Blog

Ah, the paperwork phase of sorting all of this out. The information in front of me falls into the following general categories:Academic and/or conservatory training: It’s extremely rare that we’ll take someone without either an advanced degree or a stint in a year-round YAP. Each year we end up hiring a few people who are

Took a couple of days last week to visit a friend’s house in the Blue Ridge mountains. It wasn’t long enough to qualify as a vacation, but it allowed me to screen the first 300 applications with the view at left. Back home now, and just finished listening to the first 120 demo CDs. Our

Well, the folks at 1&1 (“The World’s Biggest Web Host” indeed) promise 99.9% “server up time.” I think the 3 hours our website spent offline this afternoon blows that statistic out of the water. Murphy’s Law says that the server would go down on the day of the New York application deadline. But we’re back

Here we are on Friday, October 6, the day of our first application deadline (for the Philadelphia and New York audition sites), and the server that’s hosting our online application has crashed. No good deed goes unpunished, they say. If we can’t get back online very shortly, we will extend this first deadline by one

So happy to be entering the part of our annual cycle that’s all about the music. Well, with a little paperwork, airplanes, and hotels thrown in. As willing as I am to deal with marketing, fundraising, box office, and other similar demons, I am always deliriously happy to find myself in October and November. There’s

If you’re searching for the online audition application overnight Monday (9/18) into early Tuesday (9/19), you may be having difficulty. We’re reformatting and rebooting our server. Check back later or Tuesday or early Wednesday morning. The printable application is still available at http://www.wolftrap.org/opera/app07.pdf. If you submitted an application prior to this afternoon, and you received

Apologies for the paucity of new entries. The post-season fatigue was significant, and right now I seem to only have enough energy to take care of essentials. But the blog is still getting about 5,000 readers a month (“unique” visitors as they’re called in the world of internet statistics…. but then again, you opera folks

Shame on me for not posting more often this week. Figaro opens tomorrow night, and we’re terribly proud of it. It looks as if the weather just might cooperate, too. I’m not superstitious but still think it would be unwise to be too cocky. At this venue, the bottom line can be scarily dependent on