Los Angeles Opera News

On Wednesday, April 21, We begin this week’s tour with one of the Los Angeles Opera website’s most popular “Living Room Recitals.” Soprano, Latonia Moore sings with pianist Roberto Berrocal. After the recital, we leave for NYC. On arrival, we go to Shut Up and Eat, a most generous Toms River restaurant that offers a discount to patrons in pajamas. 

On April 15, 2021, Opera San Jose premiered its digital stream of Love and Secrets: A Domestic Trilogy: Il Segreto di Susanna (The Secret of Susanna), Four Dialogues, and The Husbands. Wolf-Ferrari’s buffa comedy presents a wife with an addiction that she tries to keep secret. Thus, her husband suspects she has a lover and is most pleasantly surprised when he finds out she merely smokes cigarettes. Baritone Efraín Solís sings increasingly dramatic lines as his suspicions grow. A fine singing actor, he creates a most believable character.

On the Los Angeles Opera website, tenor Russell Thomas and collaborative pianist Kyung-Mi Kim present a program of song that includes Schumann's song cycle, Dichterliebe (Poet's Love),  Handel's aria “Total Eclipse” from Samson, and love songs by Adolphus Hailstork and Robert Owens that was filmed recently at Spivey Hall in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Have you watched Los Angeles Opera’s digital short Brown Sounds yet? Brown Sounds celebrates Black history by beginning with the Garden of Eden. Conceived by Raehann Bryce-Davis, a rising star in the LA firmament, it's a stunning vocal piece. Composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson set poet Henry Dumas's evocative verses to music with Bryce-Davis’s ravishing mezzo-soprano in mind.

On Sunday, March 21, 2021, tenor Issachah Savage and collaborative pianist Laurie Rogers gave a half-hour recital called Anything for Love and Honor for the Merola Opera Program. Savage, a former member of Merola, won three prizes at Seattle’s International Wagner Competition in 2014: First Prize, the Audience Prize, and the Orchestra Fave' Award.

Broadway and Opera star Zachary James (South Pacific, Coram Boy, The Addams Family, Metropolitan Opera’s Akhnaten) is bringing his award-winning cabaret show ON BROADWAY to the digital airwaves. 

WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera today announced a third season of the critically acclaimed opera podcast Aria Code, hailed by The New Yorker as “elegantly constructed [and] effortlessly listenable.”

Mar 13 and 14, San Francisco Opera presents Wagner’s Die Walküre. Chief god Wotan fathers the hero Siegmund to regain control of the ring. But, when confronted with the futility of his dream, Wotan is forced to forsake not only his son but also his beloved daughter, the warrior-maiden Brünnhilde. Wagner’s opera has English supertitles. 

On Saturday, March 6, 2021, San Francisco Opera did a wonderful thing. The company put the opening opera of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen online, free to  the world of opera lovers and the universe of the curious. Anyone with access to the Internet can see the entire Ring on weekends in March, and I, for one, am extremely grateful. 

WQXR and the Metropolitan Opera today announced a third season of the opera podcast Aria Code. Hosted by MacArthur Fellow and Grammy Award–winning musician Rhiannon Giddens, Aria Code brings to life the human experience at the heart of opera through storytelling, interviews, and stellar performances from the Metropolitan Opera’s treasured archives.

Opera lovers everywhere are invited to join the acclaimed Merola Opera Program for its first-ever virtual benefit gala, Un Gala in Maschera. This musical evening honors Merola Artistic Director Sheri Greenawald (2002-2020), celebrating her nearly two decades as Director of the San Francisco Opera Center and Artistic Director of the Merola Opera Program.

Los Angeles Opera’s digital short film, Death, is Nadia Hallgren’s nine-minute creative take on Paul Laurence Dunbar’s turn-of-the 20th century poem, entitled Death. Two crows in seemingly choreographed flight introduce scenes with myriad black birds circling the edge of a leafless forest.

Inspired by the success from their safe drive-in performances of La bohème in the Fall, which heralded the return of live, in-person, opera to San Diego County since the start of the pandemic, and provided over 300 jobs to many, San Diego Opera has announced a Spring season of safe, socially-distanced, drive-in performances.

In celebration of Valentine's Day, on Saturday, February 13, at 5:00 P.M. PST, Russell Thomas, Los Angeles Opera’s new Artist in Residence, welcomes Ashley Faatoalia, Tiffany Townsend, Alaysha Fox and pianist Leonard Hayes to the On Now digital stage for the first episode in its After Hours series, 'Black Love.” Enjoy sweet renditions of works by composers such as H.T. Burleigh, Undine Smith Moore, and Margaret Bonds.

On January 28, 2021, Los Angeles Opera streamed a newly filmed version of Roxie Perkins and Ellen Reid’s Pulitzer Prize-winning opera  p r i s m. An operatic tapestry, p r i s m tells of the psychological dreams, desires and struggles of Bibi, a sexual assault survivor.

This year has been a challenging one to say the least; particularly in the arts. Hawaiʻi Opera Theatre, like other performing arts organi-ations, has been facing a changing landscape, not only due to the pandemic (which forced HOT to postpone the 20-21 season) but also in the way people consume entertainment.

Los Angeles Opera was the first to launch original programming in response to COVID-19 stay-at-home orders. Because of the success of its online  programming, LAO decided to make that feature a permanent part of its offering and to give it a name that reflects fresh and innovative interpretations of the art form. Welcome to LA Opera On Now.

East Passyunk Opera Project (ePOP) teams up with Pistola's del Sur, Sancho Pistola's and Jose Pistola's for Love Notes, a special three course dinner and virtual concert taking place over Valentine's Day Weekend.

The West is a Land of Infinite Beginnings will stream for free Jan. 15-29. The promise of the American dream runs up against hard realities and uncontrollable forces in this new digital short from Missy Mazzoli, composer of Song from the Uproar and Breaking the Waves. James Darrah directs this video that tells of a ghostly sodbuster.

What's Streaming: Classical (Week Of January 18–24)