Tentative pacts avert Metropolitan Opera lockout scheme
The tentative agreement includes mandatory cost reductions from management and an independent monitor to track budget performance.
Metropolitan Opera unions say they are being forced to strike
Deep salary cut demands, which its unions say are unjustified, and a company threat to close down are combining to force members of the 16 unions to plan to strike, if necessary.
Thaïs: Religion versus sexuality on an epic scale
Jules Massenet's Thaïs is a tale of religion and sexual repression, with baritone Plácido Domingo as Athanaël, a meddler of epic proportions, masquerading as a monk to hide his inner psychological conflicts.
A Coffin in Egypt, Texas
The latest by American composer Ricky Ian Gordon, among the freshest voices in music today.Von Stade plays the 90 year-old Myrtle Bledsoe, lone survivor at her family homestead in Egypt, Texas.
"The Death of Klinghoffer": controversial history in opera
Composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman specialize in expressing 20th century historical events in opera The rarely staged Death is the most controversial, dogged by criticism and cancellations.
"Billy Budd": sex, revolution and sea in jaw-dropping opera
In 1888 Herman Melville began the philosophical novella Billy Budd. Perhaps one could say that composer Benjamin Britten and his librettists E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier "completed" it with their adaptation.
Go see Duke Ellington’s sweet, tangy “Queenie Pie”
Ellington was one of the most versatile figures in music of the 20th century, but most people do not know that from the 1930s on, Ellington worked intermittently, all the way up to his death in 1974, on an opera.
In Verdi’s “Falstaff,” all the world’s a jest
What better way to celebrate Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi's bicentennial than with a production of Falstaff?
