(Photo: Maru Teppei) Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) is an organization actively changing the roadmap of opera production and composition one project at a time. Since 2006 the company has commissioned, developed, produced, and toured over 60 works in 14 countries around the world, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning chamber operas “Angel’s Bone” and “p r i s m.” This year’s PROTOTYPE {…}
(Credit: Brittany Lesavoy Smith Photography) Few organizations have done as much to illuminate the possibilities of contemporary opera than American Opera Initiative (AOI). The program, founded in 2012 by Francesca Zambello, is a one-year lab of sorts for aspiring opera composers and librettists to create, workshop, rehearse, and premiere a short opera. Amongst the works to premiere under the program {…}
(Photo: Michele Monasta) Italian Soprano Chiara Isotton is a graduate of the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory in Venice, and is a member of the La Scala Academy, Milan. She won several important national and international competitions, including being among the winners of the “European Community” Competition for Young Opera Singers by the Teatro Lirico Sperimentale di Spoleto in 2013 where she {…}
OperaWire met up with English soprano Charlotte Bowden between performances of Monteverdi’s “Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria” and a double Purcell bill of “Hail! Bright St. Cecilia” and “Dido and Aeneas” at the Ravenna festival, in which she was essaying the roles of Melanto, a solo soprano and Belinda, respectively. Although she only recently graduated from the Royal College {…}
(Photo © Marc Larcher) To learn from Maestro Paolo Arrivabeni about his journey before he steps on the podium to conduct an opera or a symphony is more than a treat. It is a brief excursion into some of the layers he explores before he picks up his baton. More than rehearsals with singers and orchestra, more than simply studying {…}
When Jane Marsh made her Italian and European début at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy singing the demanding part of Desdemona in Giuseppe Verdi’s “Otello,” she was just past her teens. She had been recommended to Thomas Schippers by the Metropolitan Opera as he was looking for a soprano to sing the role for the opening of {…}
(Photo: Annemone Taake) Russian baritone Mikhail Timoshenko began his musical and theatrical training in Mednogorsk, then at the Franz Liszt University in Weimar and the Hans Eisler in Berlin. From 2015 to 2017, he was a member of the Académie de l’Opéra national de Paris. He sang in the world premiere of Joanna Lee’s “Vol Retour” and performed the role of {…}
(Photo: Dahyun Baek) SeokJong Baek’s rise to prominence in the opera world can only be described as meteoric, if not almost difficult to believe. Almost 15 years singing as a baritone, a chance encounter with fellow South Korean tenor Yonghoon Lee suggested to him that he might make a better tenor than a baritone. Despite joining the San Francisco Young {…}
Published in 1931, “The Waves” is recognized as Virginia Woolf’s most experimental work, featuring soliloquies from six different characters in a unique stream-of-consciousness. And now it will get an opera. The team behind the work is composer Blake Allen and director / writer Will Nunziata. Allen, an award-winning composer, violist, and producer, enjoys “merging merging the worlds of opera and {…}