Los Angeles Opera News

Today's top stories: the cast of Come From Away returns to film the show, Laura Benanti releases new music video, and more!

Christine Goerke and Craig Terry's Recital can be seen on the Los Angeles Opera website as part of the five-part Signature Recital Series offered for $45 per household. Performances will be streamed until July 1, 2021. Goerke and Terry opened with a wildly dramatic  rendition of Handel’s fire and brimstone“Furie Terribili,” (“Dreadful Furies”) from Rinaldo. Goerke then introduced a group of Italian songs in honor of her mother whose lineage is Sicilian and Neapolitan.

Enjoy Los Angeles Opera’s Signature Recital Series presentation of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham with pianist Jeremy Frank in a program of songs by Kurt Weill. Selections include the yearning 'Lonely House,' the tantalizing 'I'm a Stranger Here Myself' and the nostalgic 'September Song.” The video, streams until July 1, 2021.

Following a year of shuttered doors, Feinstein’s at the Nikko announced today they will reopen later this month with a lineup of fan favorites, Broadway stars, and local icons who will take the stage at San Francisco’s premier nightclub.

The Merola Opera Program, one of the most prestigious and selective opera training programs in the world, has announced its 2021 season, presenting performances by the rising opera stars of tomorrow.

Los Angeles Opera’s new Signature Recital Series gives vocal music fans  exclusive access to astounding performances in intimate settings—filmed in stunning venues across this country and in Europe—streamed directly to home screens. Tenor Russell Thomas partners with pianist Mi-Kyung Kim for Schumann's Dichterliebe (Poet's Love).

Arizona Opera has announced its 2021/22 Season—its 50th Anniversary Season—which will feature an exciting and diverse programming schedule of five productions, including the release of the company’s first world premiere film and four planned in-theater productions in both Phoenix and Tucson.

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.