Class warfare and the battle of sexes broke out in Fort Worth Saturday night—at least onstage at Bass Performance Hall, where the Fort Worth Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro held up to the audience a cold, clear mirror of human folly.

Dissatisfaction was already smoldering across Europe when Pierre Beaumarchais wrote his play Le Mariage de Figaro, a not-so-thinly-veiled attack on the aristocracy, in 1781. Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, clearly sensed the inevitable fall of ..read more

The Dallas Opera announced Tuesday evening that it has commissioned a new opera, Everest, a one-act piece that will debut in February 2015. The opera will be scored by British composer Joby Talbot, and the book will be written by Moby-Dick librettist and frequent Jake Heggie collaborator Gene Scheer.

The new work will be based on the 1996 Everest disaster in which a number of climbers were trapped in a blizzard near the summit of the world’s highest peak, including Dallas resident Beck Weathers. ..read more

After opening on Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall with one grand old favorite opera about a diva—Puccini’s Tosca—Fort Worth Opera’s spring festival moved on to a contemporary one-act chamber opera—also centered around a diva as the main character—Sunday afternoon at Scott Theatre.

In the wake of the triumphant premiere of his Moby Dick in Dallas in 2010, Jake Heggie has moved securely to the forefront of living American opera composers. Area opera fans had previously become acquainted with his work ..read more

Whilst heading into one of the most admirably up-to-date opera festivals in the world—with two works by living composers in a four-production season—Fort Worth Opera opened its annual spring festival Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall with a hyper-traditional production of one of the all time hits from the traditional standard repertoire, Puccini’s Tosca.

This particular production offers everything a lover of traditional opera could want. Mammoth, realistic, and beautifully detailed new sets by Andrew Horn provided a backdrop that enhanced ..read more

The Dallas Opera says an estimated 15,000 people showed up at Cowboys Stadium for the first opera simulcast at the football stadium. We sent intern Becca Brooks to the event, and here’s her report.

As I watched a man in a tailored suit shotgun a beer, I reminded myself that I was at the opera, not a Cowboys game. The Dallas Opera’s free simulcast of The Magic Flute Saturday drew a diverse crowd. There were prom groups, young children, music teachers, ..read more

Faced with his own always uncertain health and career security, and living in world rapidly careening toward two decades of war and tumult, Mozart responded, in 1791, with his operatic carnival The Magic Flute. Two hundred twenty years later, the piece continues to puzzle, delight, amaze, and, most importantly, challenge both performers and audiences.

The current production by the Dallas Opera, designed by August Everding for Chicago Lyric Opera and first presented there in 1986, emphasizes the comedy and whimsicality of ..read more

Dallas Opera’s current production of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Winspear Opera House hovers tantalizingly close to greatness at times—often enough to allow the listener to leave the house convinced that a major operatic monument has unfolded on stage, but not often enough to allow that same audience member to be totally satisfied that the work has been presented at its best.

The opening moments were, unfortunately, the weakest in almost all respects. Director Bliss Hebert clearly had good intentions in ..read more

Remember the Dallas Opera’s plan to simulcast their production of The Magic Flute live on April 28 on the super-uber-tron at Cowboys Stadium? The opera sends word that the community response has been tremendous. To date, they have received more than 25 thousand requests for free tickets to the event. That’s enough for a solid wave during “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” or some crowd call-and-response for “Papagena/Papageno“. Good times. Here’s the best bit for the Dallas Opera. According ..read more

Contemporary chamber opera has taken root in Fort Worth, with several notable productions in recent years as part of the Fort Worth Opera’s spring festival. Friday night, the Dallas Opera made its first major entry into that field, with Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse at Wyly Theatre.

Extraordinary vocal demands and stringent dissonance are the most obvious features of The Lighthouse, which has been called, with good reason, one of the most difficult operas in the repertoire. One could well say that the work, for three singers and a dozen instrumentalists, must be performed very well or not at all. In this tightly designed score, a missed note or entrance could be disastrous.

Responsibility rests almost equally among the singers, who must produce correct pitches with very little cue from the orchestra and all thirteen of the accompanying musicians, who perform on a menagerie of instruments including banjo, deliberately out-of-tune piano, and referee’s whistle. If any one individual has a greater burden, it’s the conductor, who in this case is Nicole Paiement. She combined old-fashioned precision and discipline with up-to-the-minute insight into the complex modernity of the score.

In spite of the complexity of the music, there’s a deeply traditional angle to The Lighthouse as well. Based on a historical incident (the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse keepers of the coast ofScotland in 1900), it demands that the three singers present their double roles convincingly and dramatically, all the while hitting every note precisely. Tenor Andrew Bidlack, baritone Robert Orth, and bass Daniel Sumegi manage all of this along with the distinctive portrayals of human archtypes the work demands.

Stage director Kevin Moriarty discovers numerous meaningful subtleties in the words and music, and designer Beowulf Borrit’s revolving set provides an appropriately ominous space for this ghost story. One couldn’t help thinking, however, that more sophisticated use of lighting and less dependence on real water (which made absolutely no visual impact) would be ultimately more effective.

The Dallas premiere of The Lighthouse, which has become, since its debut in 1980, one of the most frequently performed contemporary operas, was long overdue. The questions it raises and dilemmas it voices epitomize the niche opera has carved for itself in the culture of the twenty-first century—not as a showpiece for the elite, but as an essential element in the search for meaning in a society in turmoil with itself.

Photo by Karen Almond for the Dallas Opera

Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde poses more than the usual challenges of opera presentation. The new production by the Dallas Opera, which opened Thursday night at Winspear Opera House, answers all of those challenges, rendering that masterpiece from the 19th century as meaningful as ever in the 21st.

Based on a medieval romance, Tristan und Isolde is essentially a four-hour rumination on the nature of romantic love. Traditional staging of Wagner can be tricky at best: neither quasi-realism nor fantastical backdrops are ..read more

The Washington Post looks into the growing trend of performing arts organizations broadcasting their productions to movie theaters around the world. The National Theatre does it. The Los Angeles Philharmonic will broadcast its Mahler’s Eighth, performed by more than 1,000 musicians in Caracas, Venezuela. And at the Angelika this week, you can go and watch a guided walk through of the Leonardi da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery in London.

New York’s Metropolitan Opera, of course, was the pioneer in movie theater performance, and despite initial skepticism from critics, the company has turned the broadcasts, along with accompanying DVDs and recordings, into a profitable business model.

Critics have had to eat their words, since the HD broadcasts are the most successful single element of Gelb’s tenure, and have proved truly visionary. They have raised the profile of opera, created excitement where there was none, and rather than bankrupting the company, as many predicted, they have made money. In 2010-11 they netted an impressive $11 million.

But the Met has a particular brand and audience, built over decades of international radio broadcasts, so the model isn’t exactly replicable for other groups. That has not stopped ballet, theater, music, and other companies from trying. What many have found, though, is  is that not unlike their actually live performances, theater broadcasts require a good deal of marketing to sell tickets. And the competition – deep-pocketed movie studies – is steep.

Photo Marcello Giordani and Angela Meade will perform in the Met’s upcoming broadcast of Verdi’s Ernani.

Well, I’ll give the opera this: Cowboys Stadium has a mighty large TV. It is also a really large building. And opera, it’s kind of a large art form, right? And all sorts of classical music groups seem to be testing waters these days, figuring out how to dust off that stuffy feeling and get out to new audiences. And Texans love football. Oh, and Cowboys Stadium already has some visual art. So, why not broadcast a simulcast of the ..read more

We knew that the Dallas Opera was going to tighten its belt while being led by fiscal watchdog Keith Cerny, but perhaps few anticipated it was going to get this tight. Back in September 2011, he told Willard Spiegelman that the company has been running in the red, and Cerny’s plan to right the ship anticipates being back in the black by the 2014-2015 season. Earlier in 2011, the opera canceled one of its planned performances for 2011-2012, cutting the ..read more

Jake Heggie, the composer of Moby-Dick and Dead Man Walking, and Terrence McNally, who wrote the libretto for Dead Man, will team up again for a new opera based on a story written by McNally for the Dallas Opera. The annoucnement came yesterday evening that the Dallas Opera had commissioned Heggie for a second work, bringing the librettist on board for an opera that will premiere at the opening of the company’s 2015-2016 season. In addition, mezzo soprano Joyce DiDonato ..read more

The Fort Worth Opera has a reputation for its commitment to staging bold, new work. Now the company looks to further that reputation with “Frontiers,” a new addition to its annual Fort Worth Opera Festival that will showcase unpublished work by composers from the Americas. As explained in a release, the program hopes to expose new composers through live performance while also helping to network these new talents with industry professionals. The inaugural program will take place in 2013, and ..read more

The Dallas Opera’s General Director’s Roundtable series continues next Monday, December 5 with a panel discussing the role of new art works – both operatic and in other musical forms – in the context of the life of a performance arts group. Joining the Dallas Opera’s General Director Keith Cerny on the panel will be Moby-Dick librettist Gene Scheer; Ann Williams, founder and artistic director of the Dallas Black Dance Theater; and baritone Robert Orth. And the panel will again ..read more

In late 2009, the Dallas Opera announced that an anonymous donor put up a challenge grant of $10 million to establish a “Cultural Renaissance Endowment Fund,” intended to help secure the opera’s long-term financial stability. That initial generosity aside, it then fell on the opera to raise an equivalent $10 million right in the thick of one of the worst economic periods in United States history.

So, if you had any doubt that Dallas enjoys at least some modicum of insularity from the ..read more

In a year of cutbacks and budget crises, the Dallas Opera proves once again, with the current production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at Winspear Opera House, that the ability to cast great singers is that company’s single greatest asset. As so often in the past, the combination of instinct and skill—the eye and ear for a great performer—on the part of the folks in charge resulted in the American premiere of a singer likely to enter the ranks of ..read more

The Dallas Opera kicks off its new season this weekend, and the good news for the opera company is that, unlike last year, their opening night simulcast will not conflict with the World Series.

But scheduling conflicts are not the only obstacle the opera has had to contend with ahead of the opening. Scott Cantrell writes over on the Dallas Morning News site (sub. req.) that there are, in fact,  some parallels between the Dallas Opera, as a company, and Donizetti’s opera. For ..read more

Theater does wonders depicting the classic conundrum of crossed lovers. But for this Thursday’s giveaway we’re letting the Dallas Opera showcase their version. We’ve got two tickets to the October 26th performance of Lucia di Lammermoor, the story of fragile Lucia (Romanian soprano Elena Mosuc), who is tricked into trading love for familial duty. To get your hands on them all you have to do is answer the question in the form below: What year, and in what city, did ..read more

When the Dallas Opera announced that it was cutting a production from its 2011-2012 season, it was pretty clear about where it laid at least some of the blame:

While this move benefitted the company in important ways and contributed significantly to both the critical and popular success of our subsequent productions in the new, purpose-built venue, the change also had a dramatic impact on the number of patrons who could be accommodated at any given performance, falling from more than 3,400 to a seating capacity of 2,200.

In other words, “Thanks for our new, pretty opera, but it’s killing us.”

Those concerns have been picked up upon in an article in Fastco Design which looks at the architect Norman Foster’s string of “unlucky” projects in America. The opera’s problems, the article reminds us, are not the architect’s fault. The size of the theater was determined by a steering committee which oversaw the development. The decision to perform in repertory was made possible by the new house, but ultimately it was one made by the Dallas Opera. And it is hard to sympathize with complaints over the cost of operating the new building considering the opera has been dreaming of moving out of Fair Park and into a “world class” facility for decades. “World class” venues carry “world class” costs.

But the Winspear is only one of Foster’s troublesome projects in the United States. Some projects, such as a proposed Globe theater redo for New York’s Governors Island, never got off the ground. A Seattle project has fallen victim to the financial crisis. And his Hearst Tower project in New York has made it into the running for one of the ugliest buildings in that city.

When discussing the potential of the Arts District and the new AT&T Performing Arts Center, it is not long before you get to the idea of inter-institutional collaboration. One of the most intriguing collaborations the Arts District has given birth to so far is the upcoming partnership between the Dallas Opera and the Dallas Theater Center, which will co-present chamber operas in the Wyly Theatre beginning in the 2011-2012 season.

“Collaboration in the Arts” is the topic of conversation for the next Dallas Opera General Director’s Roundtable, a program launched earlier this year by new opera head Keith Cerny. The next program installment will bring together Cerny, the DTC’s Kevin Moriarty, and general director of Opera Company of Philadelphia, David Devan, on Sept 19 for a conversation about collaboration within the performing arts. The panel will be hosted by yours truly, and it is presented in partnership with D Magazine.

You have to be a Dallas Opera subscriber to attend, but you hardly needed more of an excuse for that. Hope to see you there.

I have a sinking feeling that this isn’t going to be the last of these kinds of announcements. The Dallas Opera has just announced that “as part of a careful, multi-year plan to balance and stabilize company finances as rapidly and prudently as possible” they will be canceling the planned production of Katya Kabanová, which was part of the company’s 2011-2012 season.

“The Dallas Opera is committed to preserving its proud legacy through careful balancing of artistic goals with sound financial management,” says Dallas Opera Chairman Dr. Kern Wildenthal.  “Although our General Director and CEO, Keith Cerny, assumed this role little more than a year ago, he has repeatedly demonstrated his commitment to cutting costs while enhancing the company’s artistic reputation.  He has the full backing of the Board of Directors as we navigate this challenging period in the company’s history.”

The elimination of the production will take the opera’s season down to four full operas, with the new chamber opera series taking up the fifth spot. In addition, the production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde will be an opera in concert and not a full staging of the German giant’s work. And the opera came close to loosing the fifth production as well:

Urgent appeals for an infusion of cash necessary to preserve the fifth production garnered an immediate response from more than a dozen generous donors, including Crow Holdings—which led the effort with a remarkable pledge of $500,000.

Here’s the full release:

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Any Dallas parent knows the health risks that accompany allowing their child to run and play outside all summer. Luckily Dallas offers plenty of theater and arts programs throughout the summer.

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Baroque opera is an acquired taste, and Fort Worth Opera’s production of Handel’s Julius Caesar, which opened Saturday at Bass Performance Hall, gives plenty of incentives for opera buffs to learn to love this special corner of the operatic repertoire.

For the modern audience member, the most obvious attribute of Julius Caesar (and virtually all other baroque operas) is its stately pace. Even a drama packed with murder, revenge, war, and love moves patiently, with the events themselves taking up about ..read more