The remarkable improvement of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Miguel Harth-Bedoya is no secret. Until now, though, its reputation has been mostly local. Over the weekend the orchestra sought to change that with a trip to Carnegie Hall in New York. Its big-city debut clearly was a success. Here are the [...]

The greatest of all song cycles is Schubert’s Winterreise (or Winter’s Journey). The set of 24 songs (“lieder” if you prefer German) ostensibly is about the travails of a young man, rejected by his sweetheart, who sets out on a bleak journey through wind, ice and snow, his mood matching the weather.
But most commentators believe [...]

The Houston Symphony Orchestra has announced its 2008-2009 season and there’s one minor surprise: Conductor André Previn will return to the podium after an absence of 40 years.
Previn was the Houston Symphony’s conductor-in-chief from 1967 to 1969, but the relationship was an uneasy one (for one thing, Previn’s freewheeling lifestyle upset prominent symphony supporters) and [...]

Not a note has been written yet, but the creation of Moby-Dick is well under way. That’s the word from composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, who visited Dallas Tuesday as the Dallas Opera announced plans for the inaugural season of the Winspear Opera House.
Heggie and Scheer are working on an operatic version of [...]

The Dallas Opera has provided a few more details of its first season in the Winspear Opera House. The company announced on Monday that the season will open on Oct. 23, 2009, with Verdi’s Otello and will include the world premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.
Jonathan Pell. the company’s director of artistic administration, said Tuesday that [...]

The Dallas Opera’s long dream of life in a new home has just moved closer to wide-awake reality. The company has announced details of its first season in the Winspear Opera House. A world premiere is included.
The house will open on Friday, Oct. 23, 2009, with a performance of Verdi’s Otello. The season will continue [...]

The Metropolitan Opera’s live transmissions to movie theaters, the most recent of which was Verdi’s Macbeth, create a new kind of operatic experience. The form itself is not new — what you see and hear is basically what you’d see and hear at home with a televised performance — but it’s scaled up so drastically [...]

Someone at the Dallas Opera has a sense of history. The company’s very first staged performance in the Music Hall at Fair Park, on Nov. 22, 1957, was Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri. Its very last staged performance in the hall, on March 14, 2009, will be Rossini’s The Italian Girl in Algiers. (It’s the same [...]