On May 17, 2019, the New York Opera Festival and On Site Opera will host the world premiere of Michi Wiancko and Deborah Brevoort’s opera “Murasaki’s Moon.” The work will be showcased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and will be presented in conjunction with the Met’s exhibition “The Tale of Genji: A Japanese Classic Illumination.” The work marks the {…}
For the last decade, Michael Fabiano has emerged as one of the greatest tenors on the planet, performing at the major opera houses around the globe in a myriad of repertoire. Along the way, he’s won many prestigious awards and continually showcased an ability to push the boundaries of his artistic abilities. But in that same period that Fabiano has {…}
“Carmen” is one of the most iconic operas ever written. It is performed everywhere around the world and in recent years, directors have tried to find new ways to reinterpret the story, sometimes even changing major components. This isn’t new for an opera like “Carmen,” which actually exists in another well-known version “La Tragédie de Carmen.” While not performed as often {…}
Pacific Opera Project’s “Madama Butterfly,” presented recently in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, was acclaimed for presenting Puccini’s opera in Japanese and English, the languages the characters would actually have spoken. But one of the other talking points around town was the “last-minute” assumption of the title role by Melbourne-born soprano, Janet Szepei Todd. OperaWire caught up with Janet at Cafe {…}
Riccardo Frizza is one of today’s foremost Italian conductors specializing in the Italian repertoire. He has appeared at all the great opera houses in the world and has interpreted many of the great works by Verdi, Donizetti, Rossini, and Bellini. Recently, he was appointed the music director of the Donizetti Opera Festival and for his first assignment, he took on {…}
In the premiere American staging of “La Susanna,” Heartbeat Opera and Opera Lafayette have joined forces for the first time to bring this emotive and rare Baroque work to Washington D.C. and New York audiences. “La Susanna” tells the eponymous Biblical story of Susanna and the Elders: two men, referred to as “judges” that desire a beautiful married woman; when they {…}
In Benjamin Britten and Ronald Duncan’s “The Rape of Lucretia,” a young Roman soldier is goaded into testing the chastity of Lucretia, who was the only woman not to betray her husband Collatinus. This roman soldier, Tarquinius, proceeds to show up at Lucretia’s home, awaken her from bed, and, despite being repeatedly rejected, he rapes her. Lucretia winds up killing {…}
On May 3, 2019, Australian soprano Yvette Keong will perform her graduation recital at the Manhattan School of Music’s Greenfield Hall. While still a member of the school’s Senior Opera Theater, Keong has quickly begun to make a name for herself with recent appearances in the role of Pamina in the Berlin Opera Academy’s 2018 production of “Die Zauberflöte,” which {…}
“We want to make this music—these composers—part of the standard repertoire. Events like this shouldn’t be rare,” stated soprano Nicole Leone in a recent interview with OperaWire. Leone’s simple statement refers to the challenge of increasing the prominence of female composers in music programming, and she is doing her part. Together with Randi Marrazzo, her voice teacher from Temple University, {…}
