Hello friends!We are hearing auditions this week in New York City, at the lovely National Opera Center. It’s our third stop: we started in Los Angeles last week, and took a rather indirect route to get to Houston in the wake of Tropical Storm Imelda. It feels like a bit of luxury to unpack our
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Fun fact about yours truly: when I was choosing college programs of study, I only auditioned for one school. I wanted to be a writer, a novelist or poet. Writing was one of the two tools that I had for making sense of the world; it was my way of breaking down feelings, situations, actions
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The Wolf Trap Opera 2019 season closed with a roaring production of Rossini’s Barber of Seville. The weather was glorious, the singing resplendent, and the laughter from the audience was riotous. It was the perfect culmination of a fantastic summer! As wonderful as this summer was, however, it’s time to turn our thoughts to the
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It’s been a busy week here at the Trap! We’ve been in technical rehearsals for Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos, which opens tomorrow (Friday, July 19) at The Barns. The production is set in the time period in which the piece was written, and there are beautiful homages to the work of visual artist Gustav Klimt and
Read MoreDear opera community, I hear you. The feedback on the 2009 What (Not) to Wear blogpost has been difficult to read. Wolf Trap Opera has been stewarded by female leadership for 20 years, and to see something that we wrote to demystify the audition process in the style of a then-popular tv show
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Music staff in their natural environment
Each summer we are visited by some of the best collaborative pianists in the industry; they join us from across the country bringing their musicianship, language specialties, and love and knowledge of the operatic repertoire, which infuse each production with the musical nuance you’ve come to expect at Wolf Trap. They work in the rehearsal
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Things are cooking over here at Wolf Trap Opera. (And I’m not referring the weather, nor to the awesome baked goods that are appearing in the offices and rehearsal rooms…many of our artists seems to have kitchen-focused hobbies, and while my clothes may be protesting my tummy is celebrating their culinary prowess!) This week we
Read MoreIn the studio… In addition to their onstage assignments, Wolf Trap Opera Studio Artists participate in a career-building curriculum designed especially for them. WTO’s guest faculty have specific areas of expertise and are able to provide insight on what is expected of them from the industry at large. Deborah Birnbaum is an internationally established voice
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Schedule, June example
This is a short update, to both apologize for the lack of posting and to fill you in – albeit briefly – on our doings here at WTO. As you can see from the schedule above, we’re at critical mass. Each color represents a different project, each column represents a different space: rehearsals, fittings, coachings,
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Imagine this: you’re a young singer, recently armed with a diploma that attests to the time and energy you’ve spent over the last six years. That piece of paper represents hours of practice time, language coachings, stage time at your university, scholarly papers submitted and countless tests taken and passed. Now what? How do you
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