Taking his cue from Vaughan Williams, Michael Tippett wrote some of his most beautiful pieces for a double-strings orchestra.

Colin Davis, Michael Tippett, Erich Gruenberg

Atlanta’s artistic director Tomer Zvulun is not sitting on his hands. He’s opening with Pagliacci (Oct 22–Nov 13) and The Kaiser of Atlantis (Oct 23–Nov 14) in a custom-designed open-air tent with audience on a baseball field.

The Big Tent will travel to three other Atlanta locations over the course of 2020-21. The season’s four remaining productions will be announced later this fall.

Zvulun says: “I believe that crisis reveals character and provides opportunities for change. This pandemic has devastated so many lives and businesses. But it has also been a major catalyst in accelerating a shift to a business model that we have been discussing for years: creating a company of players, performing in non-traditional spaces, and developing our video and streaming capabilities.’

Each production will be digitally captured by the company’s newly formed digital media department, with the goal of wide distribution. The cast for each of the six 2020-21 productions will be drawn from the Atlanta Opera Company Players: twelve world-class singers living in the Atlanta metro area or within a few hours’ drive, who have been hired for the duration of the season. Drawing on the region’s exceptional talent pool, and reflecting its vitality and diversity, these handpicked artists are sopranos Jasmine Habersham and Talise Trevigne; mezzos Jamie Barton, Daniela Mack and Megan Marino; tenors Alek Shrader and Richard Trey Smagur; baritones Michael Mayes and Reginald Smith Jr.; bass-baritone Ryan McKinny; and basses Kevin Burdette and Morris Robinson.

The Screaming Divas are at it again.

Last week, Sondra Radvanovsky recorded a track in Toronto’s Koerner Hall with pianist Rachael Kerr and sent it to co-diva Keri Alkema.

Keri did the video alchemy.

What comes through is the soaring hope of two opera singers that we will, never, walk alone.

We’re all in this together.

Take care of each other.

Wear a mask.

Arthur Kaptainis has written a take-down on Alexander Neef, outgoing head of Canadian Opera Company, for La Scena Musicale:

…. Neef was not a disaster in every respect. The former casting director in Paris under the late Gérard Mortier brought this skill (and this skill only) to Toronto in 2008. He had his favourites, which were not always mine, but he could assemble a decent squad of singers to staff an otherwise ghastly production of The Marriage of Figaro or Die Fledermaus….

What Neef failed to do spectacularly is build an audience. It is a failure that one might attribute to the vagaries of the economy, the advent of livestreaming, the price of parking or any number of standard-issue excuses that have potential validity anywhere. But there is a central and specific explanation for the underperformance of the COC: a parade of supposedly innovative productions that required a manifesto from the stage director to understand and a six-pack of Red Bull to sit through.

To some readers this conclusion might appear to be just a little tainted by personal opinion, so let us look at the numbers, some of them represented in a helpful article published in 2019 by Ludwig van Toronto. In 2014-15 Neef cut back the COC season from seven mainstage productions to six (one of these being a double bill). …

Since the middle of the ensuing decade the bottom line has sunk steadily. From 2014-15 to 2018-19 ticket sales plunged from 105,086 to 82,199. Average attendance dropped from 92% to 86%. Remember, attendance percentage should rise as performances decrease….

Read on here.

And here’s another sceptic take from Jenna Simeonov at Schmopera:
…. Bleh. How depressing. It felt icky back in 2018, when Neef took on a second gig as head of The Santa Fe Opera, again while also leading the COC. Sure, Santa Fe is a summer house and the COC breaks from May-ish to October-ish, but let’s be clear: running each of those major opera companies is a full-time job.

Now, this situation isn’t quite the same; there were decidedly circumstances that Neef couldn’t control, like Lissner’s exit or the pandemic. But there’s a weird vibe happening out of the COC right now, like a mix of deference and resignation to Neef as he very clearly makes decisions that are right for him.

I’ll say a few things, since it doesn’t seem like I’ll have any more time to be convinced otherwise. I think Neef has spent his time at the COC using the resources of that company – and paradoxically, the relative under-the-radar-ness of a Canadian opera house – to build his own resume. He has brought in excellence, like Sondra Radvanovsky, Thomas Hampson, Christine Goerke, Susan Graham, and Ferruccio Furlanetto. He’s brought in productions by Peter Sellars, Robert Carsen, and Sir David McVicar. He brought Harry Somers’ Louis Riel back to the stage (whether it should have come back or not), and he gave a cheeky response to all the Canadians’ call for new commissions with Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian. He’s brought to the COC important pieces of today’s operatic puzzle, and Toronto has enjoyed over a decade of seeing and hearing things that didn’t usually come this far north….

More here.

It’s a big shoutout for the ex-maestro.

press release:

We are sorry to announce that due to newly-imposed travel restrictions, Sonya Yoncheva has had to withdraw from The Royal Opera: Live in Concert performance this Friday 4 September. We are delighted to announce that soprano Kristine Opolais will be taking to the stage to sing ‘Song to the Moon’ from Rusalka, and Act I duet fromTosca alongside Gerald Finley, Filipe Manu, Jeremy White and the Royal Opera Chorus.  

The Concertgebouw’s Masterpianists series, which has run for 33 years, has been called off by the organisers for a simple reason:

‘A maximum of 350 visitors, in a Large Room designed for 2,000 creates a problem we cannot overcome,’ says organiser Marco Riaskoff.

This is the 33-year roll of honour:
Behzod Abduraimov, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Piotr Anderszewski, Leif Ove Andsnes, Martha Argerich & Stephen Kovacevich, Martha Argerich & Alexander Rabinovich, Martha Argerich & Lilya Zilberstein, Kit Armstrong, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Emanuel Ax, Daniel Barenboim, Boris Berezovsky, Lazar Berman , Jonathan Biss, Rafał Blechacz, Jorge Bolet, Ronald Brautigam, Alfred Brendel, Yefim Bronfman, Gianluca Cascioli, Shura Cherkasky, Seong-Jin Cho, Aldo Ciccolini, Roberto Cominati, Bella Davidovich, Severin von Eckardstein, Till Fellner, David Fray, Nelson Freire, Alexander Gavrylyuk, Bruno Leonardo Gelber, Jonathan Gilad, Boris Giltburg, Nelson Goerner, Richard Goode, Hélène Grimaud, Horacio Gutiérrez, Marc-André Hamelin, Michael Kieran Harvey, Stephen Hough, Lucas & Arthur Jussen, Cyprien Katsaris, Evgeny Kissin, Zoltán Kocsis, Evgeny Koroliov, Denis Kozhukhin, Anna Kravtchenko, Anton Kuerti Katia & Marielle Labèque, Marc Laforet, Lang, Alicia de Larrocha, Igor Levit, Paul Lewis, Yundi Li, Louis Lortie, Andrea Lucchesini, Nikolai Lugansky, Radu Lupu, Denis Matsuev, Hannes Minnaar, Joseph Moog, Ivan Moravec, Olli Mustonen, Enrico Pace, Enrico Pace & Igor Roma, Murray Perahia, Maria João Pires, Maria João Pires & Ricardo Castro, Mikhail Pletnev, Ivo Pogorelich, Maurizio Pollini, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Jorge Luis Prats, Beatrice Rana, Dezsö Ránki, Igor Roma, Alexander Romanovsky, György Sándor, Sir András Schiff, Grigory Sokolov, Yevgeny Sudbin, Alexandre Tharaud, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Maria Tipo, Alexander Toradze, Daniil Trifonov, Simon Trpceski , Nobuyuki Tsujii, Mitsuko Uchida, Anatol Ugorski, Elisso Virsaladze, Alexei Volodin, Arcadi Volodos, Yuja Wang, Earl Wild, Christian Zacharias, Lilya Zilberstein, Krystian Zimerman.

Rattle and the LSO have put me in a VW mood.

The young Finn Klaus Mäkelä, already music director in Oslo and Paris, has thrown his hat in for the Munich vacancy.

Mäkelä, 24, will replace Yannick Nézet-Séguin at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in three concerts at the end of next month.

He is the only significant substitution in the orchestra’s new season, announced today. Munich is auditioning for the vacant music director’s post, last held by the late Mariss Jansons.

The Bavarian State Opera has been allowed to admit 500 ticket holders to the world premiere of “7 Deaths of Maria Callas” this week. Booking opens today.

The Government describes it as an experimental easing.

Nikolaus Bachler, director of the State Opera, calls it an ‘important step’ adding: ‘theatre without an audience makes no sense.’

Our colleagues at Opera Plus report that all 62 members of the National Theater chorus have been quarantined as of yesterday on the advice of medical specialists.

The opening production of Smetana’s opera Libuše has been canceled.

Prague has recorded a steep rise in Covid cases in the past few days.

The Austrian baritone Rudolf Holtenau has died in Vienna, aged 88.

With a career based mostly in Germany, he sang major Wagner roles in the 1970s and 1980s in many international houses, before devoting himself to teaching.