Lisa DeAngelis, a graduate of University of Illinois’s esteemed voice program and current Alexander Technique practitioner, has been a weekend subscriber at the Lyric Opera of Chicago since she was 20. Driving up from college on the weekends, she and her mother would attend performances up in the second balcony. Little did undergraduate Lisa know, she would be taking over the {…}
On Sept. 18, Opera Philadelphia world premiered “The Wake World” as part of its 2017 festival. Composer David Hertzberg created an immersive experience that was showcased at the Barnes Foundation and that experimented with form and melody. As one of Opera Philadelphia’s 2017-2018 Composers-in-Residence, in a program offered in collaboration with Music-Theatre Group, Hertzberg will continue to be an active {…}
Performances of Washington National Opera’s (WNO) production of Giuseppe Verdi’s ‘Aida’ are well underway. While the production finishes its run on September 23rd, there remains great interest, and for good reason. With set and costume designs drawing inspiration from Los Angeles-based artist RETNA, audiences will no doubt find much novelty in this classic work set within the ancient world of {…}
On September 22, 2017, Utopia Opera will premiere its production of “Hydrogen Jukebox,” a modern chamber opera born from the collaboration of poet Alan Ginsberg and composer Philip Glass. During the 1988 presidential election debates between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, Glass and Ginsberg felt they weren’t addressing the real concerns of the American people and this became the {…}
Saimir Pirgu is one of today’s top tenors, singing at every major international theater, including the Metropolitan Opera, the Teatro alla Scala, the Vienna State Opera, the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the Paris Opéra, the Berlin Staatsoper and Deutsche Oper, the Zurich Opera, Barcelona’s Liceu, the San Francisco Opera, and the Salzburg Festival. This season he heads to the Teatro {…}
Orson Welles is one of the most fascinating figures of the past century, his art among the most influential of all time. But one of the things few people know about Welles is that he was as much concerned about process as he was about the final result. In fact, some of his films, most notably “F for Fake” examines {…}
Rihab Chaieb is a rising star in the opera world having won the 2016 Gerda Lissner International Vocal Competition and becoming a member of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Program. The Tunisian mezzo-soprano has quickly earned praise singing a number of houses including the Canadian Opera Company where she was a member of the Ensemble Studio and participant in {…}
It was 2013 and Suzanne Vinnik was contacted by soprano Zulimar López, who was looking to solve a problem that every female opera singer faces – getting rid of a bunch of gowns that were hogging her closet space. “I had also experienced the same issue with my over-stuffed closet in my one bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side,” Vinnik told {…}
Joan of Arc is an iconic figure and one that has been showcased in a lot of different art forms, including opera. In recent years, some operas telling the famed heroine’s story have been given revivals, most notably Verdi’s “Giovanna d’Arco.” Of a different ilk, but no less compelling is Tchaikovsky’s “The Maid of Orleans,” which will open Odyssey Opera’s {…}