On Nov. 5 in Cape Town, South Africa, the 30 th -anniversary edition of Operalia awarded prizes in a number of categories. The competition was founded three decades ago by Plácido Domingo to encourage the development of promising singers … » Read

The existence of slavery in the U.S. for almost 250 years remains a fraught presence in our national psyche, so the October 2019 news that the 2020 Spoleto Festival USA would present Omar , a new opera based on the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said … » Read

Opera, the most-costly of the performing arts, is facing an existential crisis that is “either a problem or an opportunity,” suggests David Devan, general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, in an interview with PBS’s … » Read

The Manhattan School of Music has partnered with Con Edison to produce a dramatic drop in its energy consumption. "We're going down over 700,000 kilowatt hours per year throughout this building, which equates to about $140,000 annually," … » Read

Stephen Sondheim developed a healthy attitude toward failure near the end of his life: “In ten years they’ll revive it in London and it will be hailed as a masterpiece.” So he told Nathan Lane when their rewrite of The Frogs was … » Read

LONDON--This “opera project” by Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic has crisscrossed Europe since its first appearance in Munich three years ago. The incarnation that reached London on November 3, courtesy of English National … » Read

The English National Ballet has selected Maria Seletskaja as its new music director. She succeeds Gavin Sutherland, who held the position for 15 years and will continue as the company’s principal guest conductor. The 39-year-old Seletskaja, … » Read

Carnegie Hall has announced that its performing arts streaming service Carnegie Hall+ , currently available on the Apple TV app, Spectrum, Verizon Fios, DISH, Sling TV, and Astound, is now also available in the U.S. on Amazon’s Prime Video … » Read

With the start of the new academic year, Patrick Warfield has begun his tenure as director of the School of Music (SoM) in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at the University of Minnesota. With an undergraduate degree in music education from … » Read

“As a musician, you know, you’d like to find the kind of music that is so powerful it can stop a bomb from falling, or stop bullets from killing people,” a youthful David Harrington says in an old TV interview excerpted by … » Read