Opera Wire: A Passionate Duo at Prague Summer Nights

Opera Wire
By Francisco Salazar

Sherrill Milnes & Maria Zouves

What do you do after you’ve taught, formed a young artist program and had a legendary career as a singer and conductor?

The answer? Direct opera.

That is exactly what famed baritone Sherrill Milnes has embarked on alongside his wife, Maria Zouves. In collaboration with the Prague Summer Nights, presented by Classical Movements, the duo has already directed two Mozart masterpieces with the festival and have garnered rave reviews.

Passing On Tradition

When the Prague Summer Nights Festival was started Artistic Director John Nardolillo contacted Milnes and Zouves with the idea of bringing them to the program and having them work as directors. It was the opportunity to not only bring their knowledge to young artists but it was also a new opportunity for Milnes.

“I’m post-career and the idea of passing on to younger singers ideas is important,” Milnes noted in a recent interview with OperaWire.

Part of those ideas is passing down musical history. “I go back to the Bernstein, Solti, Giuliani and Karajan and all these giants. And I sang under Fritz Reiner, who was a great maestro in the old style. He was scary. I often categorize the old conductors as ‘Fear conductors’ and now from James Levine to now, I call the ‘Love conductors,'” Milnes joked.

The baritone recalled working with Reiner noting that he was part of the generation where conductors were more like enemies and often times scary to work with. However, that trend changed while he was singing. “When you look at Jim Levine or Jim Conlon, you feel like, ‘Let’s do this together.’ Psychologically you feel like you can give more. I don’t know if you actually do, But you feel like you give more when you see a face that is bright and wanting you to succeed,” he noted.

For Milnes, it is crucial that younger generations understand this newer conducting philosophy and its impact on music,  as well as the tradition and style of the old masters.

But it also goes beyond passing down history. While Milnes sang he learned a lot about languages and realized that the English language could be an obstacle when singing in Italian or French. And that is something Milnes is constantly looking to improve.

“In America, we tend to be mathematically correct, tah-tah eighth notes, 3/4 bar or whatever it is. But every language has its own contours. For example in Italian, you don’t say ‘Am-mo-re’ accenting the ‘Re’ but you say ‘amore’ smoothly. It’s mathematically precise but with a flow.

“You have to be correct, but beyond correct, there is a whole musical level. There has to be intention and meaning. Correct doesn’t make good music,” Milnes noted.

The Dynamic Directing Duo

The second opportunity that the program allowed was for Milnes and his wife Maria Zouves to collaborate as directors. Milnes would make his directorial debut, expanding his artistic horizons and also furthering his artistic relationship with Zouves.

“Maria is the stage director,” Milnes revealed. “She has the ideas. If I have a bunch of people on stage, I don’t know what to with them. She is very imaginative. She really does the staging. However, if you show me a staging, I can make it better.”

And Zouves agrees that Milnes always goes back to his experience and it is really helpful.  “He is the eyeballs. I look at him and he goes, ‘This isn’t working.’ And then he says, ‘When I did it with Jean-Pierre Ponnelle or Tito Capobianco, we did it that way.’ So the partnership works.”

Milnes has another forte while they are directing together. “I know how to cheat on stage. Audiences can judge left and right but they can not judge depth at all. Well, you never walk straight stage across for many reasons and that is important.”

As for how they approach the directing, Zouves is extremely diligent with going back to the original text as is Milnes who is always looking for meaning and intention. So before going into blocking or stage direction, they both sit down with their cast members and do what Zouves calls a “Script reading.”

But there is a twist. Zouves describes it as a Babel reading because everyone reads it in their first language. So in one reading, there could be Korean, Spanish and German.

“It’s always about reacting. In opera, we’re in a different language and we generally only speak English and you have to sing most of the time for a language which is not their language. That is tough and we’re supposed to be as good as the native speaker,” Zouves noted.

The result is that singers react more naturally in their own language, allowing them to discover the character and, as Milnes notes, “the intention becomes real.”

Zouves recalls one of the first readings she did with this technique and notes that it really created the drama. “We had a ‘Don Giovanni’ in Korean and the Leporello repeated it back in what he heard of the Korean. And he just repeated it that way as an impulse. We saw the humor in the scene and those are the responses you get when you use that gut level translation.”

She finds that this technique eventually leads to great listening when the young singers are finally on stage getting ready to perform.

The Advantages of Prague

Beyond their artistic rewards and the teaching experience they both bring to young singers, Milnes and Zouves feel a great reward seeing them grow.

The duo noted that some of the singers enter the program without having ever performed an opera and seeing them develop into their characters and learning the process is incredibly important.

“One of the Figaros this year had never been in an opera scene before. He had no operatic experience whatsoever. He came here and he had no idea what to do. Everything was new. But he got through the title character and he did a wonderful job and he feels really good now and excited. It is a huge deal. There are other singers who are a little more seasoned so it’s a little more mileage. For others, it’s a huge arch,” Zuoves revealed.

And the other important aspect is learning from each other and their environment.

“They are also able to experience a foreign language,” Milnes noted. “They are also working with international students and they are learning from each other. We have Korea, Poland, America, France, Canada, Germany, China and much more represented here. It’s the United Nations and that is very good for all.”

Milnes and Zouves also feel that working in Prague opens the possibilities for general growth.

“These types of programs where they go to another country, they also absorb what our art form has intrinsically in it, which is the international scope and they are learning how to manage their way through this. For some of them, it is the first time out of the U.S and out of their home. So they are learning how to experience foreign currency and culture and sometimes it’s not as comfortable. But they are also learning about audiences. Here in Prague, they love music. It’s part of the culture.  To have that type of audience, that’s important for a singer. When the work is done they want to have someone to perform for,” noted Zouves.

And the other aspect that makes Prague so enriching is the history. This year, for example, when the Estates Theater was closed, the festival found a venue where Mozart and Hayden gave recitals. That made the experience even more exciting for them.

“We all throw around Mozart but he was here. In fact, I was the first American to sing ‘Don Giovanni’ in the theater where it was premiered. And there is a plaque. They have redone it several times but Mozart walked there and that is awesome.”

A Changing Landscape

With the Prague Summer Festival having ended Zouves and Milnes will go back to their development program in Savannah and continue to enrich and develop new singers. And most of the young singers at Prague will not be going back with them. Some will go back to auditions while others will be back to college having learned and garnered an international performance on their resume. But some of them will face new obstacles.

In the operatic landscape, singers today are crashing and burning quickly with many promising voices faltering after a few years. And that is something that Milnes and Zouves have tried to avoid as they develop singers.

“Part of the problem is today’s culture. Today everything is instant and it’s all an app. You can’t download an app in opera. It’s a slow process and today’s instant life gets in the way of that slow process,” said Zouves.

Milnes goes back to his 42-year career and has two words of advice for young singers, “Common Sense.”

“You have to have enough rest. Sleep and the voice are very friendly. When I didn’t have to get up at 7 a.m. to do a 10 a.m. audition I was better. That means the day of a performance you better be careful. There wasn’t really a conscientious effort but it was all about being smart. One of the worst things in performing is going to a noisy nightclub after singing because you have already used your voice and then the music is so loud you have to yell. Then you really beat up the throat,” Milnes joked.

But Zouves also thinks it was due to her husband’s discipline and learning to say no when he felt uncomfortable.

“He was very disciplined. He was very good at performing and it had to do with his musicianship. There are singers who were great artistically which he was but there are also good musicians. Singers that are just singers who make beautiful sounds. When those beautiful sounds no longer work there is nothing else to do. Sherrill is a wonderful conductor and teacher and great masterclass giver. He could, as a result, take projects not just with opera. He did a lot of concerts, recitals and oratorio work. His roles diminished in terms of what he could take on. But those roles like Scarpia, Germont and all of these guys stayed constant. He was doing Scarpia up to the end and Falstaff was a defacto. Sherrill was also smart and he said no to things.”

One such thing that he did not sing,despite the insistence of  Karl Böhm, was “The Flying Dutchman.”

“It wasn’t the right fach and the center of my baritone was a little higher than what Wagner requires,” Milnes recalled.

But with the operatic world changing so quickly, both Zouves and Milnes do have faith in the future. With their Voice Experience program, both are giving singers an opportunity to perform and learn their craft as well as engage with audiences.

And the other thing that Zouves is excited about are the new initiatives and the new opera companies coming up.

“I see a lot of singers starting their own companies to start their opportunities and I think that is great. Organizations like Opera America give them more resources and that is a different idea. You have to create and that has changed.”

“It’s about the longevity of the art form. Opera is not dead because it is ingrained in our history and culture.”

Daily Mail: Serenade! Choral Festival finds the universal in choirs

Neeta Helms, president and founder of Classical Movements, poses with the Madras Youth Choir from Chennai, India, ahead of the Serenade! choral festival in Washington

Daily Mail (via Agence France Presse)

The human voice is the most basic of all musical instruments. But when singers come together as choirs, quality standards vary widely around the world.

A festival in Washington is bringing together top-tier choirs from a dozen countries in a bid to show music's universality -- how the joy of singing together transcends cultures.

But the festival is also part of an effort to boost training for choral music, which can be rudimentary in many countries.

The Serenade! Washington DC Choral Festival is the brainchild of Neeta Helms, president of Classical Movements, a company that runs international tours for major music ensembles.

Helms, who launched the festival in 2011, said she had been struck by an explosion of global interest in choral music -- largely outside the Western canon.

"I'm not on a mission to change the world through choral singing -- although I think that sometimes we end up doing that. I've seen a need and I've seen I can help," she said.

"Everybody has a voice -- well, almost everybody -- and almost every culture has this huge tradition of songs and sounds and rhythms and folk tunes," she said.

The latest Serenade festival, which runs eight days through July 4, is part of celebrations for the centennial of the birth of slain US president John F. Kennedy.

With free concerts at the Kennedy Center and other sites across the Washington area, the festival features choirs from countries with strong connections to Kennedy or the Peace Corps, the international volunteer program his administration created.

Performers include Mongolian folk group Egschiglen; the Madras Youth Choir, formed by celebrated South Indian film composer M.B. Sreenivasan, and Spain's L'Escolania de Montserrat, considered the world's oldest boys choir -- which has ties to cellist Pablo Casals, who was famously invited to the Kennedy White House.

Choirs also come from Kenya, Zimbabwe, China, Northern Ireland, Panama, Bulgaria and Latvia -- which Kennedy visited while a Harvard student.

- Refining oral traditions -

Helms, who was born in India, said she saw a particular demand in the billion-plus country where many people without means can instantly sing along to Bollywood hits yet have nowhere to train.

Classical Movements has started a fellowship to send established choir directors to India as instructors. As part of the festival, the company also has commissioned original works from around the world.

Members of choirs especially need to master harmony -- coming together as a whole by singing different, and often fewer, lines.

"I always say that Pavarotti would have been terrible in a choir. His voice would have stuck out," she said.

Choirs at the Serenade festival vary sharply in their traditions. The Mongolians sing from their throats while the Africans often have rich vibratos and, compared with Europeans, dance and move much more when they sing.

With choral music often passed down by oral tradition, it can carry more freedom than, say, Western orchestral music, which emphasizes precision.

But Helms said it was also critical to transcribe choral music.

"That's how things spread. That's how literature has spread -- the printing press was created," she said.

"Someone has to take all those folk tunes that are in people's heads, or some records of them, and put them down on paper so that people can figure them out."

But whatever the course of education, Helms said she was impressed by seeing choirs bond -- uniting in music without regard to race, gender, religion or other barriers.

"We are firm believers that in this small way we are changing the world bit by bit," she said with a laugh, "no matter who is in power in that country or our country."

WQXR: The Cliburn Winners' First Public Appearance

WQXR

Less than a week after the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, the gold, silver and bronze medalistscome to The Greene Space at WQXR for their first public appearance as winners. WQXR’s Elliott Forrest hosts this special sold-out evening of music and conversation.

The Winners:

Yekwon Sunwoo (Gold)
Kenneth Broberg (silver)
Daniel Hsu (Bronze)

Every four years, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition convenes the most promising rising star pianists from around the world for 17 days of intense competition. Established in 1962, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is widely recognized as “one of the world’s highest-visibility classical music contests.” Winners are chosen by an esteemed panel of judges and awarded significant cash prizes, as well as three years of comprehensive career management and concert tours. Previous laureates include Radu Lupu, Olga Kern, Joyce Yang, Haochen Zhang and Vadym Kholodenko.

Cliburn Gold 2017 will be available on Decca Gold digitally on June 23; physically on August 18. Cliburn Silver 2017 and Cliburn Bronze 2017 albums are digital-only, also out on August 18.

NYC Arts: Pianist Haochen Zhang Profile

NYC Arts

Originally from Shanghai, 27-year-old Haochen Zhang has already established an international career. He first rose to prominence in 2009 as the youngest ever gold medal winner at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. A graduate of the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia, Zhang is widely respected for his virtuosity and musicality.

Watch the profile video here.

The New York Times: Livestream with Pianist Yekwon Sunwoo

The New York Times Facebook livestream
With reporter, Josh Barone

We're with the pianist Yekwon Sunwoo, who recently bested 29 rivals to win the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

KING 5: Catching up with Maestro Gerard Schwarz

KING 5

For 26 years, Maestro Gerard Schwarz served as the musical director of the Seattle Symphony. During that time, the Symphony made more than a hundred recordings, earning twelve Grammy nominations, and winning two Emmy Awards. The Symphony also made the move to its current home, the beautiful Benaroya Hall. When he stepped down, they named the block around Benaroya Hall after him, Gerard Schwarz Place.

His illustrious musical career spans five decades as he writes in his new memoir, Behind the Baton. Maestro Gerard Schwarz stopped by to share more about his memoir, as well as his work as the Musical Director of National Public Television's Emmy-winning All Star Orchestra.

CLICK HERE to learn more about Maestro Gerard Schwarz

Connect with the Maestro on Facebook.

New York Times: South Korean Pianist Wins the Van Cliburn Competition

The New York Times
By Zachary Woolfe

The Cliburn winner, Yekwon Sunwoo, center, with the bronze medalist Daniel Hsu, left, of San Francisco, and the silver medalist Kenneth Broberg, right, of Minneapolis. Credit Ralph Lauer

Yekwon Sunwoo won the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition on Saturday, besting 29 rivals over two weeks of playing to become the prestigious contest’s first champion from South Korea. The Cliburn, held every four years in Fort Worth, was founded in 1962 by Van Cliburn, the American pianist who stunned the world by winning the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow in 1958, at the height of the Cold War.

Mr. Sunwoo, 28, played Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in the final round, when each of the six remaining contestants performed first with a string quartet and then with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. The critic Scott Cantrell wrote in The Dallas Morning News that Mr. Sunwoo “tended to rush faster music, a common problem among other competitors — but he demonstrated a real, if not reliably mature, musical personality.”

Two Americans — Kenneth Broberg, 23, from Minneapolis, and Daniel Hsu, 19, of San Francisco — finished in second and third place.

Strings: A Musical Journey to India

Strings Magazine
By Robert Mealy

We come onto the stage of a beautiful 19th-century concert hall with an elegant half-circle of seats facing a proscenium stage. It is packed with people—some even standing in the aisles. Juilliard415 is in Chennai, India, to perform a program of Rameau, Telemann, and Bach. But what does this audience expect? I wonder if they have heard much live Western classical music before. How to explain a concerto, a dance suite—the idea of early music as a whole?

Our ensemble, the Juilliard School’s historical-performance group, quickly found out, and won over the crowd, which responded with booming applause between movements and attentive listening while we played. Some of the younger members of the audience told us afterward that they had never heard Western classical music played live before—what a responsibility and an honor!

And so ended our tenth day on the road, with this concert in Chennai at the Government Museum. Our tour was organized by Classical Movements, a concert-tour company that promotes cultural diplomacy across 145 countries. Neeta Helms, president of Classical Movements, is a native of Mumbai and was delighted to show off her home country to us. Our first concert was in Delhi, in a spectacular hall that was part of the Bahá’í House of Worship, a building from the 1980s set in a gorgeous park. After a side-trip to Agra for a life-changing visit to the Taj Mahal (where we discovered that it is impossibly beautiful, even more so than one imagined), we went on to Mumbai to play at the National Centre for the Performing Arts, where they were just about to produce Gandhi: The Musical!

Juilliard415’s tour to India came out of an ongoing collaboration with Yale’s Schola Cantorum, the chamber choir of the Yale Institute for Sacred Music. Juilliard415 has done several projects with them over the years. It’s a natural fit that allows both groups to explore some of the major choral works of the Baroque, since a choir often needs an orchestra, and vice versa. The director of the Schola Cantorum, British conductor and organist David Hill, is a musician who is equally committed to early music as he is to new music. Thanks to his openness to both worlds, the result was a program unlike anything any of us had ever done before.

Sitar virtuoso Rabindra Goswami was a recent visiting scholar at the institute. Thanks partially to his presence at Yale, the idea took root to tour India with chorus and orchestra. Our concert program also featured Bach’s Magnificat, as well as a Rameau suite. But as the centerpiece of our collaboration was a new piece that Yale commissioned for the occasion from Reena Esmail, an Indian-American composer who is a graduate of both Juilliard and Yale. Reena produced an extraordinary, seven-movement meditation using texts from seven different sacred traditions, each in its own language: This Love Between Us: Prayers for Unity.

The result, a 40-minute work for choir, Baroque orchestra, sitar, and tabla, turned out to be especially resonant in light of our recent political upheavals. Being able to perform as Americans and Indians together with a message of breaking down boundaries, reaching across barriers, and connecting through music made each concert a moving occasion for everyone involved—both audience and musicians. The singers had to master the challenges of diction in languages like Malayalam, Ardha Magadhi, and Sanskrit, and had to discover how to make Reena’s written-down vocal improvisations into their own.

The piece was introduced with a raga by Goswami and his amazing tabla partner Ramchandra Pandit to set the stage for the collaboration between all these traditions. Interestingly, the question of playing at A=415 or A=440 didn’t matter for the Indian musicians—they worked from whatever pitch was given as a basis. What turned out to be more complicated was the integration of these two brilliant soloists into the highly ritualized traditions of orchestral playing. In the end, Reena sat next to the tabla and sitar, to give a kind of simultaneous translation of abstract conducting patterns into a pulse that could be felt and sensed.

It’s a challenge for contemporary composers to write music for Baroque instruments that brings out their special characteristics of color and rhythmic vitality. Reena had some great ideas that brought the worlds of Indian instruments and 18th-century strings together. Sometimes she introduced propulsive, polymetric vamps to accompany the tabla and sitar. In other sections, the Baroque strings provided a transparent wash of ethereal sustained chords as a background for the singers, or for solo moments by the winds.

We had the opportunity to sightsee in Mumbai and Chennai, where the choir and orchestra each did a separate performance, and one last joint concert. By the time we got to the deep south of Tamil Nadu and Chennai, temperatures were soaring around 104. And to our surprise, everyone congratulated us on missing the really hot weather.

The experience of India itself was overwhelming, saturating, totally fascinating, always compelling, sometimes exhausting. I think none of us were prepared for quite how intense the whole experience was—there was so much going on all the time, so much life, such endless varieties of existence. The most spectacular buildings, the most moving shrines, would be right in the midst of some of the poorest neighborhoods any of us had ever experienced. We had enough time to see wonders both great and small—temples, palaces, the Taj Mahal—and to witness the endlessly absorbing life of the street. Some of the most life-changing experiences for all of us came on the small guided tours that we received from inhabitants of Dharavi, one of the most extensive (and amazingly self-reliant) slums in Mumbai.

A particularly memorable day on the tour was thanks to an organization called Songbound, an initiative that brings collective music-making to some of India’s poorest and most marginalized children. Working with local partners, Songbound sets up and sustains children’s choirs that rehearse each week. They now have 15 choirs in Mumbai, and many of those children came to join us for a day of music-making together at the National Arts Centre. We sang, played, and danced together, and afterward had a great feast outside, where our students continued to, well, sing, play, and dance with the kids.

Each night in concert, it was overwhelming to encounter a great and venerable classical tradition in full flower that none of us really had known much about. Hearing Goswami and Ram playing ragas showed us a glimpse of a kind of improvisatory mastery that we could only dream of approaching. And the tour of one of Delhi’s great music academies, the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya Music School, where each room had a different kind of musical art being practiced, was spectacular, showing us the interrelationships between vocal artistry, instrumental virtuosity, and the exquisite control and power of dance.

These artists and concerts made me start to think how fragmented our Western tradition is, since fashions in music for us change so quickly and so radically. The idea of reclaiming a musical tradition that is 300 years old—the concept at the heart of historical performance—is a little hard to imagine in India, where it seems the great ancient traditions simply evolve to incorporate new technology as it proves useful. For example, the traditional music we heard was always amplified. And now instead of a tanpura player providing the glistening fabric of a drone for the sitar and tabla, players turn on a “tanpur-app,” via their iPhones to set the mood for their raga.

But there are also some strong Western musical traditions there. One particularly moving part of our tour was that each of our concerts was preceded by a brief recital from a local choir—they all sang from memory with a tremendous commitment to the music. They would join with us in the chorus “And the Glory of the Lord” from Handel’s Messiah, as a kind of grand finale.

Our tour was in connection with a much larger project, the India Choral Fellowship, a longterm vision of nurturing the choral tradition in India. As Helms says, “For those students bereft of basics like food, clothing, and shelter, a musical instrument is impossible to purchase and maintain. But the human voice, however, comes free of charge.” Judging by what we heard from the choirs that joined us in each city, as well as the tremendous energy and enthusiasm of the Songbound children, the choral tradition is thriving in India.

Those ten days in March now seem like a dream. For all of us who were on the tour, I think coming back to America was disconcerting. Yes, everything’s safer, cleaner, more organized, but it’s also all so very plastic, sanitized, bland. I would go back to India in a heartbeat, except it takes about 15 hours to get there.

Violinist, educator, recording artist, and early-music specialist Robert Mealy is the director of Juilliard’s historical-performance program.

Source: http://stringsmagazine.com/a-musical-journey-to-india-juilliard415s-life-changing-ten-day-tour/?utm_source=Strings&utm_campaign=281ae7ffb3-STN_Notes_09_09_169_6_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_7811abf900-281ae7ffb3-217737533&mc_cid=281ae7ffb3&mc_eid=fe8958f9c3

Opera Wire: Prague Summer Nights Festival's Le Nozze di Figaro is a Top 10 Must-See 2017 Opera

Opera Wire
By Francisco Salazar

10 Must-See Operas During Summer 2017 [International Edition]

Last week Operawire took a look at some of the 10 must see summer operas in the United States. It featured a range of repertoire and some very intriguing new stars. This week we look at the European Festivals and see where the big stars will be and what they will be performing.

The following is a list of OperaWire’s 10 Must-See productions around the world over the summer.

10. Rigoletto

The Arena di Verona will present Verdi’s “Rigoletto” with numerous all-star casts that include Gianluca Terranova, Francesco Demuro, Arturo Chacón-Cruz, Amartuvshin Enkhbat, Carlos Álvarez, Leo Nucci, Elena Mosuc, Jessica Pratt, Irina Lungu, Jessica Nuccio and Andrea Mastroni. “Rigoletto” will be performed five times and will be directed by Ivo Guerra.

9. Le Nozze di Figaro

Legendary baritone Sherrill Milnes and Maria Zouves direct a new production of Mozart’s ‘”Le Nozze Di Figaro” at the Prague Summer Nights Festival which is set to star a number of young artists. Five performances will be given starting on July 3 and running through July 9.

8. Pinocchio

Stéphane Degout, Vincent Le Texier, Chloé Briot, Yann Beuron, Julie Boulianne and Marie-Eve Munger star in the world premiere of Philippe Boesmans’s new opera “Pinocchio” at Aix en Provence Festival. The opera promises to be something spectacular in a new production by Joël Pommerat and is later scheduled to be at the Monnaie and Opera National de Bordeaux. The opera opens on July 3, 2017, and has five performances in total.

7. Die Entfuhrung Aus Dem Serail

Teatro all Scala will celebrate the 20th anniversary of Giorgio Strehler’s death and the 10th anniversary of Luciano Damiani’s death with a revival of Mozart’s classic opera. The intriguing young cast stars Lenneke Ruiten, Sabine Devieilhe, Mauro Peter, Maximilian Schmitt, Tobias Kehrer and Cornelius Obonya. Zubin Mehta conducts the run which begins on June 17. It will also be broadcast on June 19, 2017.

6. Tannhäuser

The Bavarian State Opera will open a new production of Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” with Klaus Florian Vogt in the title role. He will make his role debut alongside Anja Harteros and Annette Dasch. Mathias Goerne and  Christian Gerhaher also star in a production by Romeo Castellucci. Music Director Kirill Petrenko conducts the momentous Wagner work which opens on May 21, 2017.

5. Adriana Lecouvreur

Anna Netrebko may be singing the role at the Vienna State Opera later in the fall but Russian audiences will get a first look as the soprano will sing her first “Adriana” at the Mariinsky theater in a new production being created for her. Isabelle Partiot-Pieri directs with Netrebko scheduled to perform on open June 19 and 22, 2017.

4. The Siege of Corinth

Beverly Sills’ famously made this work known when she made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1975. Now Nino Machaidze takes on the iconic role of Pamyra as she opens the Rossini Opera Festival on August 10, 2017, alongside Alex Esposito, John Irvin, and  Sergey Romanovsky. Roberto Abbado conducts the new production by La Fura dels Baus.

3. La Clemenza di Tito

Continuing the annual Mozart cycle, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Rolando Villazón team up for Mozart’s Opera-seria with a star-studded cast at the Baden-Baden Festival. Sonya Yoncheva and Joyce Didonato also star alongside Regula Muhlemann, Tarra Erraught, and Adam Plachetka. The performances will take place on July 6 and 9, 2017, and are scheduled to be recorded for Deutsche Grammophon.

2. Aida

Anna Netrebko makes her role debut in Verdi’s masterpiece in the Salzburg Festival most anticipated production. The occasion will reteam the diva with Riccardo Muti and her frequent onstage partners Francesco Meli and Ekaterina Semenchuk. It will also see the extraordinary Luca Salsi and Roberto Tagliavani in what should one of the most memorable nights of the festival. Filmmaker Shirin Neshat directs a new production which opens August 6. The run is alsready sold out. 

1. Otello

Jonas Kaufmann makes his role debut in Verdi’s “Otello” in a new production by Keith Warner at the Royal Opera House. Antonio Pappano conducts the production which will also star Maria Agresta and Ludovic Tezier. Opening June 21, 2017, all of Kaufmann’s performances are sold out. Gregory Kunde takes over the run for three performances.

Washington Post: Serenade! Choral Festival on the Hotlist for June

Washington Post
By Going Out Guide Staff

The Hotlist: 13 things to see, eat, drink and do in June

Serenade! Washington D.C. Choral Festival at Kennedy Center, June 28-July 3

The international choral festival moves to the Kennedy Center, which continues its celebration of the 100th birthday of President John F. Kennedy by showcasing choirs from countries where his Peace Corps initiative has been active. The list is long: Depending on the day, you can see traditional groups from countries including India, Ireland, Panama, Zimbabwe, Bulgaria, Latvia, Mongolia or Ghana. Catch the grand finale July 3, at the Concert Hall, to see all of the choirs in action together. Free.

— Fritz Hahn, Maura Judkis, Peter Marks, Harrison Smith, John Taylor