tube that could be placed as close as desired to your nose. Mr. Matthew urged everyone to relax and breathe naturally.A breakthrough of sorts took place on Sunday night at the Guggenheim Museum with the... more
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She seduces, she kills, she winds up a prostitute and gets murdered by Jack the Ripper. Philip Hensher on why greed-filled, lusty Lulu is the 20th century's greatest opera
The premiere took place at the Opéra Garnier in Paris, and the BBC put it out on prime-time TV; things have certainly changed in the last 30 years. What strikes everyone, on first viewing, is the apparently tawdry quality of Lulu's subject matter compared with the sumptuous beauty of the score. Lulu is a woman of limitless sexual allure, who takes one man after another, rising in the social scale while killing them or driving them to suicide in turn. She is arrested for the murder of one husband, Doctor Schön, and so begins her descent. By the end, she is prostituting herself in a London garret; her last client is Jack the Ripper, who murders her and her lesbian lover, Countess Geschwitz.
Thirty years on, Berg's opera seems an indisputable candidate for the greatest opera of the 20th century. But that 1979 performance of the three-act Lulu came 44 years after Berg died, apparently from blood poisoning caused by an insect bite. After the composer's death, the work was regarded as a decadent oddity - perverse, bizarre and, most importantly, unfinished. The long delay in the work being given a proper performance was a catastrophe for 20th-century music.She seduces, she kills, she winds up a prostitute and gets murdered by Jack the... more
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The story, narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, is illustrated and interwoven with music and their own poetic and musical collaboration in the Royal Opera House project.
Speaking ahead of his appearance at the Hay Festival on May 31, Sting said: “A performance like this is a personal journey. You’re forced to share very private thoughts and make them public, and that creates a tension.
“This love story – the relationship and the tragedy – provides a great introduction for people who don’t normally listen to classical music. Hearing the Schumanns’ music at the same time as telling their story is a very intimate, engaging and emotional experience.”
The Hay Festival is one of the world’s biggest art festivals with over 500 events with writers, comedians and musicians on its programme. The festival is taking place in the Brecon Beacons in Wales between 21 and 31 May.The story, narrated by Sir Derek Jacobi, is illustrated and interwoven with music and... more
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Nicholas Maw, a British composer who bucked the fads of modern classical music to return to more traditional melody and who brought William Styron's wrenching novel "Sophie's Choice" to the opera stage, has died. He was 73.
Maw died Tuesday at his home in Takoma Park, Md., of complications from dementia and diabetes.
A "maverick among English composers of his generation," Maw "forged a musical language which is truly vibrant and sensuous, and which borrows both from the old and the new," music scholar David Cooper wrote in the "International Dictionary of Opera." Maw's compositions ranged from solo instrumental works to sprawling symphonies and from comic to tragic operas.Nicholas Maw, a British composer who bucked the fads of modern classical music to... more
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"The first lady, Michelle Obama, visited New York City on Monday to promote the arts, celebrating opening night at the American Ballet Theater and the reopening of part of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Mrs. Obama described the nation’s creative spirit as critical to its ideals and its identity, and said the arts needed to be nurtured even during difficult economic times. She noted that her husband had included $50 million in his economic stimulus package for the National Endowment for the Arts.
“The arts are not just a nice thing to have,” she said, adding that the arts “define who we are as a people.”
At the American Ballet Theater, Mrs. Obama and her husband, President Obama, were listed as honorary co-chairwoman and chairman for Monday night’s spring gala, along with the designer Carolina Herrera, Renée Zellweger, Caroline Kennedy and others.
The first lady seized her moment in the limelight on the grand stage of the Metropolitan Opera House to call on institutions and philanthropists to make the art world readily accessible to children.
She praised the Metropolitan Museum and the American Ballet Theater for involving children of diverse backgrounds in their programs.
“My husband and I believe strongly that arts education is essential for building innovative thinkers who will be our nation’s leaders of tomorrow,” said Mrs. Obama, who introduced a performance by a multiracial cast of young dancers.""The first lady, Michelle Obama, visited New York City on Monday to promote the... more
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Famous before age 14 for classical singing on a TV talent show. A debut album in the top 10 on British pop charts. What next?
For Charlotte Church a decade ago, it was unwanted tabloid attention and a transition to pop music that fell flat.
Thirteen-year-old Faryl Smith now faces the same question. A finalist on last season's "Britain's Got Talent," her debut CD, "Faryl," sold over 150,000 copies in the United Kingdom; it was released this month in the United States.
Faryl says she plans to stay in school and continue voice training with her longtime teacher in the small town of Kettering, about 80 miles north of London. And though she listens to Lady Gaga and Beyonce, Faryl won't go pop like Church did.
"I think people enjoyed it more when she sang classical music because they knew her as the classical singer," Faryl said in an interview. "And I just want to kind of stay true to what I do and stay classical."
Not that the skinny brunette entirely minds comparisons to Church.Famous before age 14 for classical singing on a TV talent show. A debut album in the... more
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An opera featuring shocking scenes of sexual abuse was delayed for a month as its performers suffered nervous breakdowns over what they were doing on stage.An opera featuring shocking scenes of sexual abuse was delayed for a month as its... more
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"The story is this: in a very distant, watery future, one lonely creature survives — Blorkra, the clumsy result of evolution backtracking from the human form to allow for a largely aquatic world. This dismal creature spends her days watching the beach, haunted by visions of her human predecessors.
“It’s not that different from singing operatically on land,” claims Snapper, who has previously worked with the extreme performance artist Ron Athey on The Judas Cradle, in which she sang hanging upside down until her voice collapsed. “It uses the same basic process of compressing the air, creating a stream of soundwaves and allowing that to go into the water, with a little bit more care because at the end of the phrase you don’t want to pull any water in.” And how do you not do that? “You monkey with your throat a little bit. Underwater you really want to be able to shut that door.”
The pressure changes are the worst, “especially within the first 30ft or so. The oxygen in your lungs has compressed, so you can be down at the bottom and taking in air, but if I don’t sing on the way up with a lungful of air, then the lungs will burst because as the air decompresses, it gets bigger, so it will pop the balloon.”
In this case, fortunately, the pool is only about 6ft deep, but Snapper intends to take her technique to the sea in the future. She describes the process of working out how to do it as “trial and error”. “If you get a couple of tablespoons of water in your lungs, they stop functioning. I had some scary moments, getting tangled up in the sets and not being able to surface, or just being a goof and running out of air in my oxygen tank on the bottom.” She now practises with people on hand to help her out of difficulty. “It’s completely negotiable as long as you don’t panic,” she says, blithely.
It’s impossible to imagine what it will sound like. Sound behaves quite differently in water than in air — Snapper describes the “airless” sound of a voice filtered through water as “like a humming and mewling”. The bubbles she produces have their own character. “The vocal melody is complicated by the percussive sound of the bubbles. If the bubbles are smaller or larger, then the percussive sounds will come more or less rapidly and they all have pitches attached to them. Sometimes you have a kind of second melody over the voice.” But does it sound like singing? “It does. I think it sounds like singing.” But you wouldn’t know, because you’re under the water, doing it. “Now I’m wondering!”""The story is this: in a very distant, watery future, one lonely creature... more
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Start them off on Wagner: that is the unapologetic advice of the chair of Arts Council England to those who would try to inspire an enthusiasm for classical music among young children.
"Throwing children alive into a boiling vat of great music does them no harm at all," said Dame Liz Forgan, addressing the Royal Philharmonic Society awards for classical music tonight.
She said that she advocated a "deliberate policy of exposing [children] to what might appear to be entirely unsuitable masterpieces at an early age".
This, she said, was a tribute to her own experience – which started with an introduction, aged six, to the Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde from her passionate, if mildly eccentric, grandfather. It was, she said, the "equivalent of loading a baby's bottle with Napoleon brandy".
Her first concert – a complete performance of Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius – soon followed.
But it was this "chronicle of unsuitability" that really worked to hook her on classical music.
"If I had been forced to start with clapping games, or tooting Frère Jacques on the recorder, I fear I might have turned to crime or even netball as more exciting alternatives," she said.
The virtue of this approach was, she said, that it was the opposite of a prevailing attitude in current music education – a "defeatism that believes classical music is inaccessible, out of reach and somehow to be approached in disguise". Instead, she urged, "give them Birtwistle, Buxtehude, Ligeti, Ockeghem and Beethoven as soon as possible." Above all, she said, "don't apologise".Start them off on Wagner: that is the unapologetic advice of the chair of Arts Council... more
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After 20 years, the Metropolitan Opera's literal translation of Wagner's Ring cycle in New York has had its last performance. Its heartbroken fans think we may never see its equal
Fans of Richard Wagner's The Ring are devoted at the best of times. But when they've come to watch the final performance of a 20-year-old production about as close to Wagner's original stage conception as possible, then devotion becomes near-fanaticism.
So it was at New York's Metropolitan opera last Saturday night. The Lincoln Centre Plaza was full of serious opera followers wearing ridiculous outfits, in the Wagner equivalent of an annual Star Wars convention. In their day jobs, they probably work (or used to) as chief executives of major international banks; on Saturday night they were dressed as 12th-century warriors.
The occasion was the last rendition of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final instalment of the Ring, under the uber-traditional production of the Viennese director Otto Schenk. When it was first introduced to the Met, opening with Die Walküre in 1987, the production must have been astonishing, with epic set changes to match the scale of the music, its romantic mountain and forest settings, and its technological wizardry. In the digital age such tricks no longer astound, and the set itself is said to be ready to actually implode – as opposed to theatrically implode, as it does at the end of Götterdämmerung. Which is why the Met decided to kiss goodbye to this old, much-loved friend.After 20 years, the Metropolitan Opera's literal translation of Wagner's... more
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When I began singing it was the first time I was happy in my life. As a baby I would stop crying when I heard a great singer. My mother says that as a young boy I used to sing all the time, but I grew up in a small village where the opportunity to study singing was limited. More difficult still was deciding whether singing was what I truly wanted to do; nobody can be sure of this.
Singing provides a true sense of lightheartedness. If I sing when I am alone I feel wonderful. It's freedom. In front of an audience I suffer terrible stagefright, which I still haven't managed to overcome. I always feel nervous and afraid when going on stage because I know my responsibility to the audience. But they are always so kind and warm toward me that it is beautiful and calming to feel. The only thing that helps me relieve the pressure of stagefright is preparation. I rehearse every day so that I'm always able to do what my audience expects of me.
For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume ... to do something with your body. When singing in concert you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural.
Being a tenor is like being an athlete. You can never smoke, or drink and eat too much. It's very difficult, but it's necessary in order to be able to sing well. Also, you have to have great passion, because to sing operatic music requires lots of work. I study for at least two hours every day. The voice is like an instrument and requires constant exercise.When I began singing it was the first time I was happy in my life. As a baby I would... more
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José Carreras, who became a household name as one of the Three Tenors with Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo, announces his retirement from opera in an interview with The Times today.
The Spanish singer, 62, a survivor of leukaemia, declared that he can no longer withstand the rigours of performing principal roles, unamplified, to opera houses. “If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that’s good enough,” he said. “But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done.”
Carreras’s exit from the opera scene leaves only Domingo, who is six years his senior, performing operatic roles. Pavarotti died in 2007, at 71, after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Domingo is scheduled to perform at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, twice next year. He will take a principal role in Tamerlano by Handel in March and will perform as a baritone for the first time in Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra in the summer.José Carreras, who became a household name as one of the Three Tenors with... more
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