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Dawn Kotoski
Dawn Kotoski (born 1966) is an American operatic soprano who has a substantial international opera career. She began her career at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City during the late 1980s singing lighter lyric soprano and soubrette roles. She joined the Vienna State Opera for the 1993–1994 season and since then her career has been centered mostly in Europe. She is the wife of tenor Neil Shicoff. Biography Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Kotoski studied at the Manhattan School of Music and then entered the Young Artist Program at the Metropolitan Opera. She made her professional opera debut at the Met as Poussette in Jules Massenet's ''Manon'' on 22 September 1987 with Catherine Malfitano in the title role. She sang several more roles at the Met over the next couple years including Giannetta in Gaetano Donizetti's ''L'elisir d'amore'' with Dawn Upshaw, Ruth Ann Swenson, and Kathleen Battle alternating as Adina (1988–1989), the Dew Fairy in Humperdinck's '' Hänsel und Gret ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as '' Singspiel'' and '' Opéra comique''. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Engelbert Humperdinck (composer)
Engelbert Humperdinck (; 1 September 1854 – 27 September 1921) was a German composer. He is known widely for his opera ''Hansel and Gretel (opera), Hansel and Gretel'' (1893). Biography Humperdinck was born at Siegburg in the Rhine Province in 1854. After receiving piano lessons, he produced his first composition at the age of seven. His first attempts at works for the stage were two singspiele written when he was 13. His parents disapproved of his plans for a career in music and encouraged him to study architecture. But he began taking music classes under Ferdinand Hiller and Isidor Seiss at the Cologne Conservatory in 1872. In 1876, he won a scholarship that enabled him to go to Munich, where he studied with Franz Lachner and later with Josef Rheinberger. In 1879, he won the first Mendelssohn Scholarship, Mendelssohn Award given by the Mendelssohn Scholarship, Mendelssohn Stiftung (foundation) in Berlin. He went to Italy, where he became acquainted with composer Richard Wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
92nd Street Y
92nd Street Y, New York (92NY) is a cultural and community center located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, at the corner of East 92nd Street and Lexington Avenue. Founded in 1874 as the Young Men's Hebrew Association, the 92nd Street Y (often simply called "the Y") transformed from a secular social club to a large arts and cultural center in the 20th century. History In 1874, a group of German-Jewish professionals established the New York Jewish Community Center, Young Men's Hebrew Association (YMHA). The founders were predominantly members of the Temple Shaaray Tefila, or synagogue, and New York's YMHA and other across the country grew out of existing Jewish congregations. The YMHA itself was a secular organization intended to serve as a social and literary fraternity. Officially incorporated on September 10, 1874, the YMHA would initially operate out of rented premises on 112 West 21st Street. A few years later, the organization would move to larger acco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Young Concert Artists International Auditions
Young Concert Artists is a New York City-based non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting the careers of talented young classical musicians from all over the world. The competition, founded in 1961, allows artists from all over the world to compete as individuals or in a chamber group, such as a string quartet. The number of winners varies from year to year, as there is no specified limit to the number of participants who can win. Winners of the competition receive a cash prize and are provided the opportunity to perform in concert at Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. Winners are also provided with an artistic manager who promotes the artist through booking concert engagements both in the United States and abroad, and providing publicity materials, promotion, and career development. Many artists in the program's history have also made their debut recordings through the help of the Young Concert Artists program. Notable ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera Orchestra Of New York
The Opera Orchestra of New York (also known as OONY) specializes in the performance of opera in concert form. It is particularly known for its work in presenting rarely performed repertory. Among the numerous American premieres it has presented are Puccini's ''Edgar'', Boito's '' Nerone'', and Smetana's ''Libuše''. History Founded in 1971 by Eve Queler, who remains its conductor and music director, the orchestra presented its first season in 1972 with two operas – Rossini's ''William Tell'' and Meyerbeer's ''L'africaine'' – performed at New York's Carnegie Hall. Since then it has gone on to present more than ninety different operas there, with the season now consisting of three to four operas, which are also broadcast on National Public Radio. In the past, tickets came with a complete libretto of the opera being performed. However, the 2007/2008 season introduced surtitles for the first time. Financial difficulties in early 2007 threatened to close the company or severely cur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Wally
''La Wally'' is an opera in four acts by composer Alfredo Catalani, to a libretto by Luigi Illica, first performed at La Scala, Milan, on 20 January 1892. The libretto is based on a hugely successful ' by Wilhelmine von Hillern (1836–1916), ' (''The Vulture Wally: A Story from the Tyrolean Alps''). Wally, short for Walburga, is a girl with some heroic attributes. The story is based on an episode in the life of Tyrolean painter Anna Stainer-Knittel, whom von Hillern met. She gets her epithet "Geier" (vulture) from once stealing a vulture's hatchling from her nest. Von Hillern's piece was originally serialized in ''Deutsche Rundschau'' and was reproduced in English as "A German Peasant Romance" [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfredo Catalani
Alfredo Catalani (19 June 1854 – 7 August 1893) was an Italian operatic composer. He is best remembered for his operas ''Loreley'' (1890) and ''La Wally'' (1892). ''La Wally'' was composed to a libretto by Luigi Illica, and features Catalani's most famous aria "Ebben? Ne andrò lontana." This aria, sung by American soprano Wilhelmenia Fernandez, was at the heart of Jean-Jacques Beineix's 1981 film ''Diva''. Catalani's other operas were much less successful. Life and career Born in Lucca, Catalani came from a musical family. He was trained at the Milan Conservatory, where his teachers included Antonio Bazzini. Despite the growing influence of the ''verismo'' style of opera during the 1880s and early 1890s, Catalani chose to compose in a more traditional manner, which had traces of Wagner in it. As a result, his operas (''La Wally'' excepted) have largely lost their place in the modern repertoire, even compared to those of Massenet and Puccini, whose style his own periodically re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera Theatre Of Saint Louis
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) is an American summer opera festival held in St. Louis, Missouri. Typically four operas, all sung in English, are presented each season, which runs from late May to late June. Performances are accompanied by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which is divided into two ensembles, each covering two of the operas, for the season. The company's performances are presented in the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts on the campus of Webster University. First seasons and achievements In 1976, Leigh Gerdine, Laurance L. Browning, Jr. and James Van Sant co-founded OTSL. They hired Richard Gaddes, who at the time was working at The Santa Fe Opera, as the company's first Artistic Director. They signed him as full-time General Director in 1978 at the suggestion of Ed Korn, who was brought in as a consultant from the Metropolitan Opera. Gaddes acknowledged that the model for OTSL was The Santa Fe Opera: : That was not a coincidence. I always sa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Werther
''Werther'' is an opera (''drame lyrique'') in four acts by Jules Massenet to a French libretto by Édouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartmann (who used the pseudonym Henri Grémont). It is loosely based on Goethe's epistolary novel ''The Sorrows of Young Werther'', which was based both on fact and on Goethe's own early life. Earlier examples of operas using the story were made by Kreutzer (1792) and Pucitta (1802). Milnes R. Werther. In: ''The New Grove Dictionary of Opera''. Macmillan, London and New York, 1997. Performance history Massenet started composing ''Werther'' in 1885, completing it in 1887. He submitted it to Léon Carvalho, the director of the Paris Opéra-Comique, that year, but Carvalho declined to accept it on the grounds that the scenario was too serious. With the disruption of the fire at the Opéra-Comique and Massenet's work on other operatic projects (especially ''Esclarmonde''), it was put to one side, until the Vienna Opera, pleased with the succes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera Omaha
Opera Omaha is a major regional opera company in Omaha, Nebraska. Founded in 1958, the professional company is widely known for the International Fall Festival events it held in the 1980s and 1990s, which garnered international attention and served as the U.S. and world premieres for a number of notable works. One of these performances, the 1990 U.S. premiere of the 1841 work Maria Padilla, was among the primary debuts for noted soprano Renee Fleming. "I’ve been calling all my singer friends and saying, 'You’ve got to sing for this company.'" Fleming said at the time. It has "a lot of vision." In 2007, the Toronto Star said "Opera Omaha has grown into one of the continent's most enterprising regional opera companies." After attending the 1992 Fall Festival, Denver Post critic Jeff Bradley wrote that "this quiet prairie city on the Missouri River is becoming one of the most exciting operatic meccas in the country." The Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram in 1992 said Omaha had beco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Partenope
''Partenope'' ("Parthenope", HWV 27) is an opera by George Frideric Handel, first performed at the King's Theatre in London on 24 February 1730. Although following the structure and forms of opera seria, the work is humorous in character and light-textured in music, with a plot involving romantic complications and gender confusion. A success with audiences at the time of its original production and then unperformed for many years, ''Partenope'' is now often seen on the world's opera stages. Background The opera, which is in three acts, is composed to an Italian libretto adapted by an unknown hand from a libretto originally written in 1699 by Silvio Stampiglia. Stampiglia's libretto had received many previous settings, including one by Caldara which Handel may have seen in Venice around 1710. It was Handel's first comic (or, rather, unserious) opera since the much earlier '' Agrippina'', breaking away from the more traditional opera seria works for which the composer was known ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Frideric Handel
George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (; baptised , ; 23 February 1685 – 14 April 1759) was a German-British Baroque music, Baroque composer well known for his opera#Baroque era, operas, oratorios, anthems, concerto grosso, concerti grossi, and organ concertos. Handel received his training in Halle (Saale), Halle and worked as a composer in Hamburg and Italy before settling in London in 1712, where he spent the bulk of his career and Handel's Naturalisation Act 1727, became a naturalised British subject in 1727. He was strongly influenced both by the middle-German polyphony, polyphonic choral tradition and by composers of the Italian Baroque. In turn, Handel's music forms one of the peaks of the "high baroque" style, bringing Italian opera to its highest development, creating the genres of English oratorio and organ concerto, and introducing a new style into English church music. He is consistently recognized as one of the greatest composers of his age. Handel started three c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
