The New York City Opera will premiere Ted Rosenthal's Holocaust themed opera Dear Erich on January 9th, with performances running through January 13th. The opera was inspired by 200 recently discovered letters written in Germany between 1938 and 1941 by Herta Rosenthal to her son Erich, the composer's father.
Barihunk Brian James Myer will be making his company debut as Young Erich, in a cast that also includes fellow barihunk Peter Kendall Clark as the Older Erich, hunkentenor Glenn Seven Allen as Freddy, Jessica Tyler Wright as Herta and Rachel Zatcoff as Lili. Tickets are available online.
Glenn Seven Allen(photo as honorary tenor in Barihunks calendar)
The title character was a Jewish academic who escaped Nazi Germany to the U.S. shortly before Kristallnacht. The opera tells the story of his family's dual fates, including Erich's journey to a new life in the new world - his studies, jazz and love - while the situation deteriorates in Germany and his family ultimately meets their cruel demise at the hands of the Nazis. Frustrated and powerless to help them emigrate, Erich must live with deep survivor guilt which affects him in his relationships with his wife and children.
The opera has had workshops at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, New York City Opera and the Usdan Summer Camp for the Arts.
American bass-barihunk Evan Hughes will be performing a recital with Les Grandes Interprètes in Toulouse, France on December 10th with accompanist Hélio Vida.
The program will include selections from Schumann's Kerner Lieder,Hans Christian Andersen Lieder and his Lieder sur des poèmes de Heine, as well as Sibelius' Runeberg Songs, Ireland's Sea Fever, Purcell's Cold Song and Finzi's Earth and Air and Rain. Tickets are available online. Upcoming performances include Theseus in Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream with Opera Philadelphia in February and Citheron in Rameau's Platée with Semperoper Dresden in April.
Bass Hans Tashjian will be part of an evening of Russian songs on Wednesday, December 5th. The program will feature singers from the Yale opera program performing a wide array of Russian vocal music, from solo songs and arias to ensemble pieces.
The program will include works by such composers as Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Glinka, Shebalin, Pakhmutova and Rachmaninoff. Tashjian will sing Dmitry Kabalevsky's Don Quixote's Serenade.
The performance will be at Morse Recital Hall in Sprague Memorial Hall at 7:30 PM EST/4:30 PM PST or you can watch it live ONLINE.
Tashjian is an alumnus of the Manhattan School of Music and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received the Derdeyne Award in Voice. He has been a young artist at Chautauqua Opera, Sarasota Opera (where he was a recipient of the Scheininger-Reznick Scholarship), and the Caramoor Music Festival.
He will perform Beethoven's 9th Symphony in the upcoming season for the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.
Swedish barihunk Sebastian Durán will be singing Kråkan (the Crow) in Benjamin Staern's Snödrottningen (The Snow Queen) at the Malmö Opera. Performances run from December 15 through January 19. The 29-year-old singer studied at the Malmö Academy of Music and the University College of Opera in Stockholm. Shortly after graduating, he took on the title role in Mozart’s DonGiovanni on the Malmö Opera tour and at the Copenhagen Opera Festival. He went on to sing in Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest at the Vadstena Academy.
Sebastien Durán sings Hamlet's drinking song:
The Snow Queen was commissioned by the Malmö Opera and was premiered in 2016 with Durán in the cast. The opera is based on the 1844 story by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen.
There is a operatic link between Andersen and opera, as it is believed that he was in love with the Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind, although she did not have the same feeling for him. According to his biographer Carole Rosen, Andersen modeled the cold-hearted Snow Queen on Lind after she rejected him as a suitor. You can listen to the entire opera on SoundCloud featuring Durán.
The role of Méphistophélès in Gounod's Faust will be a main feature of French bass-barihunk's 2019 season, as he takes on the devilish role twice in the first part of the year.
From February 10-21, he'll perform the role at Opéra de Marseille with fellow barihunk Étienne Dupuis as Valentin. The cast also includes Nicole Car as Marguerite, Jean-François Borras and Jean-Pierre Furlan rotating the role of Faust, Philippe Ermelier as Wagner and Kévin Amiel as Siebel.
Then from May 22-28, he travels 159 kilometers down the road to Opéra de Nice where he'll be joined by Armando Noguera as Valentin, Stefano Secco as Faust, Nathalie Manfrino as Marguerite, Philippe Ermelier as Wagner and Camille Tresmontant as Siebel.
The final scene from Faust with Nicolai Ghiaurov, Joan Sutherland and Franco Correlli:
Gounod's libretto is based loosely on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust, Part One. It debuted at the Théâtre Lyrique on the Boulevard du Temple in Paris on March 19, 1859. After its successful debut, it traveled to Germany, Belgium, Italy and England.
The opera opened the original Metropolitan Opera on October 22, 1883 and went on to become one of the most popular operas in the house, having received 753 performances to date.
In between performances, of Gounod's Faust, Courjal will sing the role of Bertram in Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable at La Monnaie with an all-star cast headed by soprano Lisette Oropesa and tenor Dimitry Korchak.
Two of Europe's hottest barihunks will be singing Don Giovanni and Masetto at Beijing's National Centre for the Performing Arts. Italian Vittorio Prato will take on Mozart's title character alongside Austrian Thomas Tatzl's Masetto.
The theatre is rotating a European cast on November 27, 29 and December 1 with an all-Chinese cast on November 28 and 30. Tickets and additional cast information is available online. The Chinese cast includes the amazing bass-baritone Ao Li as Leporello, who won the 2014 Operalia competition and has become a fixture at the San Francisco Opera.
Ao Li performs at the Mt Fuji Vocal Competition:
The National Centre for the Performing Arts was founded in 2010 and features European and Chinese artists performing both Western and Chinese opera. Chinese operas have included Guo Wenjing's Rickshaw Boy, Qing Yin's The Long March, Meng Weidong'sFANG Zhimin, Lei Lei's The Jinsha River andVisitors from the Snow Mountain.
The Metropolitan Opera has announced that Alexander Birch Elliott
will sing the remaining performances of “Les Pêcheurs de Perles,” replacing fellow barihunk Mariusz Kwiecien as Zurga. The Polish singer was struggling to make it past the first act, prompting Elliott to step in for at least two performances, the first night being his Met debut.
There are three performances of the opera remaining on November 28, December 1st and 8th. Pretty Yende is
set to sing all of them except for the December 8th showcase when Amanda Woodbury wil sing. Javier Camarena will appear as Nadir for
all of the shows.
