Opera Interviews - Page 3

The first thing to know about Brian Jagde is that his name is pronounced a?oeJade,a?? like the jewel...

Brenna Corner started out with dreams of Broadway. It wouldn't be a big surprise if the versatile young director's dreams came true, but not in the way she'd originally pictured. I met with her to learn more about that and the San Diego Opera's upcoming production of Hansel and Gretel. 'Broadway ...

The LA Opera and the Metropolitan Opera join forces to co-produce the world premiere of EURYDICE from the creative minds of composer/conductor Matthew Aucoin and librettist Sarah Ruhl; beginning February 1, 2020 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Based on Sarah's 2003 play EURYDICE, this Greek myth u...

Are you lamenting that you can't get more cornbread and chili while taking in a performance of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's OKLAHOMA? Well, On Site Opera's site specific production of the family friendly musical DAS BARBECÜ, written by Jim Luigs and featuring music by Scott Warrender, is ...

Pelto will make his much-anticipated San Diego Opera debut on Feb. 8, 2020, in their highly imaginative production...

'The grace of the Lord Jesus be with God's people. Amen.' And so ends the Book of Revelation, with Chapter 22, in the New Testament...or does it? In speaking with creator-librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs, I find someone who clearly believes that too much is never enough. Thus, she decided that there was...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's classic THE MAGIC FLUTE opens this week at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Saturday November 16, 2019; under the baton of James Conlon (with Grant Gershon conducting on December 1, 12 and 15). This will be the third LA Opera mounting of 1927 and Barrie Kosky's avant-garde ...

Tenor Carl Tanner is in San Diego to sing Radames, the lead male role in Verdi's Aida, a role he's already sung 145 times before. We met to discuss his background and career just before he was due at a rehearsal. Tanner's is the most unlikely tenor in the history of opera....

Rhyming a?oeGingera?? with a??Singera?? may be a stretch, but in Ginger Costa-Jackson's case, it might well be appropriate....

Last January, Joseph Keckler seemed to burst forth, fully blown, like Athena from the head of Zeus, at New York's Prototype Festival (though his emergence was, in fact, no such thing, having already been a staple of the Downtown scene for several years). This month, Philadelphia's got him, at the Op...

The first time I heard bass-baritone Davone Tinesa--he off the sensual, resonant voice and startlingly vivid stage presence--it was in Handel's ACI, GALATEA E POLIFEMO (described as a spectacular, streamlined, Cliff-Notes version of a Handel opera), at Brooklyn's National Sawdust. Tines wowed me and...

Anna Morrissey talks about her work as a movement director and the challenges of making her directing debut with Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream...

“It's been quite a ride,” says Kim Reed, co-librettist, filmmaker—and inspiration--for AS ONE, the chamber opera by Laura Kaminsky, with co-librettist Mark Campbell. The work's 27th production, in under five years, opened on May 30 under the auspices of New York City Opera, American Opera Projects (...

For me, concert-going in Barcelona is not simply hearing a singer like Diana Damrau bring beauty and insights to the music of great composers, but where you get to hear her perform this magic. This week's evening of lieder and other art songs, for instance, performed with harpist Xavier de Maistre, ...

Isabel Leonard is one of, if not the, most in-demand opera singer in the world today. For the last decade her star has been on the rise all around the world both on the opera and concert stages. This season at The Met alone she's performing in three different production, singing three roles that cou...

Was the pairing of Iain Bell and Mark Campbell--respectively, composer and librettist of New York City Opera's (NYCO) world premiere STONEWALL--'love at first sight”? I asked them. We were at the workshop in New York earlier this month that allowed them and director Leonard Foglia to cross the t's a...

Since 2011 Mezzo-soprano Ginger Costa-Jackson has sung the title role in 12 different productions of Bizet's Carmen. She will star in yet another this month for San Diego Opera. From here it's on to rehearsals for nine performances of Bizet's masterwork at Seattle Opera. Is the singer tiring of Carm...

The famous mezzo soprano Fredericka von Stade is in San Diego this week rehearsing Three Decembers, one of several works written with her in mind by her close friend Jake Heggie. The chamber opera for three singers and 11 musicians will be performed three times next weekend at the 500-seat Patrick H...

Julia Burbach talks to BroadwayWorld UK about her role as Revival Director of the ROH's Cosi Fan Tutte and about her work as an opera director....

Coloratura Alisa Jordheim will be debuting in the role of Gilda with baritone Stephen Powell in a San Diego Opera production of Verdi's Rigoletto. This is the fifth time he's sung the lead. The first time was in a Cincinnati Opera production in which Jordheim had only a few lines as a page. 'I feel ...

Washington state is justifiably proud to call Angela Meade a native. The star soprano has been a prizewinner in more than 50 top competitions...

BWW Interview: Erica Miner author of DEATH BY OPERA...

BWW Interview: Ted Rosenthal composer of DEAR ERICH at Museum Of Jewish Heritage...

Tenor Javier Camarena--who completes his run as Nadir, the love-struck tenor lead in Bizet's LES PECHEURS DE PERLES (THE PEARL FISHERS) this Saturday--isn't finished wow-ing Met audiences for the season. Not by a long shot. He's back in February to throw off those nine High Cs in “Ah, mes amis!” the...

Can a musical drama set on a grim WW I battlefield make an audience feel good? Those working on the San Diego Opera's staging of All Is Calm: the Christmas Truce of 1914 are certain it can. The work tells the true story of the spontaneous unofficial truce between WWI enemies who left their trenches ...

I caught up with rising star bass-baritone Christian Van Horn the other day, to find out what the devil was going on with his starring role in the Met's first performance of Arrigo Boito's MEFISTOFELE in almost 20 years. Were you nervous as hell (pun intended) on the first night, I asked Van Horn, w...

Southern California's Verdi Chorus will cap off their 35th anniversary season with their Fall 2018 concert PASSIONE! OPERA! The two performances at the First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica on November 10 and 11 will feature four guest artists: soprano Julie Makerov, mezzo soprano Janelle De...

The traffic in midtown Manhattan was its usual horror at lunchtime last Friday--and Anna Netrebko was stuck in it. She was on the way to Cipriani 42nd Street, across from Grand Central Station, where the Metropolitan Opera Guild was celebrating the soprano at its 84th Annual Luncheon. Despite her de...

When the Met's literary advisor asked Nicholas Wright what he thought about doing the libretto for MARNIE, he said yes because he was really interested in working with composer Nico Muhly and Michael Mayer. He was somewhat reserved, however, about whether it was a good opera subject. That was unders...

Stephen Lawless will be directing the San Diego Opera's production of The Marriage of Figaro this week. I met with him in the opera company's rehearsal room recently to discuss that, how he came to be a director, and his views of a director's responsibilities....

“I was, like many composers, not someone who was immediately in love with the human voice, the operatic voice, in new music,” says Lembit Beecher, whose opinion has definitely changed. He has become a powerful new force in the medium, with his new opera, SKY ON SWINGS, written with librettist Hannah...

It was exactly three years ago that I first spoke with Audrey Cardwell. At that time, she was in the ensemble of CINDERELLA on tour, often stepping in for the title character opposite her boyfriend, Andy Huntington Jones (who later starred in CATS on Broadway). Since then, her life has continued to ...

When tenor Lawrence Brownlee--he of the sweet, cultured tones and ringing high Cs--was first asked to put a recital together by Carnegie Hall, he chose Robert Schumann's “Dichterliebe (A Poet's Love),” the song cycle about rapture, disillusionment and regret as the centerpiece. But in filling out th...

This week in New York City, Philharmonia Orchestra of New York (PONY) is premiering LA TRAVIATA with 3D holographic projections for the sets. On March 20 and 21, 2018 audiences at the Rose Theater will be treated to the show's classic and beloved arias set against awe-inspiring backdrops like Niagar...

I spoke recently with Elaine Alvarez who will be singing the lead role this weekend in the San Diego Opera's production of Florencia en el Amazonas by Mexican composer Daniel Catan and librettist Marcela Fuentes-Berain. Alvarez told me that when she got a call from the San Diego Opera's General Dire...

'My goal at the moment is to sound like a dead Italian,' says British baritone Christopher Maltman, who stars as Don Alfonso with Broadway's Kelli O'Hara as Despina, co-conspirators against young lovers in the Met's new production of Mozart's comedy COSI FAN TUTTE. 'Or, at least, to sound like a 'li...

The latest artful collaboration of Stewart Copeland and Jonathan Moore, the co-world premiere of THE INVENTION OF MOREL, will be presented by the Long Beach Opera at the Beverly O'Neill Theater for three performances beginning March 17, 2018. Actor/director/playwright Jonathan Moore took a few momen...

ise Lindstrom has returned to San Diego to sing the lead in Puccini's Turandot. We spoke for nearly an hour in a rehearsal room at the San Diego Civic Center where she'd just finished working on makeup for the performance. You might think that someone with Lindstrom's powerful voice would have kn...

Eric Owens and I discuss stand-up comedy, Star Wars, and how Europeans boo an opera production without booing the performers. And, on occasion, we discuss his reasons for being in Houston: To perform the lead role in Houston Grand Opera's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE as well as guest judge for the company'...

Bruce Stasyna, San Diego Opera's chorus master, will also lead the orchestra in the company's upcoming production of Astor Piazzolla's Maria de Buenos Aires. We met in the Civic Center's Copper Room recently to discuss that, his career, and more....