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Bravo Monsieur (or Madame) 79CXR for your guess in the most recent Regie quiz. The work depicted is indeed Béatrice et Benedict, in a production for the Opéra Comique directed by Dan Jemmett. The staging, La Cieca regrets to say, was not taken in with pleasure; critiques are headlined everything from “The enterprise overall does a disservice to the cause of Berlioz” to “Berlioz entre Guignol et les Monty Python.” Let’s hope this week’s puzzler got better notices!

Anna Netrebko sold her Upper West Side apartment, a 1,247 sq ft two-bedroom at the Beaumont, for a slight loss,...

Native New Zealand baritone Teddy Tahu Rhodes (thy blessed saint of laboriously-crafted guns and cut abs), just gave a colorfully...

The timing couldn't have been worse. Vancouver Opera made a bold decision to launch a new, lavish production of John Adams's opera Nixon in China. The Canadian premiere would coincide with the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, playing off those global events and taking advantage of an international audience. Such an exciting venture would no doubt attract another opera company to partner in the production, which would provide much-needed help with resources.
— Read more at The Globe and Mail

As perhaps the best-known star in opera today, Renee Fleming could probably coast on her looks, voice and rapport with audiences.
And if ever there was an occasion to just mail in a crowd-pleasing series of arias by Puccini, Bellini and the rest, it was the concert Saturday at Festival of the Arts BOCA, an informal - if expensive - outdoor event at which her voice has to be carried over an amplification system.
— Read more at South Florida Classical Review

"War and Peace," the opera, arrived at the Kennedy Center freighted with expectations. Terms like "sprawling" and "masterpiece" are often applied to Prokofiev's score, in keeping with its literary model, Tolstoy's novel. Add in the curiosity value of the opera, seldom done in the West until the Mariinsky Opera and Orchestra began taking it on the road. Then there's the buzz surrounding the massive production, weighing in at 30 tons and costing $2 million to import. Saturday night's performance, conducted by Valery Gergiev, had an awful lot to live up to.
— Read more at Anne Midgette - washingtonpost.com

Before Stalin tightened his grip, the Russian avant-garde flourished in the 1920s. In a country that saw itself as the vanguard of a new world order, writers, painters, musicians and filmmakers felt free, indeed challenged, to find new expressive voices.
Toward the end of the decade, the 22-year-old Dmitri Shostakovich sounded his barbaric yawp in an absurdist opera called The Nose. Rarely seen since then, The Nose had its Metropolitan Opera premiere Friday night.
— Read more at Scott Cantrell - Dallas Morning News

Written for Karita Mattila and premiered in Lyon, the solo-voice opera Emilie opens with the fevered scratch of a pen.
Here is the Marquise du Chatelet, writing late into the night, her swollen belly hidden from society in the Queen of Poland's apartment at Luneville. Physicist, philosopher, linguist and astronomer, author of a dissertation on light, a discourse on happiness and the first translation of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, she has ordered her papers, fearing imminent death. At the age of 43, after 17 summers of accident-free amorous adventure, "la divine, la sublime Emilie" is about to give birth.
— Read more at The Independent

Sarasota Opera's production of Engelbert Humperdinck's gorgeous 1893 fairy tale opera, "Hansel and Gretel," enjoyed a superb revival on Saturday night, bringing new wit and color to this classic fable of good versus evil. If, in this version, the evil part is not quite as scary as one might like, the good is so good that it matters little.
— Read more at HeraldTribune.com

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