Plácido Domingo is taking leave of Washington National Opera in a grand way this month, both on the stage as Oreste in a riveting production of Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride and at the podium. more ›

The Washington National Opera is going to make it through the financial crisis, thanks to being absorbed into the Kennedy Center. It has meant some sacrifices, not least of which is some less adventurous programming this season and next. Such is the company's latest production of Puccini's gorgeous but overdone Madama Butterfly, the most often produced opera in North America, according to Opera America. more ›

Washington National Opera's new production of Salome shows that Richard Strauss's 1905 shocker can still pack a wallop. more ›

The news spread quickly last night: after much speculation about Plácido Domingo's future with Washington National Opera, the legendary tenor announced he would retire as the company's artistic director at the end of his current contract in June 2011. more ›

Among the sometimes wacky performances of the Capital Fringe Festival are some unexpected offerings of the more mainstream variety, with a twist. An adventurous little company called Opera Alterna, which presented two new operas by local composers at last year's festival, returns with an earnest production of Thomas Pasatieri's 1967 melodrama Padrevia. The company is making the revival of Pasatieri's concise, neo-Romantic operas a specialty, after presenting two of them at the 2008 Fringe Festival. Pasatieri, writing his own libretto, adapted a tragic story from Boccaccio's Decameron, the first novella from Giornata IV, a day on which all the members of the brigata told stories of love that ended badly. Tancred, the Prince of Salerno, loves his only daughter, Gismonda, so much that he keeps her isolated from all other people in his palace. Reaching adulthood, she finds love by arranging to meet with Guiscardo, who tends the palace garden. Needless to say, Tancred catches the lovers in the act, leading to a violent conclusion, a verismo shocker that could pass at times as the fourth act of Puccini's Il Trittico. more ›

The Washington National Opera announced late Monday that it is making significant cuts for the coming season, both in terms of staff and the number of productions it will present. The 2010-11 season will include only five operas, continuing the downward trend from six this season and seven in 2008-09. more ›

In 2006, when Washington National Opera opened its American Ring Cycle, few could have imagined that it would end as it did on Saturday night, with a concert performance of Götterdämmerung. After very promising productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in 2006 and 2007, financial considerations delayed the staging of Siegfried by one season, to last spring, when it ended up with a troubled casting and special-effects woes. The collapse of the financial and housing market last fall was the final nail in the coffin, forcing the company to cancel the plans to mount the entire four-opera cycle this month. By all logical expectations, this doomed Ring should have come to an ignominious end, with nothing but the fact that it finally concluded to show for all the trouble. more ›

Washington National Opera's new production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos puts me in a bit of a quandary. It has a score and libretto of particular beauty and is produced rarely enough -- the last time WNO mounted it was in 1994 -- that I would always recommend that others see it, even if this particular production, heard on Wednesday night, is not an ideal one. It is a shame that this quirky opera, revised by Strauss and his brilliant librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as a postmodern dissection of the perils and vanities of creating opera, returns to Washington National Opera at this time. The company's precarious financial situation has led to a season cobbled together to fulfill contracts, hardly a context for great Strauss to thrive. Even so, the production's party atmosphere and bright costumes could make tonight's performance (at 7 p.m.) an interesting alternative Halloween destination (see the notes at the end of this review for a possible discount opportunity). more ›

Washington National Opera hit upon a great way to spread interest in opera last year with the first installment of an event it calls Opera in the Outfield. Next month, the company will offer another free high-definition simulcast of its season-opening production, Rossini's evergreen (or, overdone) The Barber of Seville, to a large crowd at Nationals Park, providing access to what happens inside the company's theater to a wider audience. In this economic downturn, it does not hurt that it will cost you nothing. more ›

This year's Capital Fringe Festival includes three productions of new chamber operas by local composers. After Michael Oberhauser's Magnum Opus, reviewed last week, there is Life in Death, a new opera by Gregg Martin, a former graduate student at Catholic University. It is a one-act adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1850 short story The Oval Portrait, in which a story is uncovered about a disturbing portrait, painted obsessively by an artist infatuated with the image of his new wife, unaware that by locking her up for endless sittings he is killing her. more ›

This year's Capital Fringe Festival features three chamber operas, including Michael Oberhauser's Magnum Opus, heard yesterday afternoon. This one-act chamber opera premiered in February, with a slightly different cast, at Catholic University's Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, where Oberhauser and most of the founders and performers of the small company Opera Alterna cut their teeth as students. The company's artistic director, Jay D. Brock, who directed the staging of this production, and several of the artists spoke about their work last week on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show. more ›

So few classical music concerts happen in the summer months that the weekly Classical Music Agenda gets a vacation. Here is what you could hear in the month of July, although you may have to travel a bit to get there. more ›

After a spring season of more challenging operas — a vicious Peter Grimes and a controversial, Americanized Siegfried — Washington National Opera brought home the bacon on Saturday night, opening its final production, Puccini's Turandot. The company presented this opera last time only in 2001 (with Alessandra Marc in the title role), and the Kirov Opera brought its road staging to the Kennedy Center in 2006. To answer the natural question — do we really need to see Turandot again so soon? — the company brought the colorful, somewhat slapstick, but still disturbingly savage production created by Andrei Şerban for Covent Garden 25 years ago (with none other than Plácido Domingo as Calaf) to Washington. Since most of the singing was quite good and the orchestra sounded in top form, this is indeed a production worth seeing. more ›

Washington National Opera continued its epic American Ring Cycle on Saturday night, opening a production of Wagner's Siegfried that was plagued by vocal and technical troubles but was still an evening of revelations. more ›

Washington National Opera opened its first-ever production of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes on Saturday night. The house was not sold out and emptied slightly after each intermission. The operas of Britten, as analyzed in some detail by Anne Midgette in the Post, do not have the same broad appeal to listeners who prefer their opera in familiar form. This is in spite of the fact that Britten is one of the more traditionally minded opera composers of the 20th century, if you compare his operas with Berg, Messiaen, and Ligeti, for example. In fact, Grimes should be the antidote for those who dislike opera because the plots are so often absurd and sacrifice dramatic realism to musical and especially vocal excesses. Although the story is drawn from a 19th-century source, its tale of a social outcast persecuted by a closed and oppressive society was directly related to the composer's life: Benjamin Britten and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, were not only closeted homosexuals but committed pacifists, which made life very difficult in WWII-era Great Britain. more ›

You know that the financial crisis has already caused a lot of damage to the lives of everyday people, as companies go into bankruptcy and people lose their jobs and mortgages. The corresponding cultural damage is beginning appear as well: regional opera companies and symphonies are folding, while others are cutting back their projected seasons for fear of being unable to fill the house. The National Symphony Orchestra was recently able to secure a large financial gift to underwrite hiring Christoph Eschenbach as its new Music Director, but other arts organizations are losing donor pledges left and right. As Anne Midgette and David Montgomery have reported in the Post, one of the casualties is the projected complete performances of Wagner's legendary Ring cycle, planned by Washington National Opera for November 2009. more ›

This year's production of Bizet's Carmen (see the piano-vocal score) was a late addition to the company's 2008-2009 season, reportedly displacing another production to a future season when its star, Denyce Graves, became available. The American mezzo-soprano, born here in Washington and an alumna of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, is a favorite with local audiences. For all of her struggles in recent years, personally and vocally, La Graves can still sell out a house, at least here in Washington. In fact, the opening night of this production felt somewhat like an opera gala, catering to the traditional tastes of audiences and the idiosyncratic whims of stars. Even the explanatory note in the program was not written by the director — the production is old and has nothing to say, anyway — but by Denyce Graves. The voice has lost none of its presence nor gained much in beauty, with an emphasis on the robust chest voice, which sounds forced from time to time. Her Carmen remains sexy, swaggering, headstrong, its dramatic scale tipped consistently toward emoting over subtlety. more ›

Washington National Opera opened its fall season on Saturday night, with an ultra-conventional but visually lavish production of Giuseppe Verdi's classic La Traviata. One of the so-called Big Three from the ground-breaking middle of Verdi's operatic career, the opera's libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, a poet so compliant that he became a sort of punching bag for the composer, is a miracle of dramatic concision. In this opera, you can actually watch Verdi forcing the conventions of Italian opera that he inherited — the cavatina, the cabaletta, the banda, the toast scene — to bend to the telling of a story. That story, about a courtesan who finds love outside of society's moral strictures and is punished for it, also resonated personally with Verdi. A widower, he resented the criticism he received from his contemporaries for living with the soprano Giuseppina Strepponi before they were ultimately married. more ›

Mascagni's over-performed, bite-sized piece of verismo pablum is neither of those things (although even WCO resorted to Cavalleria a few years ago). The initially disappointing sales for these performances seemed to indicate that even the often unadventurous Washington audience had voted it down. The slate of singers, however, had to give anyone pause, as it included two important names in this sort of repertory. The Sunday afternoon performance removed any doubt: anyone who loves great singing, such as we do not hear all that often here in Washington, should find a way to hear the only remaining performance, this Friday night. more ›

The Ottoman emperor Bayezid I once boasted that his horse would use the Throne of St. Peter as its manger. The proud sultan's downfall at the hands of the Tartar emperor Timur Lenk in 1402 has been recounted numerous times, including by Christopher Marlowe (Tamburlaine, 1588) and Jean Racine (Bajazet, 1672). Stories of Bayezid's humiliation while he was Timur Lenk's prisoner — Timur used him as a footstool, kept him caged like an animal, made his wife dance naked for his court — and resultant suicide from despair are probably apocryphal, but they make for great drama. more ›

This production is a revival of the production from New York City Opera, directed by Stephen Lawless. A skewed rectangle of wood frames the raked stage, and backdrops help situate the action, most effectively with rising and falling images that give the impression of watching a ship's deck pitching on the waves. Lawless has either not read the libretto closely or he has attempted to recast the story, but not in a way that shocks or surprises: it just makes the opera a bit of a muddle. more ›