Category Archives: Opera News

PETER HEMMINGS, Enfield, Middx, England, April 10, 1934 – Dorset, England, January 4, 2002 Where others had failed, or succeeded only halfway, Hemmings planted the operatic seed in the Los Angeles cultural desert and nursed it into full bloom. Determinedly … Continue reading →

The chimera of the long-forgotten masterwork, languishing in history’s dustbin then rediscovered and newly acclaimed, fires any opera producer’s hopes and ambitions. Surely no opera has accumulated a thicker coat of dust – at least in the world annals – … Continue reading →

Within five minutes of the opening skirmish in the San Francisco Opera’s jihad against The Merry Widow, its new script had touched upon such non-Pontevedrian matters as rolling blackouts and mutual funds. Such were the with-it fancies of contemporary playwright … Continue reading →

“I go to bed early,” says Margaret, Duchess of Argyll to a gossip-columnist snoop, “and often.” That said, however, you need to know that Powder Her Face, the opera by Thomas Adès that in six years has blazed a trail … Continue reading →

Land of strong lumberjacks and even stronger coffee, Seattle moves ever onward toward its unlikely transmogrification into the Bayreuth of the West.  In little more than a quarter-century, the city’s intrepid operagoers have had  three separate and distinct versions of  … Continue reading →

Nobody has ever suggested that running an opera company – let alone two companies the width of  a continent apart – might be for Plácido Domingo an easygoing diversion. Nobody need be all that startled, therefore, at the few dark … Continue reading →

Half a century ago almost to the day, a 21-year-old  dollar-a-gig super in an Otello in Los Angeles’ cavernous Shrine Auditorium was so bitten by the operatic bug that he chucked his pre-medical studies forthwith. Fifty years later, on the … Continue reading →