“The Golden Gate” is the latest opera from San Francisco native and Manhattan resident Conrad Cummings. It’s based on the novel by Vikram Seth and was most recently given a staged workshop at Lincoln Center’s Rose Studio. This here new website presents excerpts, synopsis and more.

Last month composer SCOTT PENDER attended a two-week summer music intensive known as the John Duffy Composers Institute, part of the Virginia Arts Festival. But it may as well be called Opera Camp. According to Pender, the sessions are for composers of opera and musical theatre to bring alive their works and get feedback from the collaborating artists and senior composers.  The musical staff consisted of founder John Duffy...

Talk about bringing music to the people! Composer/performer Byron Au Yong is putting opera in bottles (no deposit required). At least that’s the impression given by the subtitle to a 2008 piece. But the work’s name – “Kidnapping Water: Bottle Operas” – is actually deceptive. Rather than mass-produced take-home music, the piece is more about making audiences go the distance. Like a musical Christo and Jeanne-Claude,...

Big classical music institutions (i.e. symphonies and opera companies) have long been on the Stephen Sondheim bandwagon and the occasion of his 80th birthday year (which is today–3/22/10) has been a great excuse for them to further horn in on the musical theatre domain, where the composer has excelled. But one classical pianist, Anthony de Mare, has come up with a fresh approach to celebrating Sondheim.  About five years...

Stephen Sondheim musicals keep getting revived, often in chamber versions, and at 79, he’s still writing songs as well as a two-volume treatise on theater and lyrics. “Sondheim Makes His Entrance Again, Intimately” by Patrick Healy (New York Times, January 3, 2010)

Last Tuesday night in New York I was the guest at a lovely little dinner party at the home of Denes Striny.  He’s a tenor and voice teacher and later that evening his most famous student, soprano Lauren Flanigan, would be starring in a revival of Hugo Weisgall’s “Esther” at the New York City Opera.  We’ve become friends because we are both former students of Michael Cordovana, a retired assistant conductor from...

After being a fixture in lower Manhattan for several decades, lesbian composer Eve Beglarian has gone on a yearlong quest in search of America. For her exploration of the heartland she’s traversing our continent’s major artery, the Mississippi River. Her journey began in August at the river’s headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota. With a car, a kayak, and a bike, plus the company of various fellow travelers (friends who...

Perhaps it’s all because of his iconic name but composer John Adams has a knack for making headline works, pieces that become the talk of a season. With a title like “Nixon in China,” his first opera was guaranteed to garner attention back in 1987. It didn’t hurt that the work itself was colorful, humorous and insightful.Adams has continued in the so-called CNN-school of American opera with “The...

It would be easy to say that 14 years after the death of Leonard Bernstein, the legendary American composer, conductor and educator casts a long shadow.  But sunsets, darkness and shadows are just not the right metaphors.  Bernstein is still a star, and his glowing light seems stronger than ever. Some evidence: Almost 50 years after its premiere, “West Side Story” receives an average of 300 productions a year...