Opera

In his tiny dorm room, Nelson Hebo keeps an envelope containing a few tattered photographs of his family. His mother, Maria, gazes distantly from a black-and-white passport photo. His father, Francisco, stands on a patch of dirt outside their house in Angola clutching his young nephew, Fabio, and holding a Bible. Scribbled on the back, in Portuguese, are the words, “remember your father.’’ Nelson turns away. He cannot hide the sadness in his eyes. “It is very hard to look at them,’’ he says quietly.

Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" may be the most popular ballet of all time, but when it premiered on a double bill at St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theater, in December 1892, it was the audience's decided second choice. The favorite that evening was Tchaikovsky's final opera, "Iolanta," a 90-minute, one-act work about a blind princess. It has since become as undeservedly obscure as "The Nutcracker" is deservedly famous, so it was a pleasure to see it Sunday as the opening offering of the weeklong Second International Rachmaninoff Russian Music Festival.

BERLIN -- Pressure mounted yesterday on the Deutsche Oper Berlin to rescind the cancellation of a production that depicted the beheading of the Prophet Mohammed. Chancellor Angela Merkel said "there can be no compromises" on free speech. In addition, Berlin's top security official, Ehrhart Koerting, suggested that the cancellation was a mistake, and Germany's top Protestant cleric, Bishop Wolfgang Huber, added his voice to those calling for the opera to be staged again, as soon as possible.

All the lovely singing fails to save the Vienna State Opera's new production of Mozart's "La Clemenza di Tito. " No less an expert than Richard Wagner called Mozart's last opera "stiff and dry. " And that's how the work came across at its latest reincarnation on Thursday. Musically, the evening was a treat. In her role as Sesto, Elina Garanca's big mezzo voice easily powered into effortless crescendos that rode atop the orchestra before throttling down with equal aplomb to perform delicate passages allowing solo woodwinds to shine through.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the renowned German baritone who performed for more than five decades on stages in Berlin, Vienna, London and New York, died Friday. He was 86. The art songs and opera singer died at his home in the southern German city of Starnberg, Berlin's Deutsche Oper said. "He has deeply moved countless people around world for more than half a century through hundreds of concerts and recordings," German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said. Neumann said Fischer-Dieskau's recordings of works by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and...

To mark its 25th anniversary, "The Phantom of the Opera" is coming to a movie theater near you. Producers will broadcast a special performance of the show from London's Royal Albert Hall to movie houses in America, the UK, Europe, Japan and Australia. A live performance on Oct. 2 will be followed by re-broadcasts on Oct. 5, 6 and 11. Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess, who co-starred in the "Phantom" sequel "Love Never Dies," will reunite for the special presentation. More than 200 original and current cast members are expected to make appearances.

MINNEAPOLIS -- If John Steinbeck's fictional Joad family had actually existed, they'd probably be just about the last people interested in watching an opera. That irony points to the central challenge for the makers of an opera based on Steinbeck's classic novel, "The Grapes of Wrath" -- staying true to the quintessentially American story of dirt-poor, itinerant sharecroppers in an art form typically considered elitist in the United States. "Just mentioning the words 'Grapes of Wrath' and 'opera' -- people think it's nuts.

Viktor Ullmann’s “The Emperor of Atlantis’’ is a work forever linked to the circumstances of its creation, in the Terezín concentration camp in 1943. At once a dark satire and a poignant act of wishful thinking, it tells of a character named Death who goes on strike, refusing to kill and refusing to serve a maniacal Hitler-like Emperor as he wages worldwide war. The piece was prepared for rehearsal within the camp but was banned from performance. In October 1944, Ullmann and the librettist Peter Kien were transported to Auschwitz, where they perished.

BROOKLINE - When it comes to music for young people, few composers can match Benjamin Britten's track record of composing serious yet playful works, conceived with children in mind yet with enough substance to keep adult ears engaged too. As a prime example, on Saturday at All Saints Parish in Brookline, the Cantata Singers mounted a fully staged production of Britten's delightful children's opera "Noye's Fludde. " The work, premiered in 1958, recounts the Noah's ark story as taken from the 14th-century Chester Miracle Plays.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera" will celebrate its 25th anniversary this weekend with a lavish birthday party that will certainly involve someone swinging from a chandelier. Producers will broadcast on Sunday a live performance of the show from London's 5,500-seat Royal Albert Hall to movie houses in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Japan and Australia. The live performance — one of three shows at the hall — will be followed by rebroadcasts to cinemas on Oct. 5, 6 and 11. "To celebrate such an...

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the renowned German baritone who performed for more than five decades on stages in Berlin, Vienna, London and New York, died Friday. He was 86. The art songs and opera singer died at his home in the southern German city of Starnberg, Berlin's Deutsche Oper said. "He has deeply moved countless people around world for more than half a century through hundreds of concerts and recordings," German Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said. Neumann said Fischer-Dieskau's recordings of works by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and...

Yahoo's dysfunctional turnaround efforts have morphed into a Silicon Valley soap opera, one that has taken another strange twist with the Internet company's ousting of CEO Scott Thompson just four months after his arrival. Thompson's hasty departure, amid a furor over an inaccurate resume, ushers in a new cast of characters led by interim CEO Ross Levinsohn and New York hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb. It was Loeb's sleuthing skill that uncovered Thompson's misleading biography.

The history of opera exactly coincides with the history of people complaining about opera. But few can claim a better-heeded cavil than Francesco Algarotti, whose "Essay on the Opera" inspired one of the genre's most indelible masterpieces. Armed with Algarotti's strictures, composer Christoph Willibald Gluck and librettist Raniero Calzabigi produced "Orfeo ed Euridice," their 1760s avant-garde translation of the mythological tale of the musician who sings his way into hell to retrieve his deceased wife, performed on Friday and Saturday by Boston Baroque and...

Absent from the Metropolitan Opera for 15 years, Benjamin Britten's great maritime tragedy "Billy Budd" has made a brief but welcome return in the season's closing days. If the lead singers were a variable lot at Friday's premiere, the night was still a success because the real stars of the show — the conductor, the chorus and the set — all performed magnificently. That set, designed by William Dudley for the 1978 John Dexter production, is a cutaway depiction against a black background of the H.M.S.

Boston Baroque's 2012-13 season leads off with a Handel rarity: Two performances of the opera "Partenope," a seldom played work and one of the few comic operas in Handel's output. Soprano Amanda Forsythe sings the title role, a queen choosing from among three suitors. The two semi-staged performances are on Oct. 19 and 20 at Jordan Hall. The other large-scale work in the new season, announced this week, is Haydn's "Missa in Angustiis," better known as the "Lord Nelson Mass.

Director Peter Sellars has won a special award along with four of the world's best singers. On Sunday, the prestigious Opera News Awards went to the American theater whiz, and to Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, German soprano Anja Silja, Swedish baritone Peter Mattei and Finnish soprano Karita Mattila. Sellars says he "took the starch out of the Bugs Bunny version of opera" — with productions like the wrenching story of how the nuclear bomb was created in composer John Adams' Grammy award-winning "Doctor Atomic.

The PALS Children's Chorus will sing the American premiere of "The Journey of the Little Prince," based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, May 10, 11, and 12 at 7 p.m., Ellsworth Theater, Pine Manor College, 400 Heath St., Brookline. Composed by Gerald Wirth, the artistic director of the Vienna Boys Choir, the opera will be sung by all the children of PALS, which is based in Brookline. For tickets and details, visit www.palschildrenschorus.org. Andreae Downs

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- The opening night of an opera about the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica in Bosnia will be dedicated to the hundreds of people who died after terrorists seized a Russian school last week, an official said yesterday. The "Srebrenica Women" opera, inspired by the worst massacre of Bosnia's 1992-95 war, opens in Oct. 15 in Sarajevo. The opera, composed by Ivan Caviovic with a libretto written by Gojko Bijelica, deals with the suffering of the women whose husbands, sons and fathers were killed in July 1995 when Bosnian Serbs overran Srebrenica, at the time a...

The PALS Children's Chorus will sing the American premiere of "The Journey of the Little Prince," based on the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, May 10, 11, and 12 at 7 p.m., Ellsworth Theater, Pine Manor College, 400 Heath St., Brookline. Composed by Gerald Wirth, the artistic director of the Vienna Boys Choir, the opera will be sung by all the children of PALS, which is based in Brookline. For tickets and details, visit www.palschildrenschorus.org. Andreae Downs

First of two parts. Part two will appear next Sunday. The church was packed, the 198-member chorus seated, and the orchestra ready to launch into Verdi's Requiem. Barbara Quintiliani, the star, walked tentatively up the three stairs leading to the stage. She wore a wrap to help conceal the scars on her chest and arms, a reddish wig to hide her thinning hair. The Quincy-born soprano, 35, has been known for her spectacular voice, a powerful, soaring instrument that critics have likened to molten gold or gleaming steel.