Friends, Dallasites, Countrymen, lend me your eyes. I come to provide tickets, not to sell them. This Thursday’s giveaway will take you back to 44 BC with conspiring politicians, assassinations, and the ghost of Julius Caesar. We have a pair of opening night tickets to giveaway for The Fort Worth Opera Festival’s third installment, Julius Caesar, this Sunday. To get your hands on them answer the question in the form below: Who did Mark Antony claim was the only man to act for the good of Rome? We’ll pick a winner after 3pm.

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Tuesday night at Sanders Theatre, Fort Worth Opera presented what is surely this year’s most significant area operatic event—and possibly the most significant theatrical event as well—with the opening performance of a new production of Philip Glass’s Hydrogen Jukebox.

The most significant element in the production is, of course, the opera itself, a setting of an arrangement of pre-existing texts by Allen Ginsberg (1926-97). Some composers have a gift for setting the words of a particular poet, and for making that ..read more

Sure George Steel only headed up the Dallas Opera for a few weeks before jetting back to New York to take over the struggling New York City Opera. Since that public spurn, some followers of the Dallas Opera have indulged in not a small amount of Schadenfreude, watching the fire-to-frying pan jumping Steel navigate the troubled waters of the once-fabled, now nearly bankrupt New York City Opera.

The latest news: Steel is leading the opera company out of Lincoln Center, where it has lived since 1966. The move is controversial, in part because in 2006 Steel’s predecessor, the Belgian Gerard Mortier, sunk millions into renovating the David H. Koch Theater in Lincoln Center, where the opera performs. Nonetheless, says Steel, “Not everyone is built to be at Lincoln Center.”

The New York City Opera is currently built for a nomadic existence, it would seem. Though they do not have repertoire, dates, or venues set for their next season (troublesome considering opera singers are often booked three to five years in advance of performances), Steel is emphatic that there will be a next season for the New York City Opera, which was at one point in doubt.

The situation has also inflamed Alan Gordon, the head of the American Guild of Musical Artists, who said Steel’s desire to hire musicians from performance to performance is like, “an old-fashioned shape-up on the waterfront.”

Gordon continued:

“Steel’s approach is out-and-out stupid and it’s designed to assure that City Opera goes out of business.”

So, how’s that New York weather treating you, George?

Verdi’s Il Trovatore is a singers’ opera: it demands great singers, and, when great singers are present, it can become a powerful experience.

Fort Worth Opera’s current production, which opened Saturday night at Bass Performance Hall, has, in its four principals, a dream cast. First among equals, as Leonora, is soprano Marjorie Owens, a Virginia native and Baylor graduate who is clearly headed toward operatic superstardom.

Owens owns a particularly spectacular upper range. She has volume to spare, and, apparently, the lungs ..read more

The Dallas Opera has announced that their annual Maria Callas Debut Artist of the Year award will go to Laura Claycomb, the soprano who sang Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto. It is a choice our critic Wayne Lee Gay won’t be disappointed with. In his review of Rigoletto, he wrote:

Soprano Laura Claycomb was beyond reproach as Gilda. With conductor Rizzo’s sure support, she produced goose bumps and won the loudest cheers of the evening with her rendition of “Caro nome.”

Here’s the full release.

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The current tough fundraising climate for the arts is an opportunity, not a challenge. That’s the upbeat early word from Mark J. Weinstein, who’s been appointed the new president and CEO of the AT&T Performing Arts Center effective June 1.

A veteran arts executive, Weinstein, 55 (“a young 55,” he jokes), most recently served as executive director of the Washington National Opera alongside artistic director Placido Domingo. Prior to that he spent 10 years with the Pittsburgh Opera, where he was general director, and 13 years with the New York City Opera, the last three as executive director.

We reached Weinstein by phone this afternoon at the Park Place Motorcars offices of Ken Schnitzer—the Dallas auto executive headed up the PAC’s CEO search–where Weinstein was meeting people and making calls.

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Gilbert and Sullivan’s lively digs at 19th-century British society in particular, and human folly in general—thinly disguised as a fairy-tale version of Japan in the operetta The Mikado—shot headlong into the 21st century Saturday night as the opening item on the Fort Worth Opera’s 2011 Festival at Bass Performance Hall.

As a long-time opera-goer who had just about given up on anybody anywhere having anything meaningful and new to say about Gilbert and Sullivan, I’ll admit I was won over the ..read more

The annual Fort Worth Opera Festival kicks off Friday, and while the opera world’s eyes turn to Cowtown, the opera company has announced its 2012 season. Next year will bring two of the most performed works in the repertoire, Tosca and The Marriage of Figaro, presented along side Jake Heggie’s Three Decembers and Mark Adamo’s Lysistrata. Here are details on the lineup.

Scott Cantrell rolls the significance of Darren Woods’ impact on North Texas music into this one lean paragraph:

That gift of gab has helped Woods transform a dysfunctional provincial organization into an opera festival drawing national and even international attention. That plus skills at raising dollars and pinching pennies and just getting a community to rally around a new and daring artistic vision.

Woods’ Fort Worth Opera festival kicks off this Friday with Gilbert and Sullivan’s popular favorite, Mikado, but per usual with the Fort Worth Opera, there are some challenging pieces mixed among the classic works. The rest of the lineup includes a Verdi classic (Il Trovatore), a Baroque opera (Handel’s Julius Cesar), and a contemporary chamber opera based on the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (Philip Glass’ Hydrogen Jukebox).

Promo image for the Fort Worth Opera’s Il Trovatore.

Unlike Bill Lively, who renounced his position as Dallas Symphony CEO before ever starting full-time, Dallas Opera Musical Director Graeme Jenkins has been in his post for seventeen seasons and more than fifty productions. Nonetheless, Jenkins will resign his position at the end of the 2012-2013 season in order to concentrate on his European career. From the release:

In a letter to Dallas Opera General Director & CEO Keith Cerny, Mr. Jenkins says that what he has learned “in the (orchestra) pit in Dallas has given me a foundation of repertoire and experience to translate to opera houses in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Austria and Canada” and cited the increased demands on his schedule, particularly in the major opera houses of Europe, as his reason for choosing not to seek an extension of his current Dallas Opera contract.

Here’s the full release:

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The Dallas Opera has announced a new series of public conversations hosted in partnership with the Museum of Nature and Science which will feature contemporary music composers, beginning on May 24 with Tod Machover. Machover, a professor of music and media at MIT, will talk about is critically acclaimed opera Death and the Powers. Here’s the full release.

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The Maria Callas award is an annual honor given to an artist who took his or her first bow with the Dallas Opera. If you are a renewing subscriber, you can vote on the nominees. Here’s a full list, and after that, a full release:

Meredith Arwady – “Hostess of the Inn” in BORIS GODUNOV

Evgeny Akimov – “Dmitri” in BORIS GODUNOV

Elena Belfiore – “Smeton” in ANNA BOLENA

Elena Bocharova –”Marina” in BORIS GODUNOV

Charles Castronovo – “Romeo” in ROMEO & JULIET

Kirstin Chávez – “Maddalena” in RIGOLETTO

Laura Claycomb – “Gilda” in RIGOLETTO

Roxana Constantinescu – “Stephano” in ROMEO & JULIET

Vitaly Efanov – “Pimen” in BORIS GODUNOV

Paolo Gavanelli – “Rigoletto” in RIGOLETTO

Georgia Jarman – “Elvira” in DON GIOVANNI

Mikhail Kazakov – “Boris Godunov” in BORIS GODUNOV

Mikhail Kolelishvili – “Varlaam” in BORIS GODUNOV

Mirco Palazzi – “Leporello” in DON GIOVANNI

Ailyn Pérez – “Zerlina” in DON GIOVANNI

Oxana Shilova – “Xenia” in BORIS GODUNOV

Andrei Spekhov – “Shchelkalov” in BORIS GODUNOV

Paulo Szot – “Giovanni” in DON GIOVANNI

Image: Charles Castronovo as Romeo in his Dallas Opera Debut (Karen Almond)

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This Friday evening Moby-Dick composer Jake Heggie, lyricist Gene Scheer, and baritone Nathan Gunn will debut a new song cycle, A Question of Light, which was inspired by a number of works currently on view at the Dallas Museum of Art. Gunn, who starred in last year’s Don Pasquale at the Dallas Opera, is coming off recent success dabbling in popular song, a caberet performance which prompted the New York Times’ Stephen Holden to call the singer the “a vocal Babe Ruth.”

He belted it out of the ballpark four times. There were also singles, doubles and a couple of strikeouts.

Needless to say, a review like that will land you a nod on barihunks.

Image: Nathan Gunn (right) in the Dallas Opera’s production of Don Pasquale (Photo by Karen Almond).

Dallas Opera has taken on one of the monsters of the repertoire for the final production of its 2010-11 season and has emerged with a rare artistic triumph.

Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov of 1874 challenges any company with its length, the difficulty of its vocal and orchestral writing, the sheer magnitude of its concept. And Dallas Opera’s production, which opened Friday night at Winspear Opera House, meets all of those challenges brilliantly.

This Friday, the Dallas Opera opens Modest Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov, and as Scott Cantrell writes, it is an opera in the grandest sense:

“There will be more people on the stage, I think, than with anything we’ve ever done,” says Dallas Opera music director Graeme Jenkins, who’s conducting the performances. “I take my hat off to [artistic director] Jonathan Pell, who went off to audition all these young Russian singers. He’s assembled a fantastic cast. And I’m incredibly proud of what the chorus have done, to memorize over an hour of Russian text.”

The opera hasn’t been performed in Dallas in more than 30 years, and the production will feature a design by the great Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky, the man behind Solaris and Andrei Rublev.

Nearly all the elements for a perfect Rigoletto were in place as the Verdi masterpiece opened in the Dallas Opera’s latest rendition at Winspear Opera House Friday night.

Set designer Michael Yeargan’s production, originally created as a joint venture of the Dallas Opera and Houston Grand Opera nearly two decades ago, and since seen at numerous major opera houses, has been aptly labeled a classic. Friday night, it was as visually captivating as ever: massive, Bauhausian rectangles provide a visual anchor ..read more

It is a lament as old as the carpets at the Music Hall at Fair Park: the Dallas Opera performs few contemporary operas, and the season is too conservative and filled with “greatest hits” pieces.

Is it time for progressive opera fans to bury the hatchet? The Dallas Opera is setting off into uncharted waters with a new performance series, the Chamber Opera Series, which will focus on contemporary pieces, new commissions, and other “opera rarities.” The new chamber series will launch during the 2011-2012 season with “Queen’s Composer” Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse, and that production will be directed by Dallas Theater Center artistic director Kevin Moriarty. Dallas can’t get enough collaboration these days, and I must say, the cross pollinations are mighty intriguing.

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Marc Blitzstein’s glorious and problematic opera Regina, originally produced on Broadway in 1949, took the stage at Murchison Performing Arts Center in Denton Friday night in a largely successful and unfailingly fascinating production by the UNT Opera.

Blitzstein based the opera on Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, a drama of greed and dysfunction in an upwardly mobile family in Alabama in the early twentieth century. Two years after its premiere on Broadway in 1939, with Tallulah Bankhead in the principal role of Regina Giddens, Hellman’s play became a cinematic star vehicle for Bette Davis, who obliterated everyone else on the screen with an elegantly cruel rendition of the role that had belonged to Bankhead on Broadway.

Blitzstein, famously left-wing in his politics and not afraid to present his political views into his works for the musical stage, managed to maintain Hellman’s vividly defined characters and, at the same time, introduce new layers of political and sociological exploration. The result is a masterpiece that, while keeping any audience’s attention, constantly disturbs and, at times, confuses with a grand hodgepodge of styles ranging from traditional spiritual to blues to lyrical neo-romanticism to dissonant mid-twentieth-century modernism. At times, Regina is daringly experimental and defiant of operatic tradition—as when, for instance, in the first act, the cast sings its stage directions. And at times it’s assertively show-bizzy—there are scenes that would do credit to Bollywood at its most bizarre. And, at times, styles and concepts seem to collide: a moment that seems almost severely realistic can turn, suddenly, into pure opera.

The Lyric Theater of the Murchison Center proved, once again, to be an ideal setting for innovative, intimate opera production, with a realistic cutaway set dominated by a grand staircase. (With, however, one minor drawback, in that a very few of the scenes were performed on a runway that was partially obscured for much of the audience.) Conductor Stephen Dubberly successfully marshaled the constantly shifting musical forces and styles, and stage director Paula Homer wisely chose to play with and even emphasize the swings of mood and style inherent in Blitzstein’s score. Homer, incidentally, handled the racial subtext sensitively and with admirable style; although, as with any work dealing with race written in the United States in the middle twentieth century, there is inherent stereotyping, Homer enhanced Blitzstein’s deliberate mixture of musical styles by introducing some convincing visual interaction between the character of Alexandra, the white heiress, and the African-American servants, in a subtle defiance of the historical norms.

Among the cast for Friday night’s performance, Maria Bellanca sang beautifully in the title role while acting the part in an appropriately garish, emotionally insecure, and almost trashy sub-nouveau riche manner. We could hate her a little more than we hate the Bette Davis version of Regina, but we could also more readily understand her origins and sympathize with her considerably as a product of the culture around her. Ponder Randy Price Gilliland delivered a resonant and commanding performance as Ben Hubbard, and Kylie Toomer was continually captivating, sensitive, and vocally magnificent as the alcoholic aristocrat Birdie. Avis Stroud as Addie and Kathryn Supina as Alexandra Giddens both delivered beautifully acted and sung performances, as did Darry Hearon in a show-stealing performance as the musical field hand named Jazz.

Although Regina has yet to enter the operatic canon—performances are sporadic and rare, even in an era that appreciates eclecticism—the UNT production proves that it’s a piece very much worth the effort. The third act, indeed, pays off hugely, both in a lyrical moment in which four of the more likeable characters join in at least realizing simple human values, and, moments later, when Regina triumphs over her sibling adversaries and, at the same instant, realizes the tragedy of her own situation. Here, Blitzstein, through the constantly risky brewing of disparate musical styles, achieves a moment in which the political and the personal come together profoundly.

Image: Marc Blitzstein via tsutpen.

Do you need to make up for a subpar Valentine’s Day date, or just want to treat your significant other? Either way we have four pairs of tickets to giveaway to tomorrow’s performance of Romeo et Juliet at the Winspear Opera House. To get your hands on them, all you need to is answer this question in the form below: in what production did Russian soprano Lyubov Petrova, who is singing the role of Juliet in the Dallas Opera’s production, make her debut? You have until 3 p.m. to enter. We’ll draw the winners from the correct answers.

It hardly seems fair, on one level, to complain even a little about the Dallas Opera’s current production of Gounod’s Romeo et Juliette, which opened Friday at the Winspear Opera House. The singing was often spectacular—and, as has often been said, good singing is the sine qua non of good opera. Soprano Lyubov Petrova as Juliette had a voice that was beautiful, unique, and consistently expressive; best of all, she looked and played the part of a young woman who ..read more

Joining the ranks of such opera luminaries as Beverly Stills, Jon Vickers, and Marilyn Horne, the Dallas Opera’s artistic director Jonathan Pell was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the National Opera Association. From the NOA’s Barbara Hill Moore:

“To those of us involved directly in educating young singers, it’s been refreshing to see his firm commitment to the future of the Dallas Opera’s Young Artists Program,” said Convention Chair Barbara Hill Moore in presenting the award to Mr. Pell.  “Acting with intelligence, with fortitude, perception good humor and (I like to say) chutzpah, Jonathan has proven himself to be a great asset to the Dallas Opera, to opera in the Southwest and in America, and – indeed – opera in the world.”

Here’s the full release:

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Dallas audience enjoyed Ben Heppner’s origination of the role of Ahab in Moby-Dick last year, an awe-inspiring, physical performance. As it turns out, we were even more lucky to have Heppner in the role than we may have guessed – especially in light of the demands of the one-legged part. Heppner has now withdrawn from the Metropolitan Opera’s highly-anticipated new production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle, where he was set to play the role of Siegfried. Considered one of the foremost interpretors of Wagner living today, Heppner says the reason for his withdrawal is that he has, “retired the role form his repertory.” Via the La Times: 

In recent years, Heppner has suffered vocal problems that have caused him to withdraw from a number of performances. The singer, who turned 55 in January, has long been regarded as one of the world’s top performers of Wagner. But a combination of illnesses and stress is believed to have taken a toll on his voice. . . .

“It happens,” he said flatly. “There have been some not-great moments in my more recent past. I’m working through it.”

Opera companies plan their repertoire years in advance, and so it is a surprise that the companies are able to keep their lineups under wraps as well as they do. Well, sort of. We got wind in 2009 that a Wagner opera was in the works at the Dallas Opera, a relative rarity considering the great German composer’s work is expensive to produce and difficult to sell. Nonetheless, Artistic Director Jonathan Pell hinted the Wagner was coming; the question was ..read more

I remember taking note of rising opera star Ava Pine when she was still in the young artists program at the Dallas Opera some years back. From there she has continued to resurface, a lead role in a Fort Worth production here, some other notable roles abroad there. Now comes news of the biggest milestone in her career to date: the Fredericksburg, Texas-native has been nominated for a Best Opera Recording Grammy Award for her work on the album Marc Antonio e Cleopatra, featuring music by Baroque composer Hasse. The Dallas Symphony’s blog has more. Pine will be singing in the DSO’s Christmas Celebration this year.

The title of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena tells all: one of the most fascinating, contradictory, and unintentionally influential figures in British history, Anne Boleyn, serves as the inspiration for a nineteenth-century opera that provides acres and acres of territory for vocal showmanship, at the same time weaving a tale of betrayal, lust, power, and love that ranks among the greatest in the operatic repertoire. Although this may sound like the blurb for a historical romance novel, that’s what opera, ultimately, is ..read more