Greer Grimsley News

This weekend (August 1-2) in live streaming: Cheyenne Jackson sings with Seth Rudetsky, Renee Fleming sings for the Met, and so much more!

The Met has announced the Week 20 schedule for its Nightly Met Opera Streams, a free series of encore Live in HD presentations and classic telecasts streamed on the company website during the coronavirus closure.

San Francisco Opera continues streaming performances as part of its Opera is ON initiative with Richard Strauss' Salome (June 20), Jules Massenet's Manon (June 27) and Carlisle Floyd's Susannah (July 4). The presentations, filmed live in high-definition at the War Memorial Opera House, will be viewable on demand for free at sfopera.com on the streaming date starting at 10 am PT and expiring at 11:59 pm the following day.

Minnesota Opera has announced its lineup for the 2020 Digital Opera series!

While McCaw Hall's stage may be dark, opera music continues to reverberate in the Pacific Northwest and beyond: Starting every Saturday on April 25, enjoy Seattle Opera Mornings on King FM. Classical KING FM 98.1 will broadcast recordings of previous Seattle Opera performances including Tosca, La traviata, The Magic Flute, and Madame Butterfly. Broadcasts will be available on the radio and at king.org every Saturday morning at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. 

Today, the Metropolitan Opera announced its 2020-21 season, the first in which Yannick Nézet-Séguin assumes his full breadth of musical duties as the company's Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, conducting six productions. His schedule includes the Met premiere of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking, the first contemporary opera conducted by the maestro on the Met stage, as part of his ongoing commitment to opera of our time at the Met, which will expand in the seasons to come.

Michaela Schuster will sing Fricka in tomorrow's performance of Wagner's Die Walküre, replacing Jamie Barton.

The second and third repetition is ultimately what will establish a piece as an addition to the repertoire...

There's lots to enjoy in the Met's revival of DIE WALKURE, the second part of Richard Wagner's great tetralogy, DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN, better known simply as Wagner's Ring Cycle, which had its first performance of the season on Monday night--all five hours of it!--under the pulsating control of Philippe Jordan and the Met orchestra in full throttle. The thrills started with the entrance of soprano Christine Goerke as Brunnhilde, tenor Stuart Skelton and soprano Eva Marie Westbroek as the incestuous Siegmund and Sieglinde, the clarion mezzo Jamie Barton as Fricka, goddess of marriage. For sheer pleasure and delight, however, there's nothing that beats the best-known section of the opera, “The Ride of the Valkyries,” which opens Act III.

World Premiere: Court Theater, Munich, 1870. The second opera in Wagner's monumental Ring cycle, Die Walküre has long stood on its own as an evening of extraordinarily powerful theater. Part of this appeal lies in its focus on some of the Ring's most interesting characters at decisive moments of their lives: Wotan, the leader of the gods; his wife, Fricka; his twin offspring, Siegmund and Sieglinde; and, above all, Wotan's warrior daughter Brünnhilde. These characters and others follow their destinies to some of Wagner's most remarkable music.

If Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Ring Cycle (formally, DER RING DAS NIBELUNGEN) had worked as smoothly when it opened in 2010 as it did at this season's marvelous premiere of its prologue, DAS RHEINGOLD, on Saturday afternoon, there probably still would have been complaints--not about its focus on technology but on its traditional approach. Personally, i liked it.

Wagner's visionary initial installment of the Ring Cycle depicts the original sin of the theft of the sacred golden treasure, the vanity of the gods, the greed of the Nibelungen, the fratricide of the giants, and the building of Valhalla. Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley sings the role of Wotan, the conflicted lord of the gods. Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton sings her first Wagner role at the Met as Wotan's embattled wife, Fricka.

Wagner's visionary initial installment of the Ring Cycle depicts the original sin of the theft of the sacred golden treasure, the vanity of the gods, the greed of the Nibelungen, the fratricide of the giants, and the building of Valhalla. Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley sings the role of Wotan, the conflicted lord of the gods. Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton sings her first Wagner role at the Met as Wotan's embattled wife, Fricka.

The 2018-19 season of The Met: Live in HD will continue at the Warner Theatre on Saturday, March 30 with Wagner's DIE WALKURE at 12:00 pm in the Nancy Marine Studio. The 2018-19 season is sponsored by Viron Rondo Osteria. A complimentary 45 minute pre-opera lecture by Dr. Marguerite Mull e will be offered in the Studio Theatre Lobby two hours before the broadcast, sponsored by Mitchell Auto Group. In what is expected to be a Wagnerian event for the ages, soprano Christine Goerke plays Br nnhilde, Wotan's willful warrior daughter, who loses her immortality in opera's most famous act of filial defiance. Tenor Stuart Skelton and soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek play the incestuous twins Siegmund and Sieglinde. Greer Grimsley sings Wotan. Philippe Jordan conducts.

The Ring Returns! Die Walkure, Opera's supreme experience returns to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time in six seasons with a cast of magnificent Wagnerians, led by the thrilling Christine Goerke making her Met debut as Brunnhilde. See Die Walkure in a live simulcast on the big screen at The Ridgefield Playhouse Saturday, March 30 at 12pm, part of Atria Senior Living Classical Series, underwritten by Jeanne Cook, Liz & Steven Goldstone and Sabina & Walter Slavin with support from Whistle Stop Bakery. Philippe Jordan conducts Robert Lepage's breathtaking production, which faithfully presents every detail of Wagner's immortal libretto.

Carl St.Clair, music director of Pacific Symphony and John Forsyte, the Symphony's president, announce programming for the orchestra's 2019-20 season. Pacific Symphony will celebrate Carl St.Clair's 30th year as music director of the orchestra and pays homage to Beethoven to honor the 250th anniversary of the great composer's birth. This landmark season commences on Thursday, Sept. 26 with Maestro St.Clair conducting the combined forces of Pacific Symphony and Pacific Chorale in a program featuring two great blockbusters: Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, a forerunner to his mighty Ninth Symphony along with Carl Orff's popular masterpiece Carmina Burana, the most frequently performed choral work of the 21st century.

The Metropolitan Opera will present Richard Wagner's four-part masterwork Der Ring des Nibelungen in performances March 9-May 11, 2019.  This season's performances are the first time the Met has presented the inventive Robert Lepage staging in six seasons and are the only complete Ring cycles to be presented in North America in 2019. Marshaling the vast forces on stage and in the pit is the incoming music director of the Vienna State Opera, Philippe Jordan, who has conducted acclaimed Ring cycles in Paris and Zurich.

The Dallas Opera is extremely proud to present the season opener of the company's grand 2018-2019 "Swept Away" Season: Richard Wagner's haunting nineteenth-century masterpiece, The Flying Dutchman (Der fliegende Hollander), a work not seen on The Dallas Opera stage since January of 1994.

In an onstage presentation following the July 1 performance of Richard Wagner's Gotterdammerung, San Francisco Opera General Director Matthew Shilvock presented former general director David Gockley with the San Francisco Opera Medal, the Company's highest honor. An industry pioneer who helped shape the operatic repertory and build new audiences for the artform, Gockley served ten years at the helm of San Francisco Opera and is currently the Company's General Director Emeritus.

San Francisco Opera's presentation of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung) opens tonight with the first of three complete cycles, each presented over the course of one week as the composer originally intended, from June 12 through July 1 at the War Memorial Opera House. Encompassing four operas-Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdammerung-and more than 17 hours, Wagner's Ring is one of the most ambitious works of music, theater and stagecraft ever created.