Operas

Two art museums are contributing to Los Angeles' Ring Festival with small exhibitions opening this month. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Myths, Legends, and Cultural Renewal: Wagner's Sources" (April 15-Aug. 16) looks at some of the artists who drew inspiration from the same sources as "Ring" composer Richard Wagner. At the Fullerton Art Museum at Cal State San Bernardino, "Timeless Enchantment: Richard Wagner's 'Ring of the Nibelung' in Visual Arts and Performance" (Thursday-July 31)

Large classical music ensembles are no strangers to economic challenges, but the Santa Monica-based Verdi Chorus may be the only one whose existential crisis came when an Italian restaurant went out of business. The opera-only ensemble of about 50 voices has lived to tell the tale, and this weekend, it will celebrate its 30th anniversary while also honoring the 200th anniversary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, the great composer after whom it is only tangentially named. The chorus began in 1983 as a house organ of Verdi Ristorante di Musica, a fancily redone former Wilshire Boulevard funeral parlor where singing was as much a fixture as veal scaloppine.

Italian soprano Mara Zampieri, scheduled to sing four performances as Lady Macbeth in Los Angeles Music Center Opera's production of Verdi's "Macbeth," Dec. 11-21, has canceled her appearance here. Zampieri's U. S. manager, Alan Green of Columbia Artists Management Inc., said the soprano hurt her leg in an accident in her apartment in Venice, Italy. Her leg is in a cast and she will be unable to travel this month. Zampieri will be replaced in the four "Macbeth" performances (Dec.

PALO ALTO - We hallucinate. But we are often of two minds about having two minds. We produce drugs to enhance hallucinations and drugs to dull them. Medical science seeks to relieve schizophrenics of their visions. Religion, on the other hand, sanctifies visionaries. Neurologists hunt for explanations. Art is haunted by the haunted. Where would opera be without its mad scenes and wild fantasies? Where would the Beatles have been without LSD? Stanford University made an ambitious attempt to bring together much of the above in its new Bing Concert Hall on Friday night with the premiere of "Visitations" - two short chamber operas about hallucinations by faculty composer and neurological researcher Jonathan Berger.

L.A. Opera's new production of Saint-Saens' "Samson et Dalila" (borrowed from San Francisco Opera) continues at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Sunday and Sept. 26 at 2 p.m., Wednesday and Sept. 18, 21 and 24 at 7:30 p.m. Denyce Graves sings the role of Dalila at all performances. As Samson, Placido Domingo sings Sept. 18, and American tenor Gary Lakes takes the role Wednesday and Sept. 21, 24 and 26. Lawrence Foster is the conductor, Nicolas Joel the stage director.

Jose Carreras, who gained international fame as one of the Three Tenors with Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo, told the Times of London that his opera career may be over. In an interview published Friday, the 62-year-old Spanish singer said he could no longer withstand the rigors of performing principal opera roles, unamplified. "If I can do concert recitals, adapting the repertoire to my needs, then no problem, that's good enough," he said. "But with operas, unless the right circumstances come up, my career is done."

New York's Metropolitan Opera and the English National Opera will co-produce stagings of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic" and a new work by Osvaldo Golijov. "Doctor Atomic," which had its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera in October 2005, will open at the Met on Oct. 13, 2008, and at the ENO in February 2009, the companies announced Wednesday.

Less than three months before the scheduled opening of the L.A. Music Center Opera production of "Queen of Spades," the company has announced that the Tchaikovsky opera will be replaced by Verdi's "Don Carlo," on the same dates in April. The late switch marks the first time that the 4-year-old company has changed productions on such short notice. Generally, opera productions are planned three years in advance.

"If it must be Richard," a clever if unfriendly critic once wagged, "give me Wagner." "And if it must be Strauss," he added, "make it Johann." Conventional wisdom, only a decade or two ago, insisted that Richard Strauss managed to write a couple of terrific little shockers near the turn of the century--"Salome" and "Elektra"--and then peaked with the mock-Viennese nostalgia of "Der Rosenkavalier."

Helene Zaslove spent Friday afternoon like most Southern Californians--stuck in traffic. Having heard that patrons who arrived late at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for the opera "Tristan und Isolde," would not be seated during the first act, Zaslove feared the worst as she crept on her way to downtown Los Angeles from Santa Monica.

HONG KONG - Strung up in the Sunbeam Theatre in a gritty working-class part of this city are posters showing Cantonese opera singers, their red lips offset by chalk-white, made-up faces. In the faded lobby, where theatergoers mill on a Saturday afternoon, dozens of bouquets with handwritten messages are dedicated to the stars by fans. For four decades, this theater in North Point on Hong Kong Island has been one of the last remaining stalwarts for Cantonese opera in the city. But its existence is by no means guaranteed.

IFC announced a development slate of 11 projects on Wednesday, three pilots and eight scripts, and based on their descriptions, the channel appears to be going even more idiosyncratic in its projects. Among the projects possibly coming soon to the channel are an '80s-style soap opera animated entirely with baby dolls and a buddy comedy about a struggling comic-book illustrator befriending a vampire from the future, titled "Jetpackula. " PHOTOS: Hollywood Backlot moments The three pilots IFC has commissioned include "Timms Industrial Piping," the "Dynasty"-inspired series about the residents of Timms Valley, Wis., dealing with the disappearance of the founder and CEO of the town's biggest employer.

Los Angeles Opera wheeled into its final three performances of Rossini's “Cinderella” Wednesday night with a new Cinderella toiling amid her cadre of lovable, helpful rats. She is the Georgian mezzo-soprano Ketevan Kemoklidze -- yet another winner of Plácido Domingo's Operalia competition to appear on the L.A. Opera stage (her debut), and also somewhat of a contrast to the previous Cinderella, Kate Lindsey.   This Cinderella registered a distinctive vocal presence with a Slavic accent (which lessened as the performance unfolded)

SAN DIEGO - Devout opera companies caring to connect with Holy Week easily can. Along with the obvious choice of Wagner's "Parsifal," contemporary composers such as Harrison Birtwistle ("The Last Supper") and John Adams ("The Gospel According to the Other Mary") have been contributing to the cause. On Easter Eve, San Diego Opera looked a little further afield, however, by offering the first major American production of Ildebrando Pizzetti's "Murder in the Cathedral" at Civic Theatre.

From the nation that brought you "Are You Being Served?" comes "Mr. Selfridge," a loose dramatization of the founding of a British retail institution, the Selfridge & Co. department store, familiarly called Selfridges. Its eight-part run begins Sunday, under the colors of PBS' "Masterpiece. " Starring Jeremy Piven as Harry Gordon Selfridge, the American who brought recreational shopping to Britain, it is neither a miniseries nor a biopic, but a full-on, open-ended TV series - a second season is already slated for 2014 - which, like "The Tudors/The Borgias," takes real people from a real place and time and embroiders their lives with the sort of things you watch television for. There are resemblances to "Mad Men," as well, in that it is a period piece about the business of selling and the dreaminess of buying; and of "Downton Abbey" because it is concerned with social mobility at the end of the Edwardian era and ... big hats.

LONDON - The editor of Opera is worried. The March editorial of Britain's leading opera monthly describes this city's opera scene as being in crisis. The city's major companies - Royal Opera and English National Opera - are in a state of flux, administratively, artistically, musically and, in the case of ENO, financially. Opera everywhere should suffer such crises. On a recent Saturday in the British capital, I couldn't imagine a better place for opera, crises or no crises.

Linda and Larry Boehm has sold the Old Town Music Hall in Monrovia for $237,000 to Will and Judy Lucas, who will rename it Old Town Theatre and use it for plays and operas. The sale was brokered by the Daum Corp.

"It's a completely new experience," said Matthew Zuber, a 21-year-old bassoonist studying at the Colburn School. "I've never done an opera before. " He was referring to his participation -- along with 21 other young musicians at the downtown conservatory -- in a new collaboration between Colburn and Los Angeles Opera's Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. That union gets its first showcase this weekend, when the combined forces present two one-act operas: Ernst Krenek's "The Secret Kingdom" and Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis.

Fifty years ago, a gallon of gasoline sold for 29 cents, the Beatles were preparing the release of their first song in the U.S. and "The Beverly Hillbillies" loomed large as the No. 1 show on television. And ABC's "General Hospital" debuted on April 1, 1963.  Monday marks the 50th anniversary of the show -- the longest running soap opera currently in production - after 12,776 original episodes. PHOTOS: 10 long-running soap operas A year ago, fans fretted that ABC would cancel "General Hospital" following the demise of the Walt Disney Co. network's two other signature soaps, "All My Children" and "One Life to Live.

We may look these days at Mexico as a place of peril, what with drug trafficking, kidnapping and wanton murder. But we ignore Mexico as an arts center at our own peril. When it comes to classical music, we might not recognize our own music had we not once had inspiration and help from south of the border. Do we need now to be reminded that Mexico City has been an opera center a lot longer than Southern California has been - and that it still is one? We do. Fortunately, Long Beach Opera has done the reminding with its most gratifyingly ambitious undertaking in quite a while: what it is calling the U.S. premiere of what it is calling Gabriella Ortiz's "Camelia la Tejana: Only the Truth.