Pretty much the last thing I expected to hear about a Wagner opera at Bayreuth.

"... for no clear reasons, singers smear one another with crude oil."

- from "At Bayreuth, Boos and Dropped Jaws" by Anthony Tommasini in today's New York Times.

Opera in a barn (continued): Rossini and Verdi

At 10 AM tomorrow (Saturday), tickets go on sale for the Summer season at Wolf Trap, including opera at the Barns.

(2011)

Free. Jazz. (or, Sidney & her man Clovis)

May I suggest that you set aside an hour before clicking through to listen to Jason Moran's amazing (and free!) "Live: Time On The Quilts Of Gee's Bend" Suite?

From the NPR website:

Jason Moran, composer and piano
Alicia Hall Moran, vocals
Bill Frisell, guitar
Tarus Mateen, bass
Nasheet Waits, drums

"If new-laid eggs wore wooden legs I should not laugh or cry."

I would like to tell you how beautifully Corinne Winters sang the role of Anne Trulove at today's matinee of The Rake's Progress at the Barns of Wolf Trap. And I'd like to tell you that Eric Barry inhabited the title role of Tom Rakewell so perfectly that it could have been written for him! And I'd like to tell you that Margaret Gawrysiak's portrayals of Mother Goose and Baba the Turk demonstrated virtuosity and great humor.

But I can't.

I can't. Not because any of that isn't true, but because my ticket says that by attending the performance, I agreed that I "will not transmit ... any description [or] account ... of the event."

Sorry!

"... by your use of this ticket you agree, that you will not transmit ... any description [or] account ... of the event ..."

oPad?

At the Barns of Wolf Trap tonight, when Leporello sang the aria "Madamina, il catalogo è questo'" (also known as "The Catalogue Aria"), listing Don Giovanni's conquests ("In Italy, 640 / In Germany, 231 / 100 in France; in Turkey, 91 / But in Spain, already 1003"), he read not from a book, but from an iPad — while the data were digitally projected onto tall scrim panels.

Don Giovanni's iPad can be seen at the 0:30" mark in this video.

And here's a video of the aria (from a different production) with English subtitles.

Mozart & Stravinsky, in July & August.

Tickets for this summer's two productions by the Wolf Trap Opera Company at the Barns of Wolf Trap – Don Giovanni & The Rake's Progress – are now available.

Tonight!

Tickets are still available for tonight's world premier of the new opera "The Inspector" at The Barns of Wolf Trap, as well as for the performances this Friday and Sunday.

Opera in a barn (continued).

At 10 AM tomorrow (Saturday), tickets go on sale for the Summer season at Wolf Trap, including opera at the Barns.

Four-legged opera stars?

The Seattle Opera's new production of Don Quixote features a horse & a donkey.

"Curiosity, Revenge, and Heartbreak."

The Wolf Trap Opera Company have announced their 2011 season!

How is opera like chocolate?

Much like the shrinking chocolate bar – same price, less chocolate! – the cost of a subscription to the Washington National Opera remains about the same, although the season has shrunk from seven productions to five.

4-5 yrs; 36-46".

NeuroCooking friends with small children in the National Capital Area may be interested in the Washington National Opera's "Trouble auditions" which will take place early evening next Tuesday; they are looking for children ages 4 to 5, between 36 and 46 inches tall, to play the role of "Trouble" in Madame Butterfly.

"floundering"

It is rare to see a daily newspaper's front page plainly call an important failure a failure, because doing so tends to offend readers, in direct proportion to the failure's importance.

Which is why, today, from Anne Midgette's article, "Kennedy Center to take over Washington National Opera", in the Washington Post, we may conclude that opera is of no importance:

‎"In what amounts to a rescue operation, the Kennedy Center announced Thursday that it is taking over the Washington National Opera, a company that has been floundering artistically and financially for years..."

Name that (opera) blog!

NeuroCooking friends seeking either free tickets to a dress rehearsal at the Washington National Opera, or merely the glory concomitant with winning a challenging contest of wits, may be interested in entering the WNO's "name the blog" contest:

To enter, email contest [at] dc-opera [dot] org with the subject line “Blog Contest.” In the body of the email, include your name, contact information, and blog name submission. All submissions must be received by November 30, 2010.

Of course, we think the WNO's blog should be named "Killing the soprano", but we feel it is very unlikely that our suggestion will be adopted.

"The Inspector"

A new opera will premier at the Barns of Wolf Trap in the Spring!

"The Inspector", with music by John Musto and libretto by Mark Stephen Campbell, is "loosely" based on "The Government Inspector" by Nikolai Gogol.

From the description on the Wolf Trap Opera website:

"The Inspector is set in 1930s Sicily in a fictional small town not far from Palermo. A crafty drifter is perceived to be a high-ranking government inspector by town officials, who go to great comic lengths to hide the extent of their corruption."

Tickets for the world premier on April 27th do not appear to be for sale, but tickets for the performances on April 29th and May 1st are available.

Tomorrow (Saturday) at ten!

Tickets to the Wolf Trap Opera Company's summer season go on sale at 10 AM tomorrow!

How does the story end? Let the audience decide.

Mozart never finished Zaide. (I suppose dying when you're 35 gets in the way of finishing all kinds of stuff.) This summer, when the opera is presented at the Barns of Wolf Trap, at each performance, the audience will decide how the story ends.

monkeys@keyboards?

The Washington National Opera (WNO) reliably produces captivating (& often outstanding) operas, as well as amusing (& often ridiculous) communications to their subscribers.

We've subscribed to the WNO for almost twenty years now. This week I received an email:

Welcome to Washington National Opera!

You have been invited by Mr. and Mrs. Pekar to SAVE 25% on your first purchase of Washington National Opera's 2009-10 Season.*

You are receiving this offer as part of WNO's Patron Referral Program, where our subscribers are given the opportunity to share their love of opera with their family, friends and colleagues.  This offer is extended to patrons new to WNO and to those who have not attended a WNO performance since September 1, 2008.

Click here to participate in this this special program or call WNO's Audience Services at 202.295.2400. You must enter or mention Referral Code XXXXXX  to redeem this offer.

"Live opera transports you to a magnificent place, one filled with artistry and drama, music and storytelling. Washington National Opera's productions will lift your spirits and refresh your soul."  ~ Plácido Domingo

We hope you take advantage of this special introductory offer and become part of the opera family.

Of course, a reasonable person receiving such a message would reasonably ask three reasonable questions about the WNO:

1. How dare the WNO solicit in my name, without first seeking my permission?
2. Why would the WNO send me an invitation from myself?
3. Has the WNO replaced their entire development staff with a roomfull of monkeys typing randomly at computer keyboards?

Today I telephoned the WNO. [Frankly, I do not recommend that you, NeuroCooking friends, ever telephone the WNO, because being put on hold by the WNO requires listening to opera on the telephone. And listening to opera on the telephone is, quite unlike the real thing, really awful. Sort of like phone-sex vs. real sex, except that phone-opera is even more annoying than phone-sex. I do recommend that you attend the Washington National Opera, and subscribe to the Washington National Opera, and support the Washington National Opera – but don't phone them; use their website.]

After a few minutes of phone-opera punishment, a kind and thoughtful person answered the phone, and explained to me that the email offer in my name had not been sent to anyone else, and was not actually intended for me. Rather, it had been sent to me, by the WNO, so that I might forward it to my friends. Furthermore, a card had been mailed to me, explaining this! The card could be found, I was told, inside the recently-mailed big envelope with our 2009-2010 season tickets.

Got that? They sent an email offer to me, only so that I would forward it to others – and they explained this, not in the email itself, but in a small card included in a big fat envelope destined for my mailbox.

Perhaps question three above is still reasonable.

Care for a 20-oz. pour with your 358-year-old opera?

One more very special thing about opera @ the Barns: The bar pours twenty-ounce drafts of good beer, and you can bring your drink to your seat. Seats on the floor (but not in the balcony, a.k.a. "hayloft") even have cupholders. Honest!

[title refers to this summer's superb WTOC production of Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses]

opera in a barn

Sometimes it's dangerous to rely upon a small N. But other times, it can really pay off.

The Barns at Wolf Trap, in Vienna Virginia, is a special performance space – two eighteenth-century New England barns, relocated and repurposed, joined such that one barn houses the theater and the other barn houses the bar – that seats fewer than four hundred people. The Wolf Trap Opera Company (WTOC) is a summer opera company dedicated to the development of promising young singers. Each summer WTOC stages two or three operas in the Barns - mainly baroque operas, which were written for smaller ensembles; the "pit" at the barns is small - with three or four performances of each.

It's a treat to see opera in a hall this small, because opera is usually produced in much much larger halls. At the Barns, events onstage become more intimate and less remote. And, for each WTOC production, if you ask how many people saw that? You multiply the audience size for each performance, times the number of performances, and get a total N of a bit more than one thousand. This is maybe twenty times smaller than for a major opera company, which fills an almost ten-time-times-bigger hall for maybe three-times-as-many performances.

Having recently warned of the dangers of relying on small N in other settings, today I'd like to celebrate the small-N WTOC productions. Simply because they are consisently as good as, if not better than, anything else in the world. [I have seen in total maybe two hundred opera productions, so I am no expert. But opera is something about which I do know more than nothing, and my job at NeuroCooking is to share my opinions.] Now, just how does this happen? How is it that the thousand or so folks who sit in a wooden barn over three evenings (or two evenings and a Sunday matinee) enjoy the sublime transcendence of a totally successful integrated artistic experience - combining words and music; singing, instrumental performance, oration, acting, choreography; sets, costumes, makeup, hair, props, lighting - more so (in your reporter's opinion) than the twenty thousand folks who (pay much more to) turn out over eight nights at most fancy state-of-the-art opera houses? I think the answer lies in the training mission of the WTOC – and in their excellence.

To save money, when I was in graduate school, I had my teeth tended by the student dentists at the dental school clinic, and I had my dog tended by the student veterinarians at the veterinary school clinic. These student clinics were not quick, but they were remarkably cheap, and the care was superb. Now, the primary mission of the vet clinic, say, was, in a real sense, not to take care of my dog, but to train the next generation of vets. And to do that, they gave my dog the best care in the world. Well, I think that the primary mission of the WTOC is not to please their audience, but to help grow the next generation of singers. And to do that, they consistently give their audiences the best opera in the world.

The WTOC is remarkably selective. Reminds me of some remarkably selective doctoral programs. If you ask, why do the best students in the world go there? They go because it is the best program. And what makes it the best program? Why, in large part, because they get the best students.

NeuroCooking friends, I hope to see you next summer at the Barns.