(Photo Credit: Benjamin Ealovega) According to renowned conductor Zubin Mehta, Alma Deutscher is “One of the greatest musical talents today.” According to others, she is comparable to Mozart, a former child prodigy, British composer, pianist, violinist and conductor, who started playing music at the age of two and who could read music before she could read words. Her music has {…}
(Photo credit: Tilo Stengel) Göteborg Opera won the award for Sustainability at the International Opera Awards 2022 Gala at Teatro Real in Madrid. Artistic Director for Opera/Drama, Henning Ruhe, makes his role a leading example by honoring ecological sustainability and collaborates with other opera house to make a positive difference along the way. This company celebrates its 30th year anniversary {…}
(Photo Credit: Jan Reiser) For Theater Magdeburg’s General Director, Julien Chavaz, color is at the core of how he approaches his opera productions. It’s also where his artistic journey commenced. Specifically, he worked a job in painting as a teenager. When his attempts to embark on a college degree in agricultural engineering didn’t pan out, he returned to that very {…}
(Photo credit: Ignacio Barrios) Bayreuth Baroque Festival has been awarded “The Best Festival of 2024” by Germany’s Oper! Awards. The first season began in 2020 with a staged production of Nicola Antonio Porpora’s “Carlo il Calvo”, and an opera in concert version of “Gismondo, Re di Polonia” by Leonardo Vinci and libretto by Francesco Briani’s Il Vincitor Generoso. The orchestras {…}
(Photo credit: Alexander Kofler) OperaWire had the incredible opportunity to attend the Innsbruck Festival of Early Music this summer and learn firsthand about what makes this local community, nestled in the Austrian Alps, inspiring at an international level both artistically and sustainably. Innsbruck, Austria is a place where everything and everyone participates in celebrating Early Music as an art for {…}
What does it take to make a difference in the opera world? And what does it mean? Should one be world-famous, have a star-management and a five-figure fee? I guess it’s a certain way. But then, on a planet [over]-populated by almost eight billion people, we would have just a handful of such personalities. When a couple of years ago, {…}
(Credit: The Riker Brothers) LA-based composer and baritone Samuel Siskind is a high school senior whose music has garnered significant international recognition. He is a winner of the 2024 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and is also an LA Phil Composing Fellow, under the direction of acclaimed composer Andrew Norman. His music has been played at Carnegie Hall and {…}
Despite living in a horrific Nazi concentration camp, Jaap Polak and Ina Soep continued to write love letters to one another. The couple’s letters were published in 2000 and were featured in a documentary film of this same title. Their relationship inspired Composer Gerald Cohen and librettist Deborah Brevoort‘s first opera together, “Steal a Pencil for Me.” The couple was {…}
It was January 2020, on the Brooklyn waterfront. A bone-chilling wind funneled through old buildings, slamming the streets. Inside, “Ellen West” would have its premiere. But my mind wasn’t on opera; that very day, I learned my brother had cancer. As I arrived, a cluster of people stood on the steps. Ricky Ian Gordon was in the aisle, easy to {…}
After 140 years, Wagner’s final opera, “Parsifal,” first performed at the second Bayreuth Festival in 1882, finally got its Mexican premiere in April of this year. While not quite an opera—it was defined by Wagner as an ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel,’ or a ‘stage festival play’ with a sacred focus—Wagner’s final piece testifies to his consummate understanding of opera as not just a {…}
(Photo: Alex Dowling) During the pandemic, the composer, Emma O’Halloran, and librettist, Mark O’Halloran, produced a piece for Irish National Opera’s hugely successful and innovative “20 Shots of Opera.” The work, entitled “The Wait,” is an impressive opera that brilliantly showcased O’Halloran’s compositional skills, in which OperaWire drew attention to her “wonderfully evocative score, with its contrasting densities and textures, {…}