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After having sunk into the depths of almost writing Giovanni supertitle translations right up until the dress rehearsal, I’m reforming. Finished the first draft of Cenerentola today. Actually have a week to edit and tweak. Tonight brought a magnificent Don Quixote by the Bolshoi Ballet and Orchestra. A landmark event at Wolf Trap. Back in

Our music library is just about a year old, but it’s one of the best things about our home in the Center for Education. I was desperate for something like this 20 years ago. Scores, recordings, reference books, biographies, historical programs, trade magazines. It’s a small room, but it’s packed with the building blocks of

It’s a relief to start staging rehearsals for Cenerentola. Mostly because 99% of the work I’ve done on it this summer has fallen on the negative side of the ledger, and at last we’re creating instead of tearing down. Our conductor and director have stuck with us in this revised scenario, and we’re in their

Three singers finished their work with us this weekend and headed for home. I love those summers when we can keep most of the company on through the final opera, but the only way to do that is to program a finale to the season that involves a huge cast – Magic Flute, Falstaff, Tales

Our season often starts with our “death by aria” concert for the Wolf Trap Associates. (That’s not really the title. But you get the idea.) This is the first time it has ever happened this late in the summer. And it was a surprisingly atypical event. In early June, the performers don’t know one another

Another bout of illness in the Giovanni cast; this time a bit less severe vocally, but still traumatic in its own way. It’s so hard to spend weeks and months refining something and then have your “instrument” rebel. The sobering thing is that it’s unavoidable. Most singers are surprisingly hardy people. But there’s no way

Normally, this is the quickest turn-around of the season. There’s no “buffer” of time between the 2nd and 3rd operas – it’s the only way to cram everything into 12 weeks. It means that singers who work on both operas (in this case, the three who are in both Giovanni and Cenerentola) rehearse the new

All of my matinee audience predictions have come to naught this summer. And I couldn’t be happier to be wrong. Great audience today! And again, marvelous work from all involved. To have these young singers deliver Italian recitative in such a vivid, detailed, and in-depth fashion is a real gift. From them, and from our

A great week of bringing opera to the kids. Probably about a thousand of them all together. Lots of enthusiastic feedback. (Today’s 6-person story included a rapper/narrator singing Rossini, (I never would’ve believed it if I hadn’t seen it), a jailor, a prisoner, an evil landlord, a genie, and a fortune teller.) We had set