San Francisco: Calixto Bieito makes U.S. directorial debut at SF Opera

LOS ANGELES- Often dubbed CelloFest, the biggest names in the cello world — from Zuill Bailey and Truls Mørk toSol Gabetta and Yo-Yo Ma — will gather with students and fans on the West Coast to share their insatiable appetite for all things cello. The immersion festival involves the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Emerson and Calder Quartets, and the LA Chamber Orchestra under the auspices of USC.

A typical program, on May 17 at Walt Disney Concert Hall, features “dozens and dozens” of virtuoso cellists from around the world along with a new work called Threads & Tracesfor mass cello ensemble. It was commissioned by the LA Phil from British-born composer Anna Clyne, who is drawn to unique collaborative challenges. She is composer-in-residence for the Orchestre National d’Ile de France and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra after similar appointments with the Cabrillo Festival and the Chicago Symphony. The festival involves significant student opportunities; its name honors the great mid-20th century Russian-born cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, who often performed with pianist Arthur Rubinstein and violinist Jascha Heifetz, and who taught for many years at USC. (Some events are free.)

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May 16-June 5: Full details  DALLAS- The Dallas Symphony Orchestra and two of classical music’s youngest breakout stars will play a central role in the city’s second annual Soluna International Music & Arts Festival, which sprawls throughout the performing and installation spaces of Dallas’ downtown arts district. The 23-year-old composer and pianist Conrad Tao — who was first commissioned by the DSO to write a work observing the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy — will be back to perform a solo recital. And then, in festival-capping final concerts June 3-5, Tao’s latest orchestral work, Alice, will receive its world premiere led by DSO music director Jaap van Zweden. Meanwhile, DSO assistant conductor Karina Canellakis, who has been making the rounds with major orchestra debuts, will conduct a novel program called “Remix: Orchestral Myth and Legend” (May 20-21). It involves the world premiere of a multimedia component — Turo, a film by New York-based artist Anton Ginzburg. The film is designed to coordinate with live performances of Sibelius’s Pohjola’s Daughter and Wagner’s Forest Murmurs. The festival crosses freely into art and science; the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center is offering a seminar, “Music and the Brain.”

May 20-28: Full details

Music director James Conlon brings his extraordinary 37-year tenure as music director of the Queen City’s choral festival to an end this season, after which the gloriously eccentricred-brick Victorian Gothic revival hall that was built to house it (along with historic civic functions and wrestling matches) will be closed for extensive renovation. For his final fling, Conlon has chosen to revisit favorite achievements from past seasons, including a concert performance of Verdi’s Otello on May 21 (with Gregory Kunde in the title role, Tamara Wilson as Desdemona, and Egils Silins as Iago). On May 27, Conlon will lead Dvořák’s cantata Stabat Mater, which he led the first time he conducted it at the festival, in 1978, as an up-and-coming maestro of 28. New works by American composers Julia Adolphe and Alvin Singleton, both of whom Conlon has long championed, have been commissioned for the festival, which extends as usual over two long weekends. The 145-member chorus is led by Robert Porco.

May 21-June 26: Full details

A typical Opera Theatre of St. Louis festival season allows you to catch a world premiere, check out talented young American singers before they become household names, and remind yourself of the pleasures of hearing opera sung in English. With its thrust stage, clear acoustics, and good sightlines, the Loretto-Hilton Center, in suburban Webster Groves, makes opera an intimate experience. AGlyndebourne-style ambience prevails in miniature: Following the performances, patrons gather for snacks and libations in a striped party tent on the green adjacent to the theater. The 41st festival season will begin May 21 with a new production of Puccini’s La bohème, conducted byEmanuele Andrizzi and directed by Ron Daniels.May 28 will bring Verdi’s Macbeth, with baritone Roland Wood in the title role and sopranoJulie Makerov as his power-hungry Lady; Stephen Lordconducts, and Lee Blakeley directs. Strauss’ Ariadne on Naxos is next, with Rory Macdonald pacing a production both staged and choreographed by Seán Curran (June 5). This year’s world premiere will be Shalimar the Clown, opening June 11, with music by Jack Perla and libretto byRajiv Joseph, based on the novel by Salman Rushdieabout an ill-fated marriage between Muslim and Hindu entertainers in a folk troupe. OTSL artistic director James Robinson will direct, and Jayce Ogren will conduct.

May 30-July 9: Versailles Festival 2016 – Full details

To experience the French High Baroque, take a commuter train in the other direction to the placid bourgeois town of Versailles. No more than a ten-minute walk from the station,the palace lies at the end of a tree-lined avenue, a splendid, improbable mirage. Under Louis XIV, the original 15th-century chateau was expanded and enhanced with an immense tract of gardens and groves, and a huge and intricate system of waterworks. These embellishments united with architecture, the decorative arts, music, drama, and dance to bolster the Sun King’s reputation as a near deity. While performances take place year-round in the Opera House (completed less than 20 years before the Revolution), the Royal Chapel, and the Hall of Mirrors, the Festival expands its offerings into the vast gardens, the fountains, and more intimate venues like theGrand Trianon. Installations by Olafur Eliasson, this summer’s artist-in-residence, should add an unexpected note to the historic property. In the 700-seat jewel-box Opéra Royal you can see recitals by Cecilia Bartoli (May 31),Patricia Petibon and the Venice Baroque Orchestra (June 14), and Lang Lang (July 5). But to best appreciate the exquisite theater, see a Baroque opera. Hervet Niquet’s Le Concert Spirituel performs Boismortier’s comic Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse (June 11-12), andCollegium 1704 from Bratislava stages Vivaldi’s Arsilda, regina di Ponto (June 23 and 25). Even without fluency in French you’ll get the jokes in Moliere’s play Le bourgeois gentilhomme, of the Comédie Française, with Lully’s incidental music directed byChristophe Coin (June 3-5). Performances of sacred music in the Royal Chapel include the Gabrieli Consort in Handel’s Dixit Dominus (June 4) and Handel’s Ode to Saint Cecilia by the Kammerorchester Basel and the Leipzig Radio Choir (June 11). In the Hall of Mirrors you can attend aSerenade Royale, a 40-minute program of Baroque dance performed every Saturday at 6:30. From 8:30-10:50 attendees can stroll the gardens and groves, enjoying the extensive fountain display, with lights and (recorded) music, ending with fireworks just before 11. And on the final evening, the Petit Trianon, the pavilion built for Louis XV’s mistress, is the headquarters for a gala event, with mini concerts throughout the property and an open buffet (July 9), inspired by the royal fêtes champêtres of Versailles’s heyday.

June 16-July 29: Full details 

With presidential politics gobbling up the headlines this year, the nation’s second-oldest opera company is right in step with the zeitgeist as it unveils a world premiere set in the nation’s capital and rife with political intrigue.Fellow Travelers, with music by composer Gregory Spearsand libretto by playwright Greg Pierce (based on Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel), takes place at the height (nadir?) of the McCarthy era, in 1950s Washington. A young college graduate’s forbidden love affair with a State Department official devolves into deceit, betrayal, and worse. Aaron Blake, Joseph Lattanzi, and Devon Guthrie star. The first of eight performances is June 17. Playing in repertory will be more familiar fare: Strauss’Die Fledermaus, with Nicole Cabell, Nicole Haslett, andZach Borichevsky (opens June 16); Beethoven’s Fidelio,with Christine Goerke, Russell Thomas, and Nmon Ford(July 7), and Puccini’s Tosca, with Evelina Dobračeva,Marcello Giordani, and Gordon Hawkins (July 23). Performances will be given at the company’s temporary venue, the Aronoff Center for the Arts, while its regular home, the venerable Music Hall, undergoes renovation. Stars from the 2016 season will present a free Opera in the Parks concert of opera and musical theater favorites,June 26 at Washington Park.

June 24-July 17: Full details

Ordinarily one would not expect opera to thrive amid the Iowa cornfields, but DMMO is no ordinary opera company, and it is thriving just fine, thank you. One of the heartland’s leading summer opera festivals has earned distinction for presenting big works on a relatively small scale, with mostly American casts, conductors, and production teams, in a cozy, 467-seat theater at the Blank Performing Arts Center on the Simpson College campus just outside Des Moines. DMMO presents at least one opera new to its repertory each season. For the 44^th festival summer, that opera is Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, presented in its French version, with Gary Thor Wedow conducting (opening July 2). Verdi’s Falstaff opens the season June 24 with baritoneWayne Tigges as the fat knight, led by conductor David Neely. Soprano Sydney Mancasola will portray the pleasure-loving heroine of Massenet’s Manon, under Neely’s baton (June 25). DMMO will go off-site to theScience Center of Iowa in Des Moines for performances of Philip Glass’ one-act opera Galileo Galilei, July 7 and 10.

June 30-Aug. 21: Full details

High in the Colorado Rockies, opera performances play a relatively minor role in this jam-packed classical music festival that is a mecca for performers, pre-professional music students, and audiences alike. Still, the artistic level requires no apologies, and the repertoire is nicely varied. Opera Center director Edward Berkeley will stage Puccini’s La bohème (opens July 14) and Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict (Aug. 16). Representing contemporary American opera will be William Bolcom’s A Wedding, a comedic drama from 2004 based on the 1978 Robert Altman film, with libretto by Altman and Arnold Weinstein (July 28). The conductors will be Ramón Tebar,Johannes Debus, and Patrick Summers, respectively.

July 1-Aug. 27: Full details

Santa Fe Opera’s summer festival seasons attract opera lovers from all parts of the planet, as much for the diverse repertoire and top-level performances as the magnificent setting: an alluring aerie of an amphitheater perched atop a mesa in the mountains of northern New Mexico. A stage house open at the back affords breathtaking views of high-desert sunsets that more than one stage director has worked into his or her show. Almost every Santa Fe Opera season comes with a world premiere, but not this time around. Even so, the 60^th-anniversary schedule offers a canny combination of standard repertory and less-often-performed operas, and the roster is full of performers worth hearing. Barber’s Vanessa and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette will receive Santa Fe Opera premieres. Vanessa’s libretto (byGian Carlo Menotti) may be slushy hokum, but the score is prime lyrical Barber, and soprano Erin Wall should be entrancing in the title role; Leonard Slatkin conducts, and James Robinson directs (opens July 30). SopranoAilyn Pérez and tenor Stephen Costello portray the star-crossed lovers in Gounod’s Gallic tragédie lyrique, with the company’s chief conductor, Harry Bicket, presiding (July 16). Puccini’s spaghetti western, La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West), will open the season July 1, in a co-production with English National Opera that stars soprano Patricia Racette as the pistol-packing Minnie;Emmanuel Villaume is the conductor. Rounding out the season will be a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, conducted by John Nelson and directed by Ron Daniels (July 2), and Richard Strauss’ “conversation piece with music,” Capriccio, conducted by Leo Hussain and directed by Tim Albery (July 23). A footnote to the Strauss: Capriccio had its American premiere at Santa Fe Opera one year after the company’s maiden season in 1957. Founding director John Crosbyremained a tireless champion of Strauss’ music throughout his tenure, conducting every one of the composer’s operas save Die Frau ohne Schatten. 

July 1-Aug. 14: Full details

Opera is always a prime component of this ever-ambitious, seven-week cornucopia of culture at the gleaming, Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Performing Arts Center at Bard College in bucolic Annandale-on-Hudson in New York’s Hudson Valley. “Puccini and His World” is the theme of the 27th Bard Music Festival, its final two weekends devoted to exploring the Puccini paradox – 11 concerts of orchestral, choral, vocal and chamber music in all. The big highlight will be a rare revival of Iris, by Puccini’s sometime rival, Pietro Mascagni, which ushered in a wave of fin-de-siècle operatic exotica; Leon Botstein, the festival’s co-artistic director and indefatigable repertoire adventurer, will conduct. Other Puccini-era operas will be given – some complete, others in excerpts – including Jules Massenet’s La Navarraise, Arrigo Boito’s Nerone,Alfredo Catalani’s Loreley, and the final act of Puccini’s Turandot (in the Luciano Berio completion), paired with Ferruccio Busoni’s setting of the same tale.

July 8-Aug. 27: Full details

Best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, this sleepy village in Otsego County in upstate New York comes alive every summer with opera and song, courtesy of the redoubtable Glimmerglass Opera. Performances in the Alice Busch Opera Theater include classic American musical theater works along with operatic favorites old and new: it’s small-town opera with big-town class. A new production of Puccini’s La bohème in the style of the Belle Époque will launch this year’s Glimmerglass season. Christopher Alden will direct Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, with baritone Greer Grimsleydispensing close shaves as the demon barber. Rossini’s comic opera The Thieving Magpie will receive a rare U.S. staging. A new production by artistic and general directorFrancesca Zambello of Robert Ward’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Crucible will complete the mainstage offerings. Season add-ons include Sondheim in conversation with Jamie Bernstein (July 30), and recitals by soprano Deborah Voigt (Aug. 5) and mezzo-sopranoJamie Barton (Aug. 12).

Aug. 20-27: Dans les jardins de William Christie – Full details (available June 2)

If you’re very lucky – perhaps while visiting the châteaux de la Loire, or if you’re willing to drive a bit – in the out-of-the-way hamlet of Thiré, midway between the Loire valley and the Atlantic coast, you can join guests enjoying music and la vie douce “In the Gardens of William Christie.” The American-born harpsichordist and conductor, who spearheaded the revival of French Baroque repertoire, has been creating a dream landscape on the grounds of a 16th-century chateau he acquired some 30 years ago. In 2012 he opened his property for performances by the musicians of Les Arts Florissants, along with ensemble interns and students from the Juilliard School as well as the art of of the garden. Informal open-air concerts take place afternoons throughout the property (no chairs, the audience stands or sits on the grass), along with guided tours of the gardens. Evenings there are candlelight concerts by the reflecting pool, followed by a short walk to the Thiré village church for a 30-minute musical meditation to end the evening in peaceful contemplation. For the second year, winners of a competition for young landscape designers will construct a temporary performance space on the grounds. Unlike the intense and glitzy festival scenes at Salzburg or Bayreuth, Christie’s week invokes more Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, an experience of nature enhanced by the gardener’s art, by exquisite music, and by their enjoyment in good company. It’s akin to the original delights of Versailles, smaller in scale but more relaxed and inclusive. And isn’t that the most restorative kind of vacation?