The BBC Proms has announced its 2024 season. Here is a look at the vocal performances. Elim Chan conducts the First Night at Proms with soloists Sophie Bevan and Isata Kanneh‐Mason. The program includes Handel, Ben Nobuto, Beethoven Bruckner, and Clara Schumann. Performance Date: July 19, 2024 British choral groups The King’s Singers and VOCES8 present a Prom that showcases {…}
The London Symphony Orchestra has announced its 2024-25 season. Here are the vocal performances. Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. Performance Dates: Oct. 20 & 23, 2024 André J Thomas conducts the Soul Sanctuary Gospel Choir and LSO Community Voices in music by Brandon Boyd, Nolan Williams, Margaret Bonds, Brandon Waddles, André J Thomas, Moses Hogan, Rosephanye Powell, Joe Pace, Carol Cymbala, Kurt Carr, Raymond Wise, and Frances Fonza Smith. Performance {…}
The Lyric Opera of Chicago has announced its 2024-25 season. Here is a look at the productions. Verdi’s “Rigoletto” is set to star Igor Golovatenko, Soloman Howard, Javier Camarena, and Mané Galoyan. Enrique Mazzola conducts the production by Director Mary Birnbaum. Performance Dates: Sept. 14-Oct. 6 2024 Elza van den Heever, Russell Thomas, Mika Kares, and Brian Mulligan star in {…}
Welcome back for this week’s look at the latest CD and DVD releases in the opera world. This week audiences will be able to hear newly released archive recordings, a world premiere opera, debut albums, and some great baroque works. Erinnerung St. Florian Abbey Singers releases an album with an homage to Bruckner. Invocazioni Mariane: Andreas Scholl, Alessandro Tampieri & {…}
(Photo credit: Andrew Eccles & Jaclyn Simpson) The Aspen Music Festival and School has announced its 75th anniversary season. This article features vocal performances only. Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS Co-Artistic Director Renée Fleming and opera director Peter Sellars coach the program’s major emerging talents in arias and scenes. Performance Dates: June 29 & July 13, 2024 Soprano Renée Fleming, {…}
The Experiential Orchestra and Videmus present the Julia Perry Centenary Celebration and Festival in New York City. Julia Perry (1924-79) was an African-American composer, born in Lexington, Kentucky and raised in Akron, Ohio. She spent two summers at the Berkshire Music Center, studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and briefly with Nadia Boulanger. She won the Prix Fontainebleau and two Guggenheim Fellowships, {…}
(Photo credit: Gene Smirnov) Opera Philadelphia is set to hold “Toi Toi Toi,” a fundraising event celebrating David B. Devan’s contributions to the company. Devan, the company’s General Director and President since 2011 has announced the end of his tenure. During his time leading Opera Philadelphia, the opera company has been described as “a hotbed of operatic innovation” by the {…}
(Credit: Marty Sohl) The Metropolitan Opera’s 2023-24 season unfurled a tapestry of music, history, and Afrofuturistic magical realism with Broadway producer Robert O’Hara’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” composed by Anthony Davis, to a libretto by Thulani Davis, based on a story by Christopher Davis. The Met, traditionally a bastion of opera’s classic repertoire, transformed into a {…}
Welcome back for this week’s look at the latest CD and DVD releases in the opera world. This week several new solo albums will be released. There will also be an album released for the centennial of Victoria de los Ángeles. Here is a look at the new releases. Forgotten Arias Philippe Jaroussky releases his latest album which pays tribute {…}
(Credit: Zenith Richards / Met Opera) The Metropolitan Opera is set to present the company premiere of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” The opera will open on Nov. 3 and will be conducted by Kazem Abdullah in a newly revised score, which features a layered, jazz-inflected setting. The opera will star baritone Will Liverman, soprano Leah {…}
Photo credit: Zenith Richards, Paola Kudacki, Met Opera “Opera Evolved” is National Sawdust and the Metropolitan Opera’s new programming partnership. Throughout the 2023-24 season, National Sawdust will showcase conversations with composers and artists that focus on the contemporary operas featured at the Met this season. They will highlight and explore the ways opera is evolving today and discuss the inner-workings {…}