NEW YORK (AP) — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, all right, but not as Shakespeare imagined. No Norwegian prince arrives to seize the Danish throne. And to be or not to be is not the question.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's silver tea set is going to a family with a 5-year-old daughter who once was Ginsburg for Halloween.
ZURICH (AP) — Wotan beckoned the other gods to join him in walking to Valhalla, their new home acquired at a high and painful price. Instead of following, they shot him looks of contempt and allowed him to enter on his own.
TOKYO (AP) — The Ukrainian song has no words.
When Oksana Stepanyuk, an award-winning soprano with The Japan Opera Foundation, performs “Melody,” composed by Myroslav Skoryk, her voice turns into a wail of mourning, a pensive but piercing prayer for her homeland.
NEW YORK (AP) — Call it bel canto in the Rust Belt.
The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” plucks the ill-fated heroine out of the Scottish hills where Sir Walter Scott placed her in his 1819 novel and where Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti kept her in his opera 16 years later.
LONDON (AP) — Harrison Birtwistle, the creator of daringly experimental modern music who was recognized as one of Britain’s greatest contemporary composers, has died at 87.
Birtwistle’s publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, said he died Monday at his home in Mere, southwest England.
Soprano Anna Netrebko has been hired by the Monte Carlo Opera to sing this month following the Metropolitan Opera's decision to drop her for failing to repudiate Russia President Vladimir Putin.
The Monte Carlo Opera said Thursday that Netrebko will sing the title role in Puccini's “Manon Lescaut” in performances on April 22, 24, 27 and 30.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so liked the caricature that accompanied an article about her that she got a copy from the artist and hung it in her Supreme Court office.
That signed and inscribed print by artist Eleanor Davis is among 150 items from Ginsburg's office and home at the Watergate in an online auction to benefit opera in Washington that will end in late April.
NEW YORK (AP) — For soprano Ailyn Perez, being rejected by the man she loves is all part of the job these days. But accepting a marriage proposal in front of a live audience? That was once in a lifetime.
NEW YORK (AP) — American soprano Renée Fleming is to make rare operatic appearances as Pat Nixon in a new production of John Adams' “Nixon in China” at the Paris Opera next season.
The opera is to be given eight performances at the Bastille from March 25 to April 16, 2023, the company said Wednesday.
DETROIT (AP) — The man who staged Wagner in a parking garage and put his audience in stretch limos to watch an opera while driving around Los Angeles is now turning his hand to a staple of the repertory.
BERLIN (AP) — Russian soprano Anna Netrebko said Wednesday that she plans to resume performing in late May after announcing in the early days of the war in Ukraine that she was taking a “step back” from the stage.
NEW YORK (AP) — A display case in his old high school gave David T. Little the inspiration for his first opera — a work that 18 years later has followed an unusual path to a nomination at this year’s Grammy awards.
NEW YORK (AP) — Vladyslav Buialskyi spoke to his mother from Berdyansk, a Ukraine seaside town, and told her not to listen to him take the stage at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday night.
With electricity out because of Russia's invasion, he didn't want her wasting power for the Internet stream.
NEW YORK (AP) — It’s been nearly five years since Renee Fleming sang her last Metropolitan Opera performance of Richard Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier,” a work that culminates in a sublime trio for women’s voices.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Metropolitan Opera will stage a benefit concert on March 14 for Ukraine relief efforts that will be broadcast on radio worldwide.
Music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin will lead a program that will feature Ukrainian bass-baritone Vladyslav Buialskyi and the Met chorus in Ukraine's national anthem and “A Prayer for the Ukraine,” a choral work by a Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.
NEW YORK (AP) — Soprano Anna Netrebko withdrew from her future engagements at the Metropolitan Opera rather than repudiate her support for Russian President Vladimir Putin, costing the company one of its top singers and best box-office draws.
David Rosen walked into France's Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra National in the summer of 1968 and requested the original materials from when Giuseppe Verdi’s “Don Carlos” premiered at the Paris Opera in 1867.
MIAMI (AP) — A new opera based on the acclaimed Italian novel “The Leopard” is making its world debut in South Florida.
Based on the 1958 novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the opera premieres March 5 and 6 at the South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center in Cutler Bay, which is south of Miami.
Soprano Anna Netrebko added to her list of cancellations, withdrawing from a new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Metropolitan Opera that is among seven new stagings the company announced Wednesday for its 2022-23 season.
Ricky Ian Gordon headed downtown where his “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” was being premiered by the New York City Opera on Jan. 27. When not absorbed with that, he walked from his Upper West Side home to Lincoln Center, where previews were being staged of his “Intimate Apparel” ahead of opening night a few days later.
ROME (AP) — Pope Francis grew up listening to the opera on the radio, is a fan of Argentine tango and thinks Mozart “lifts you to God.”
But it still came as a something of a shock to see the 85-year-old pontiff coming out of a downtown Rome record shop late Tuesday with a CD in hand.
NATCHEZ, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi museum has acquired a portrait of opera singer and music educator Daisy Cecelia Newman, who was born in the state and had an international performing career that included a nomination for a Tony Award.
ROME (AP) — The Catholic Church and the northern Italian city of Ferrara made their peace Thursday with Antonio Vivaldi nearly 300 years after the city’s archbishop effectively canceled the staging of one of his operas, sending the famed Baroque composer into debt for his final years in exile.
MILAN (AP) — Milanese turned out in all their finery for La Scala's gala season opener of Verdi's “Macbeth” in a fully seated theater, a welcome return after the pandemic made last year's premiere a televised-only affair and as many European theaters remain closed.
MILAN (AP) — While many European theaters remain closed due to the pandemic, the famed Teatro alla Scala on Tuesday opened its new season with the gala premiere of Verdi’s “Macbeth” to a fully seated house.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Kennedy Center Honors returned to tradition this year with a real-life gala Sunday night and the presence of the president for the first time since 2016.
NEW YORK (AP) — He opened the season as kindly Uncle Paul in the Metropolitan Opera premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones.” Next night he was the vagabond monk Varlaam, stopping the show in Mussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov.”
NEW YORK (AP) — As Erin Morley sang on the big stage of the Metropolitan Opera, Matthew Aucoin sat in the first row of the orchestra, his score in front of him, taking notes.
Unlike most of her performances, Morley could use rehearsals to suggest adjusting notes to fit her soprano.
NEW YORK (AP) — Rising stage star Emilie Kouatchou came close to quitting musical theater during the pandemic shutdown, worried about the future. She stuck with it and has now made Broadway history.
Soprano Anna Netrebko needs shoulder surgery and has canceled performances in Verdi's “Nabucco” at the Vienna State Opera.
The 50-year-old was to have sung Abigaille on Nov. 1, 6, 9 and 12, the first three with Amartuvshin Enkhbat in the title role and the last with Plácido Domingo.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a halt. It also slowed Marie Osmond, but not for long.
The entertainer used the time to take her singing career in a different direction.
NEW YORK (AP) — “We bend, we don't break. We sway!” sings the chorus in the second act of Terence Blanchard's "Fire Shut Up in My Bones.”
That is how much of the audience of about 4,000 in the Metropolitan Opera felt as they watched Monday night' landmark performance, the first staged work in the house since March 2020 and the first by a Black composer in the long history of a company that launched in 1883.
NEW YORK (AP) — Charles Blow recalls being in the audience at the premiere of the opera based on his memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” and watching the scene that depicts his sexual abuse as a child by an older cousin.
NEW YORK (AP) — How do you turn a performance space in Brooklyn into a day at the beach?
Answer: Truck in 21 tons of sand from New Jersey in 50-pound bags and dump them out onto the floor — all 840 of them.
NEW YORK (AP) — Even before the first note, there were a pair of standing ovations — one when the chorus filed in and another when concertmaster Benjamin Bowman walked on to tune up the orchestra.
About 90 minutes later, when conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin relaxed his arms, the 3,600 people filling the seats of the Metropolitan Opera House responded with 8 1/2 minutes of thunderous applause, bringing wide smiles and hints of tears to the 200-plus performers on stage.
NEW YORK (AP) — The Metropolitan Opera reached a four-year agreement with the union for its orchestra, the last major deal needed for the company to resume performances following a 1 1/2-year layoff caused by the coronavirus pandemic.