Met Audience Boos Drab Tosca

Company names Steel new GM after chaotic year

(NEWSER) - The New York City Opera, the deeply troubled company based at Lincoln Center, has named Dallas-based director and conductor George Steel as its new general manager. The announcement comes after last fall's departure of Gerard Mortier, the Belgian iconoclast who promised a shake-up of the opera but quit before he began the job. As the New York Times reports, Steel faces an uphill battle to balance City Opera's budget and revive its artistic mission. More»

Tenor nails 18 high Cs in new production

(NEWSER) - Audiences at New York's Metropolitan Opera Monday night were treated to something they hadn't heard in 14 years: an encore. In the Met's new production of Donizetti's La fille du régiment, tenor Juan Diego Flórez nailed the nine high C's of the difficult aria "Ah! Mes Amis" and won a huge ovation. He then did the whole thing again and was rewarded with an ultra-rare mid-performance standing ovation. More»

Experts say there's nothing to worry about

(NEWSER) - A pair of New York’s top opera stars due to sing in Japan have canceled their performances following the earthquake, the AP reports. Now, the Metropolitan Opera has to “scour the world” to find replacement singers for soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Joseph Calleja, even though experts said the trip to Tokyo and Nagoya was safe. “Part of what makes opera such an exciting art form is that it is so unpredictable," said a rep for the Met. "If there were a rationality clause in opera singers' contracts, not many opera singers would perform." More»

900 authors wrote Twitterdammerung libretto in tweets

(NEWSER) - The first-ever Twitter opera—a melding of high tech and high art with a libretto written in chunks of 140 characters—received an unexpectedly positive reception when it opened pver the weekend, the Washington Post reports. One critic called Twitterdammerung “an accident waiting to happen.” But it “was actually not that bad at all," wrote a Daily Telegraph critic. More»

(NEWSER) - Most operas weave pretty far-fetched tales, but that isn't license for directors to retell them in ironic or mocking ways, Alex Ross writes in the New Yorker. Reviewing two recent productions at the Met, Ross hails a faithful staging of Verdi's Il Trovatore—but dismisses a high-concept version of Bellini's La Sonnambula that ignores the naturally "languid, trancelike aura of the early arias and duets." More»