Product Description: 'Hugely entertaining and inspiring' The Sunday TimesThe inspirational and colourful memoir of Michael Volpe, the general manager of Opera Holland Park. The son of Italian immigrants, he and his brothers were raised by his mother on a council estate in West London, before he attended Woolverstone Hall, a prestigious state boarding school designed to give bright inner city boys the opportunity of a public school education...read more

Product Description: At first glance, modernism and opera may seem like strange bedfellows―the former hostile to sentiment, the latter wearing its heart on its sleeve. And yet these apparent opposites attract: many operas are aesthetically avant-garde, politically subversive, and socially transgressive...read more

Product Description: Opera Vocal Solos

Often underestimated, lyric diction is a portal to powerful performance. It is through lyric diction that singers are able to communicate the wishes and desires of the poet, as well as the composer. Far beyond memorizing the rules of pronunciation, the study of diction involves learning to perceive speech patterns in different languages, practicing their precise articulation, recognizing this in one's own speech and singing, as well as in that of others, and developing an awareness of the refined, delicate movements of the articulators and their subsequent effect on singing tone.Amanda Johnston takes a modernized approach to the study of lyric diction in English and German Diction for Singers. Utilizing the latest adaptation of the Neue Rechtschreibung (2009), Johnston makes German increasingly accessible through the recognition that English and German are related languages, and thus have many things in common with regard to lyric diction. This comprehensive resource includes a thorough analysis of the German and English languages, as well as lists, tables, charts, musical examples, and even tongue twisters. Specific topics addressed include the German schwa, the use of the curly-tail J in German, the treatment of R in both languages, and the correct formation of the elusive open U and the extended Epsilon.Lyric diction is a mandatory subject area for all prospective opera singers and music students enrolled in an academic institution. This book is designed for both undergraduate and graduate courses in German and English lyric diction and is an invaluable resource for classical singers, vocal coaches, and voice teachers alike.

Product Description: The Metropolitan Opera 2017 Wall Calendar features another outstanding collection of images from the Met Opera's legendary stage.Stunning color photographs capture unforgettable scenes, stars, and performances from such operas as Simon Boccanegra, The Barber of Seville, Elektra, Otello, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Tosca, as well as opera's biggest stars–Plàcido Domingo, Anna Netrebko, Diana Damrau, Jonas Kaufmann, Angela Gheorghiu, Joyce DiDonato, Roberto Alagna, and Maria Guleghina...read more

Product Description: Giacomo Meyerbeer stands as one of the great paradoxes in music history. Widely regarded as the single most important opera composer in the middle third of the nineteenth century, the composer was recognised and revered all over the world...read more

In a lively exploration of Jacques Offenbach's final masterpiece, Heather Hadlock shows how Les Contes d'Hoffmann summed up not only the composer's career but also a century of Romantic culture. A strange fusion of irony and profundity, frivolity and nightmare, the opera unfolds as a series of dreamlike episodes, peopled by such archetypes as the Poet, the Beautiful Dying Girl, the Automaton, the Courtesan, and the Mesmerist. Hadlock shows how these episodes comprise a collective unconscious. Her analyses touch on topics ranging from the self-reflexive style of the protagonist and the music, to parallels between nineteenth-century discourses of theater and medical science, to fascination with the hysterical female subject. Les Contes d'Hoffmann is also examined as both a continuation and a retraction of tendencies in Offenbach's earlier operettas and opéra-comiques. Hadlock investigates the political climate of the 1870s that influenced the composer's vision and the reception of his last work. Drawing upon insights from feminist, literary, and cultural theory, she considers how the opera's music and libretto took shape within a complex literary and theatrical tradition. Finally, Hadlock ponders the enigmas posed by the score of this unfinished opera, which has been completed many times and by many different hands since its composer's death shortly before the premiere in 1881. In this book, the "mad loves" that drive Les Contes d'Hoffmann--a poet's love, a daughter's love, erotic love, and fatal attraction to music--become figures for the fascination exercised by opera itself.

Product Description: Ian Bradley's Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan has established itself across the world as the authorized and definitive 'Bible' for all those interested in the Savoy operas. Originally published in two Penguin paperbacks in the 1980's, a single-volume comprehensive compendium, hailed widely as "easily the best annotated Gilbert & Sullivan available" (Gayden Wren, New York Times) was published by Oxford University Press in 1996...read more

Product Description: Ian Bradley's Complete Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan has established itself across the world as the authorized and definitive 'Bible' for all those interested in the Savoy operas. Originally published in two Penguin paperbacks in the 1980's, a single-volume comprehensive compendium, hailed widely as "easily the best annotated Gilbert & Sullivan available" (Gayden Wren, New York Times) was published by Oxford University Press in 1996...read more

Product Description: Opera has become big business as well as an art form, attracting young and old, true connoisseurs, enthusiasts and celebrities. And while opera singers and superstars sometimes attract a separate following, the stage director's job is often the one that really counts, yet it is a type of specialised knowledge available only to a select few...read more