Richard Strauss News

Opera Saratoga's Artistic and General Director Lawrence Edelson announced today complete casting for the three exciting new productions that will comprise the company's 2017 Summer Festival, which will build on the company's commitment to producing masterpieces from the operatic cannon, important American works, and works in which dance plays an integral role. In addition, a wide variety of free and ticketed concert events will be presented from May 28th through July 16th at venues throughout the region.

On Tuesday evening June 20, The North/South Chamber Orchestra will conclude its 37th consecutive season performing four works by living composers from the Americas.

Kicking off its 40th season of innovative and intimate opera and music events, Pittsburgh Festival Opera expands to a six-week season in multiple venues in 2017. Opening on June 15 with the world premiere of its commissioned jazz opera A Gathering of Sons, the acclaimed American summer opera festival also presents Handel's Xerxes, Richard Strauss' Intermezzo, and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street on the Mainstage in Falk Auditorium, Winchester Thurston School in Pittsburgh thriving East End.

Under the leadership of General Director and CEO Susan T. Danis, Florida Grand Opera's 2017-18 season continues the upward trajectory of the past few seasons.

Concord Bicycle Music has announced the acquisition of global independent music publishing and theatrical rights company Imagem Music Group. Unique for its leadership role in Broadway, classical, and pop music, Imagem Music Group's vast and historic catalogue of music assets totals more than 250,000 copyrights and includes compositions by some of the most significant and successful artists and songwriters in music history. The landmark agreement brings Concord Bicycle Music's combined publishing catalogue to 380,000 copyrighted works, further underscoring the company's position as a fully integrated independent recorded music and publishing powerhouse.

Concord Bicycle Music has announced the acquisition of global independent music publishing and theatrical rights company Imagem Music Group. Unique for its leadership role in Broadway, classical, and pop music, Imagem Music Group's vast and historic catalogue of music assets totals more than 250,000 copyrights and includes compositions by some of the most significant and successful artists and songwriters in music history. The landmark agreement brings Concord Bicycle Music's combined publishing catalogue to 380,000 copyrighted works, further underscoring the company's position as a fully integrated independent recorded music and publishing powerhouse.

Florida Grand Opera (FGO) is pleased to welcome the singers who will make up the company's 2017-18 Young Artist Program. Twelve performers in all, chosen from the nearly 550 who applied, will arrive in early October to become an integral part of the seventy-seventh season of Florida Grand Opera, the state's longest continuously running performing arts institution.

It's not often that listening to a cast album makes one think of Richard Strauss, but such is the genius of Scott Frankel and Michael Korie. The composer-lyricist team best known for the brilliant GREY GARDENS is back with WAR PAINT, the story of rival beauty moguls Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. Here both story and emotion are thinner, but the music is gorgeous--Straussian in its elegiac beauty and bell-like notes--and worthy of its two stars, Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole, two of the most unique and exciting voices in musical theater. Like a golden-age Hollywood director 'managing' the two stars of a women's picture, the score has to find ways to manage its two leads, giving each an equal role. Ebersole gets an old-fashioned entrance--her Red Door spa staff sings breathlessly, 'She's coming, she's coming...,' bursting into a triumphant 'She's here!' LuPone's entrance is less heralded but equally dramatic (and separate), as she steps off a ship in New York. From then on, many of the songs are duets, in which one star sings half of a song about her own experience, and the second sings the other half, with lyrics expressing her different but parallel experience. Occasionally they sing in unison. What sounds tedious as a show (a narrative in which two separate characters have similar, not highly dramatic arcs and don't meet until the very end) enchants on the album. Without the strain of the storytelling, we can simply enjoy the gorgeous songs and their peerless purveyors.

An overview on the NYC Metropolitan Opera web site of choreographer Alexei Ratmansky's newest work, “Whipped Cream”, calls the ballet a “dollop of delightful whimsy”. Yet the full-length production by ABT's Artist in Residence, with a run at the opera house from May 23rd to July 1st 2017, is in fact a heaping serving of horror-infused revelry complete with drunken characters and an illness caused by overindulgence in sweets.

Guests arrived at the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center for American Ballet Theatre's Spring Gala on a rainy Monday evening.

Nobody puts conductor Manfred Honeck in a corner--except, perhaps the maestro himself. For instance, the Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony and frequent guest conductor in the US and Europe makes no bones about viewing himself as the quintessential mittel-european maestro, devoted to Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Richard Strauss and others of that ilk. But he's also an advocate of the music of the 21st century and works by Shankar, Stucky, Danielpour, Adamsand other newer masters.

American Ballet Theatre presents Mark Ryden: The Art of Whipped Cream, an exhibition of work by pop-surrealist Mark Ryden, on view in the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera House, May 19-July 8, 2017. The exhibition, organized by the Paul Kasmin Gallery, features drawings, sketches and paintings created for American Ballet Theatre's new production of Whipped Cream.

Arts Alliance Illinois, under the leadership of Executive Director Claire Rice and Board Chair Brooke Flanagan, Director of Institutional Advancement at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, welcome artistic, business, creative, and philanthropic leaders from across Illinois to the organization's Fifth Annual Benefit Luncheon on Thursday, June 8, 2017 at the Palmer House Hilton, located at 17 East Monroe Street in Chicago. Guest check-in and a reception begin at 11:15am, with the seated luncheon following promptly at noon.

Casting for the first two weeks of American Ballet Theatre's 2017 Spring Season at the Metropolitan Opera House was announced today by Artistic Director Kevin McKenzie.

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of guest conductor David Zinman, brings Brahms' Symphony No. 3 and Strauss' Don Quixote to life in two sensational BNY Mellon Grand Classics performances on Friday, May 19, and Sunday, May 21 at Heinz Hall.

Boston Landmarks Orchestra (LO) under the direction of Music Director Christopher Wilkins, and Executive Director Jo Frances Meyer,  announces its 2017 season of free concerts at the DCR's Hatch Memorial Shell on the Esplanade. Concerts will be held every Wednesday evening (7 p.m.) from July 19 through August 23, 2017. For more information visit landmarksorchestra.org.

Pacific Opera presents A Mothers' Day Concert in SYDNEY! Featuring Maestro Simon Kenway (Artistic Director of Pacific Opera) and the 2017 Young Artists, this concert includes a complimentary afternoon tea before the concert in the beautiful surrounds of the historic Independent Theatre in North Sydney.

An elite group of nineteen of the most talented young opera singers in the country competed this weekend for prestige and prizes in the 29th Annual Dallas Opera Guild Vocal Competition.

The Las Vegas Philharmonic presents its final concert of the 2016 – 2017 concert season, Cabrera Conducts Bruckner on Saturday, May 27th at 7:30 p.m. in Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center.  Music Director Donato Cabrera will host a pre-concert conversation at 6:30 p.m. for patrons to learn more about the history and meaning behind the music in the evening's program. 

For a new production that was supposed to mark a farewell for soprano Renee Fleming to a role (the Marschallin) if not to staged opera performance in general, Robert Carsen's version of Richard Strauss's DER ROSENKAVALIER at the Met seemed more of a farce and less a tale of regret about passing time than usual. And the “star” role seemed more of an aside than the center of it all.