Edward Nelson News

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) announced repertory and celebrations for a landmark 50th season in 2025, celebrating five decades of artistic innovation and discovery since the company’s founding in 1976. The 2025 Festival Season opens on May 24, 2025, with Johann Strauss II’s effervescent Die Fledermaus, which has not been seen at Opera Theatre since 1989. The season continues with the company’s 44th world premiere, This House, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon and libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. Next, Opera Theatre will present an all-new staging of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale — the very first opera that the company ever performed. Britten’s enchanting adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream rounds out the season. In addition to four mainstage productions, Opera Theatre will continue to present the annual young artist showcase, Center Stage. This concert shines a spotlight on the members of OTSL’s highly selective Young Artist Programs, accompanied onstage by members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which has served as OTSL’s Festival Season orchestra since 1978.

Des Moines Metro Opera has revealed cast updates for Debussy's PELLÉAS & MÉLISANDE, featuring new performers in key roles. Learn how to purchase tickets!

Sarah Ruhl's The Seasons and more are set for Boston Lyric Opera’s 2024/25 Season! The season will also include Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s MITRIDATE, Verdi’s AIDA, a major revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s CAROUSEL on its 80th anniversary, and more.

There’s an awful lot of death in opera, Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, lamented on a recent opening night. And those plentiful tragedies are also often further burdened with overbearing scores, turgid storylines, super-large casts and strident if not shrill performances. 

Check out the new video of Ramin Karimloo's operatic debut in Washington National Opera's Songbird opposite Isabel Leonard, one of America’s leading mezzo-sopranos.

BroadwayWorld has a first look at Ramin Karimloo's operatic debut in Washington National Opera's Songbird opposite Isabel Leonard, one of America’s leading mezzo-sopranos. Songbird is a new adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole. 

Ramin Karimloo will make his operatic debut in Washington National Opera's Songbird this March. Songbird is a new adaptation of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta La Périchole.

Opening Friday, July 22, Richard Strauss's comic opera, The Silent Woman (“Die Schweigsame Frau”), receives a rare American presentation at Bard SummerScape. Harold Wilson, “a stentorian bass … with impressive focus, carrying power and quiet charisma” (New York Times), heads a strong cast in a new production by Christian Räth, whose SummerScape staging of Das Wunder der Heliane prompted Musical America to declare: “Opera productions don't get much better than this.”

Since its inception, the annual Bard SummerScape festival has presented a series of stellar revivals of important but neglected operas. This year's immersion in “Rachmaninoff and His World” features The Silent Woman (“Die Schweigsame Frau”), the only true comic opera by Rachmaninoff's close contemporary Richard Strauss.

 Bard SummerScape will return this year with eight weeks of live dance, theater, music, and opera in New York’s Hudson Valley, June 23–August 14, 2022. SummerScape 2022 presents the world premieres of new commissions in both dance and theater.

Desert in, created by Darrah and collaborators, is a groundbreaking, eight-part operatic mini-series full of colorful and mysterious characters who populate a supernatural story of love, loss and the price of memories we struggle to keep.

San Francisco Opera announced today repertory, casting and reopening plans for its 99th season. Commencing with a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca on Saturday, August 21, the 2021–22 Season marks the inauguration of Eun Sun Kim’s tenure as Caroline H. Hume Music Director and a reemergence of opera at the War Memorial Opera House.

Long Beach Opera presents Philip Glass's Les Enfants Terribles, performing May 21, 22 and 23, 2021 at the 2nd and PCH rooftop garage at 2nd Street and Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. 

Have you watched Los Angeles Opera’s digital short Brown Sounds yet? Brown Sounds celebrates Black history by beginning with the Garden of Eden. Conceived by Raehann Bryce-Davis, a rising star in the LA firmament, it's a stunning vocal piece. Composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson set poet Henry Dumas's evocative verses to music with Bryce-Davis’s ravishing mezzo-soprano in mind.

Long Beach Opera has announced a revised 2021 Season, which will include an exciting return to live opera performance in May with an immersive drive-in Phillip Glass opera, the company’s first venture into longform digital content with a world premiere operatic television series in June, and an outdoor live performance of two operas in August.

San Francisco Opera's weekly, free opera streams continue in April with Donizetti's Don Pasquale (April 3–4), The Fall of the House of Usher double bill featuring one-act operas by Gordon Getty and Claude Debussy (April 10–11) and Verdi's Don Carlo (April 17–18).

The team behind the operatic miniseries 'desert in,” now in production for a June 2021 debut on Boston Lyric Opera’s streaming service, announced today an award-winning roster of composers and performers working on the project.

In Song is a series of intimate video portraits featuring remarkable San Francisco Opera artists who draw us into their distinctive spheres through stories and song—from classical to bluegrass to spirituals. In each episode, a singer invites us to see who they are in the world, their cultural backgrounds and how they express themselves through deep connections to song.

San Francisco Opera Tad and Dianne Taube General Director Matthew Shilvock announces re-envisioned Spring 2021 programming including a return to live performances with a new production of Gioachino Rossini's The Barber of Seville and concerts offered in a drive-in setting at San Rafael's Marin Center in April and May.

Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago is continuing the celebration of its tenth anniversary season with winter and spring offerings that include three recitals as part of the Lieder Lounge series, and the final installment of a Polish song workshop.