On May 1 and 2, Trinity Church will present Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem in collaboration with The Dessoff Choirs, which is celebrating its 100th Anniversary season. These performances will celebrate the legacy as well as the musical innovation of the organizations and will include the world premiere of a new choral work by Pulitzer Prize- winning composer Tania León, commissioned by {…}
Welcome back for this week’s look at the latest CD and DVD releases in the opera world. This week audiences will get a good helping of baroque favorites and rarities, star-studded albums, world premieres and some fantastic modern works by recognized composers. Rufus Wainwright’s Dream Requiem The new album showcases Wainwright’s “Dream Requiem,” an epic work for orchestra, chorus, soprano, {…}
(Photo credits: Rosenberg, IMG Artists, & UIA Talent) Trinity Church has unveiled its 2025 spring season. For the purposes of this article only classical vocal concerts are included. Soprano Sonya Headlam opens the season in “Sunday Afternoon Music,” featuring works by Ignatius Sancho, Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Trevor Weston, Peter Ashbourne, and others. Performance Date: February 2, 2025 (St Paul’s {…}
The score of Gordon Getty’s “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” breathes all the unpretentiously sweet melancholy of its many predecessors – from James Hilton’s 1933 novella of the same title to subsequent adaptations as, among others, radio plays and lavishly cast movie musicals. Yet it is not exactly the feel-good opera advertised in Pentatone’s press release; rather, the eponymous Mr. Chips – {…}
(Photo credit: Karen Almond / Met Opera) This season’s premiere of Met Opera’s “Tosca” features Polish soprano Aleksandra Kurzak, in the titular role, marking her 100th Met performance. Her Met debut was in 2004 as Olympia in Offenbach’s “Les Contes d’Hoffmann” and her performances leading up to this season have all been unforgettable, especially Kurzak as Tosca. Her voice alongside tenor {…}
(Credit: Philip Groshong) Cincinnati Opera’s 2024 Summer Festival which took place in July will be broadcast in November via 90.9 WGUC. The broadcasts will be on Sunday at 8 p.m. and can also be heard online at wguc.org. The first broadcast will feature Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” conducted by Dame Jane Glover and starring Elliot Madore, Jessica Faselt, Jessica Rivera, Aaron {…}
The Cincinnati Opera concludes its 2024 Summer Festival with the highly anticipated world stage premiere of Paul McCartney’s “Liverpool Oratorio” at Cincinnati’s historic Music Hall. The classical piece features music and lyrics by Paul McCartney and Carl Davis with all new sets, costumes, lighting, staging, and choreography. The “Liverpool Oratorio” will star Andrew Owens, Jacqueline Echols McCarley, Kayleigh Decker, Kevin Short, {…}
The Washington Opera Society will commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Passing of Giacomo Puccini’s with “The Girl of the Golden West.” The performance will be showcased on May 28 at the Atrium of the Embassy of France and will feature Jonathan Burton as Dick Johnson, Kristin Sampson as Minnie, Kevin Short as Jack Rance, Michael Butler as Nick, Andrew {…}
Perhaps it was the eclipse, an event typically devoid of human influence, yet on the evening of April 8, 2024, it seemed to cast an otherworldly aura over Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons’ production of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” The production premiered at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2019 before moving to the Met to sold-out audiences {…}
After this summer’s “Un Ballo in Maschera,” the forces behind the Dutch label Pentatone are turning their attention to another heavy-hitter from the Italian repertoire: with “Tosca” they enter the well-trodden territory of one of the most recorded operas ever. Yet, Carlo Montanaro and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester do not pretend to proverbially reinvent the wheel the way Rostropovich famously did in {…}
(Credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera) The Metropolitan Opera is in the midst of reviving “Un Ballo in Maschera” for the first time since 2015. Considered one of Verdi’s masterpieces, the work has some of the greatest arias and ensembles the composer ever wrote. For this revival, the Met brought a solid cast in an unfortunate production that should have {…}