Jonas Kaufmann News

A day after canceling upcoming performances due to concerns around the coronavirus, the Metropolitan Opera announced that it would stream encore presentations from the award-winning Live in HD series of cinema transmissions on the company website for the duration of the closure.

Following the success of last Monday's streamed Academy Concert, the Bayerische Staatsoper is planning to launch a series of 'Monday Concerts' starting next Monday, March 23, 2020: each starting at 8:15 pm (CET) on STAATSOPER.TV, live and free of charge. New as video-on-demand: Lucia di Lammermoor under General Music Director Kirill Petrenko with Diana Damrau in the title role.

The International Opera Awards announced today the postponement of their 2020 awards ceremony in light of the current Covid-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak.

On reflection, we should have been more suspicious. But when the curtain rose on a solid, period Fidelio complete with lowering prison walls and lank-haired French revolutionaries, a basket of freshly guillotined heads adding some grisly colour, it was easy to settle in for a breeches and muskets romp. Of course, German director Tobias Kratzer had no such intention.

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

The International Opera Awards today announced the finalists for its 2020 Awards [Wednesday 5 February 2020]. The annual red-carpet event - which celebrates achievement in opera around the globe over the 2019 calendar year - recognises excellence in a wide range of categories that cover performance, design and direction as well as education and outreach.

As part of Carnegie Hall's 2020-2021 season, announced on January 28, the Boston Symphony Orchestra will perform three programs on October 26, 2020, and April 14 and 15, 2021, led by BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons. These programs will also be featured in the BSO's 2020-2021 season at Symphony Hall in Boston. Mr. Nelsons and the BSO will announce complete details of the 2020-21 season in April.

Maestro Gustavo Dudamel, who usually leads the LA Philharmonic, took a busman's holiday to NY for a brace of performances with his orchestra's East Coast counterpart, the New York Philharmonic. His reputation as a master on the podium is not overrated: I can't think of a more understated, yet fully controlled, performance than the one I heard Friday night at Lincoln Center's David Geffen Hall, with Schubert and, especially, Mahler on the bill.

For a composer so well known for his dramatic operas--SALOME and ELEKTRA the most famous of them--Richard Strauss's most popular work remains the more comic DER ROSENKAVALIER, which just made its season debut under the scintillating baton of Sir Simon Rattle, with a bevy of first-rate singers.

The world's greatest tenor Jonas Kaufmann, respected worldwide for his operatic tones, returns to Vienna in a deeply personal tribute to the world-famous melodies from the birthplace of waltz and operetta.

I know it takes a leap of faith for the Met to schedule something outside the ABC operas--AIDA, BOHEME, CARMEN plus a TOSCA, TURANDOT and a few others--and go for something a little more off the beaten track. Tchaikovsky's QUEEN OF SPADES certainly falls into that category, even though it isn't exactly an unknown. The current production by Elijah Moshinsky, conducted by Vasily Petrenko, which still looks like new and opened the other day for the season's run, is not just well-sung and beautiful to see but makes a very good case for doing it more often.

When New Yorkers last saw a concert performance of Act II of Wagner's TRISTAN UND ISOLDE--in the spring of 2018 with the Boston Symphony under Nelsons--a major singer was trying on one of the title characters for size. That was tenor Jonas Kaufmann. This time, it was Isolde who was ready for her closeup, with soprano Christine Goerke in a can't-wait-for-the-whole-opera performance, under Gianandrea Noseda with the Washington Symphony at Lincoln Center's White Light Festival.

The Metropolitan Opera production of Philip Glass's Akhnaten comes to the big screen in HD at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Sunday, December 1 at 12:55pm in an extra special encore presentation featuring a live Q&A on The Playhouse stage during intermission with The Met Opera's Susan Gomez Pizzo, Solo Ladies Wardrobe Supervisor, and Louis Valantasis, Principal Men's Wardrobe Supervisor.

Park Avenue Armory has just announced its 2020 season, which is set to include works by Bill T. Jones, Robert Icke's Hamlet, and much more. Click here for tickets and additional information.

Following its acclaimed Carnegie Hall performances last season, the Boston Symphony Orchestra returns to New York on Monday, November 18, 2019 for a concert led by BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons. Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, who last played with the BSO and Maestro Nelsons in 2017, performs music from his homelanda?"Grieg's perennially popular Piano Concerto. Complementing the Grieg is Mahler's cheerfully bucolic Symphony No. 4.

The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage's 2019/20 Celebrity Opera Series commences with Diana Damrau (soprano) and Nicolas Testé (bass) on Saturday, May 16, 2020. James Conlon, Music Director of the Los Angeles Opera (since 2006) and Principal Conductor of the RAI National Symphony Orchestra in Torino, Italy (since 2016), conducts the orchestra.

The Hungarian State Opera Orchestra is the oldest theatre orchestra in Hungary. Due to the vast selection of performances offered by the Opera, it is the most employed Hungarian symphony orchestra. Its roots reach back as far as 1838, when Ferenc Erkel, the father of the Hungarian national opera as a genre organised an opera orchestra for the Hungarian Theatre of Pest. The orchestra moved into their present home, the Opera House after its inauguration in 1884 and was presided over by notable principal music directors including Gustav Mahler. 

The Royal Opera House today announces its 2019/20 Cinema Season which will launch in October. 13 productions will be broadcast to 600 UK cinemas stretching the length of the UK from the Orkney Islands all the way to Jersey in the Channel Islands.   

The Metropolitan Opera's annual Summer HD Festival, presenting free outdoor screenings of operas in Lincoln Center Plaza, returns for the 11th time this summer, with one screening each night now through Monday, September 2, 2019 (Labor Day). The series features ten performances from the company's acclaimed Live in HD series of movie theater transmissions, including performances from the 2018 19 season as well as some of the most popular transmissions from past years. Preceding the festival, on Friday, August 23, the classic movie musical Funny Face will be screened in the plaza, in association with Film at Lincoln Center. Funny Face features songs by George and Ira Gershwin, whose opera, Porgy and Bess, will be presented in a new production to open the Met's forthcoming 2019 20 season in September.

Join us for a night at the opera with a full bar a?" see the Metropolitan Opera's stunning production of Aida in HD on the big screen at The Ridgefield Playhouse on Friday, August 16 at 7pm! During intermission, Louis Valantasis, head of men's wardrobe for The Metropolitan Opera, will be live on stage at The Playhouse to discuss the role of costumes in the Met's dazzling productions!