Plácido Domingo, Verdi baritones, and the ripple effect

Op-ed

The complaint is: legendary tenor Plácido Domingo has retired his notorious Don José, Cavaradossi, and Otello, and has started taking on baritone roles (Oreste in Iphigénie en Tauride, and the title roles in Simon Boccanegra and Rigoletto). The argument is that his singing these roles takes away a potential gig from a hard-working, vocally appropriate Verdi baritone.

Class Acts: Kiri Te Kanewa at the Met Centennial

If you're a singer, watching this video might give you the creepy-crawlies. It's Dame Kiri Te Kanewa singing "Dove sono i bei momenti" from Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera's Centennial Gala, 1983. Kiri sings this staple aria of hers as beautifully as you would expect.

Check out: Liederwölfe

Interview

I met Liederwölfe Opera Collective co-founders and delightful ladies Francesca Perez and Lindsay Michael at the Banff Opera Colloquium this summer, where they wowed Canada's opera biggies with their proposal for Opera Peep Show. The premise is delicious: a ticket gets you into a hotel bar, where you can hear a few opera samples. From there, listeners can get keys to various rooms in the hotel, each featuring previews and excerpts from various other companies.

Interviewing the Greats: Virginia Zeani

Interview

It is no wonder that opera collectors call Romanian soprano Virginia Zeani "l’Assoluta." In May 1948, Zeani made her stage début in Bologna, singing Violetta in La traviata; she went on as a last minute replacement, never having sung with orchestra and with no rehearsals. In her career, she would go on to sing 648 times.

If you could accessorize with opera...

Humour

Accessories designer Diana Broussard is introducing a new resin handbag this November. This doesn't seem like a topic worthy of an opera blog, but stay with me. The handbag comes equipped with an LCD screen, and wearers can play video and audio of their choice, whatever goes best with your outfit, I suppose.

Vote for a note: crowdsourced songwriting?

Editorial

What do you get when you ask a crowd what a song should sound like? CrowdSound.net is currently completing a melody, generated one note at a time by people on the Internet. Users can vote for each subsequent note in a melody, choosing from a list of diatonic pitches.

Back to school opera: a practical glossary

Editorial

The summer winds down, and school and other seasonal activities (like opera!) are soon back in session. In anticipation of a brand new season of opera-going, I figured a practical crash-course was in order.

4 Opera scenes that should have happened

Humour

Above: Suzuki gets real with Cio-Cio San, just like we all wished she would (Not actually.) Ever watch an opera and think, "I wonder if those two characters would be friends"? Seems odd, maybe; I've always done it with TV and film characters, and when I got into opera, the trend continued. Like, I used to think about whether or not the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow would all be friends if Dorothy weren't in the picture. Or in The Little Mermaid, what it would be like for Eric to hang out with Sebastian.

In review: Dissociative Me

Review

I walked into RED Nightclub to catch LooseTea Music Theatre's latest offering, "Dissociative Me". A new transladaptation of Gounod's Faust, in which we find the devious relationship with the malevolent spirit Mephistopheles has evolved into a dissociative personality disorder, where he inhabits the other part of John Faustus's psyche.

Mark Morris: "Clarity."

Interview

American choreographer, dancer, director and conductor Mark Morris is one of those people that's difficult to introduce. He has worked with the likes of Peter Sellars, Yo-Yo Ma, and Mikhail Baryshnikov, and has a firm hand in dance and opera today. His company, the Mark Morris Dance Group, is a tight group of dancers, designers, and musicians, and they travel across the globe, presenting an average of 90 shows a year.