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 ›

Washington National Opera has made another significant advance in catching up to the latest trends in opera houses around the world, by staging its first-ever opera by Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-1787). The new production of Iphigénie en Tauride, which opened on Friday night, turns out to be the best work in an otherwise downsized and somewhat ho-hum season -- not only because it is the company's first Gluck opera and such a beautiful work, but because of a superb cast that proves gripping both musically and dramatically, in a production that is intriguing, stark and far from ordinary. 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 ›

Washington National Opera has had a rough couple of years: the cancellation of its Ring cycle and shortening of its season because of the recession, a rumored merger with the Kennedy Center and the departure of its general director, Plácido Domingo. Even before that, the company's music director, Heinz Fricke -- who had done so much to improve the quality of the Opera Orchestra and conducted so many of its best performances -- became ill. Maestro Fricke came less and less often to Washington, and some of the company's productions languished musically without his much-needed guidance. As rumored this summer and even earlier, Fricke has become music director emeritus, and the man we suspected to be in line to replace him has been officially appointed as new music director. 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 ›

Until now, Washingtonians seemed to have avoided the opera crunch. But although Plácido Domingo raised the Washington National Opera's profile during his tenure as General Director, the company has been hanging by a thread financially more ›

When the recession forced Washington National Opera to reconfigure its season, the company turned to some tried and true operas. This was somewhat disappointing, as in the revival of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess so quickly after its last appearance, but also made more conventionally minded opera fans happy with the return of some old favorites like Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, which opened on Saturday night at the Kennedy Center Opera House. Premiered in Vienna in 1786, Figaro was the beginning of a legendary collaboration between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, who created the libretto from a very current "hit" play by Pierre Beaumarchais, La folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro, from 1784. The story is, on one hand, quite topical and connected to the issues of its day: the conflicts between the old feudal rights of a decaying nobility and an increasingly resentful oppressed lower class were about to explode in France. On the other, the themes of the opera — jealousy and disappointment in love and marriage, the inequality of the privileged and poor — are as relevant today as they were then, with or without powdered wigs. more ›

Opera, the extravagant art, tends to flourish in times of financial excess, meaning that the ongoing financial crisis has caused considerable collateral damage to this most expensive art form. In response to the crisis, Washington National Opera drastically cut down and altered the current season, including the regrettable postponement of its American Ring Cycle. While lamentable, the decision was fiscally wise, proven surely by the plight of Los Angeles Opera, which recently went ahead with its Ring cycle only to find itself begging the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to give it a $14 million loan to cover costs. 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 ›

On Saturday night, Washington National Opera opened the second production of its downsized fall season, Verdi's Falstaff. The regrettable postponement of the company's American Ring Cycle led to a hasty but resourceful reconfiguration of this year's programming, quickly putting together a group of operas that could allow the company and the singers to honor their existing contracts. On one hand, these circumstances caused WNO to return to this masterpiece — Verdi's last and perhaps greatest opera — for the first time in over a quarter-century. On the other, it is lamentable to hear it performed in a musically uninspired way, with this magnificent score generally outclassing a cast that was vocally adequate at best. more ›

Washington National Opera's production of Rossini's overexposed opera buffa The Barber of Seville was, on the surface at least, hardly an exciting way to open the Washington National Opera season. The second performance last night, however, proved that, in spite of the many deficits a company faces in making new something that is so familiar and even tired, it is definitely worth a hearing. 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 ›

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 ›

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 ›

On Saturday night, Washington National Opera opened a new production of Donizetti’s seldom performed Lucrezia Borgia, created for Renée Fleming’s first stage appearance at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The American soprano’s debut in this opera’s title role, at La Scala ten years ago, ran afoul of that theater’s infamous loggionisti. In a recent interview Fleming said that she regards the unruly crowd’s booing as a “badge of honor,” noting that part of her reason for returning to the role is to “get back on the horse again” and reclaim Lucrezia. 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 ›

The Washington National Opera naturally wants to increase the audience for opera in the nation's capital. To that end, its last couple seasons have featured a free simulcast of one of its productions via an immense screen on the National Mall. Large crowds have shown up, with better or worse results depending on the weather. This year, the company has just announced, it will slightly modify this program, by offering its free broadcast to crowds in Nationals Park, in imitation of a similar initiative at San Francisco Opera. 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 ›

Elektra has been abandoned in the house of Agamemnon, who was murdered upon his return from the Trojan War by his wife and her lover. She plots her revenge for her father's murder, even burying the axe used to kill him, in the hope that she and her brother, Orest, can use it to slay Klytemnästra. This is not the first misfortune to befall the doomed House of Atreus, and it will not be the last. Why is Elektra so devoted to her father, who slew another of his daughters, Iphigenia, to appease Artemis and grant strong winds for the voyage to Troy? 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 ›

Part of that success was that Verdi was more dramatically shrewd, and his improving track record allowed him to dominate the creative relationship with Piave. Another component was that the story taken from Victor Hugo's play Le Roi s'amuse, was less complicated and yielded more operatic possibilities. Still, the play was regarded as dangerously revolutionary, meaning that Verdi had to mollify the imperial censors in Venice by recasting the noble philanderer as the Duke of Mantua, rather than a king, but it was not Hugo's title character who most interested Verdi and Piave. It was the court jester, Rigoletto, who became the center of this opera. 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 ›

Written by DCist guest contributor Michael Lodico The Washington National Opera’s production of William Bolcom’s operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s earthy play (premiered by the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1999 and staged by Frank Galati) shows the company’s commitment to remounting new American operas after their premieres. The Chicago production, now being presented to D.C. area audiences by the WNO, also features three leads from the original production and the two arias added by... more ›

Before the curtain of the second performance of Washington National Opera's new production of Mozart's Don Giovanni on Monday night, conductor Plácido Domingo made an announcement. Happily, it was not to announce a cast change, but to draw the audience's attention to the fact that it was the 220th anniversary of the opera's first performance in Prague (October 29, 1787). This production is not likely to rank high on anyone's list of noteworthy versions of... more ›

It is always good to know how your concert schedule is going to play out, and this week things could not be any clearer (and none of these events has sold out). Here is your list of what's good, what's free, and even some of what's both. THE BIG GUNS: >> A couple years ago, soprano Anne Schwanewilms was in the news because she replaced Deborah Voigt, when the latter could not fit into a... more ›

There are ways to attend an opera in Washington at a ticket price that will not make you cry. The easiest way is to go to a performance from one of the smaller or collegiate companies, where the reasonable ticket price will translate into hearing lesser singers or a piano or small instrumental ensemble instead of a full orchestra. If you want the true experience of opera, however — that "exotic and irrational entertainment" described... more ›

This is going to be an excellent week for serious listeners of classical music, with several major events headlining the agenda and some other good concerts on the sidelines. In the spotlight are a piano recital, a visiting orchestra, Russian music, and possibly the greatest opera ever composed. HEADLINES: >> Pianist Murray Perahia had to cancel his 2006 recital for Washington Performing Arts Society, because of renewed pain from a finger injury in the 1990s... more ›