Yesterday, it was announced that James Levine, music director of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, had to withdraw from several performances because of sudden unexpected back surgery.

Today two more substitutes were named. Edo de Waart, a…

James Levine

Indefatigable conductor James Levine, music director of both the Metropolitan Opera and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, has withdrawn from several performances with both institutions due to what the the BSO’s press release called “immediate unanticipated back surgery for a…

As a tribute to the late soprano Hildegard Behrens, who died August 16 in Tokyo, the Sirius satellite radio system’s Metropolitan Opera channel will broadcast an historic 1989 performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre.

It can be heard on August 27 starting…

Behrens as Brunnhilde

Soprano Hildegard Behrens, one of the finest dramatic sopranos of her generation, has died at 72 in Tokyo, the result of an apparent aneurysm.

Behrens (February 9, 1937 – August 18, 2009) was a remarkable performer, with an amazing…

Expect St. Louis sightings of famed designer Isaac Mizrahi to increase over the next 12 months.

Mizrahi will design Opera Theatre of St. Louis’s first-ever production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, the third show of the 2010 season. That’s…

Although some of the news from the Metropolitan Opera has been on the grim side this year — for example, next season’s anticipated-but-expensive revival of John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles was canceled in favor of a safer, cheaper bet —…

NEW YORK – I planned my trip to New York around the happy confluence of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s annual concerts at Carnegie Hall on Friday and Saturday evenings, and soprano Christine Brewer’s scheduled Bruennhilde in “Die Walkuere” at…

NEW YORK - There is a popular misconception that opera always involves heavy-duty stories and emotions, that it’s always serious, that someone — or several someones — must always perish by the end.

Not so.

As Exhibit A, consider Donizetti’s sweet, tuneful,…

St. Louis-based soprano Christine Brewer has suffered severe damage to her right knee, and has withdrawn from the Metropolitan Opera’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” Brewer was to have sung the crucial role of the Valkyrie Brünnhilde in two complete cycles,…

St. Louis-based dramatic soprano Christine Brewer was already scheduled to do her first fully-staged Brünnhildes in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera; now she’s added another cycle to that wash.

Brewer was set to sing the role…