Elementary Opera
A diverse group of fifth graders learn the fine points of collaboration as they write, produce, and perform their own original opera. Produced by Jeff Lunden.
View ArticleDiva Trouble
Producer Naomi Lewin looks behind the scenes at the highly competitive world of opera.
View ArticleElementary Opera
A diverse group of fifth graders learn the fine points of collaboration as they write, produce, and perform their own original opera.(Originally aired: January 27, 2001)
View ArticleNow Playing: Elvis Costello
Musical chameleon Elvis Costello continues to defy classification on his new album, For the Stars, a highly unusual collaboration with mezzo-soprano Anne Sophie Von Otter.
View ArticleRenee Fleming & Me
Hair colorist Michael Stinchcomb attended the opera 32 times last season. He idolizes this world class soprano Renee Fleming — but he wasn’t always an opera lover.
View ArticleRenee Fleming & Me
Hair colorist Michael Stinchcomb attended the opera 32 times last season. He idolizes this world class soprano Renee Fleming — but he wasn’t always an opera lover.(Originally aired: August 4, 2001)
View ArticleImperfect Voices
From Maria Callas to Lou Reed, Kurt Andersen and WNYC’s John Schaefer talk about what makes a voice "flawed.”
View ArticleDer Schneeman
Erich Wolfgang Korngold wrote this opera when he was just 13. It’s performed here by the BBC philharmonic, conducted by Matthias Bamert.
View ArticleNow Playing: La Bohème
This week film director Baz Luhrmann's version of La Bohème opened on Broadway and, much like his movie Moulin Rouge, the result is a rich, sexy, galvanizing blend of comedy, tragedy and theatrical...
View ArticleAida
In 1871, the composer Giuseppe Verdi staged a savage war as a backdrop for a romantic story. He set his opera Aida in the glory days of the pharaohs. Aida premiered in Egypt to mark the unveiling of...
View ArticleSpecial Guest: Greg Sandow
Kurt Andersen and the writer and composer Greg Sandow find what's right and wrong with the symphony orchestra in America, and consider what it needs to do to survive. Greg Sandow is a widely published...
View ArticleBonus Feature: Rinde Eckert
Composer Rinde Eckert’s opera And God Created Great Whales is a meditation on creativity, memory, madness, and Moby-Dick. Produced by Jeff Lunden.Audio coming soon.
View ArticleHaroun and the Sea of Stories
This fall a new opera called Haroun premiered, based on the book Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie. In 1989, Rushdie was forced into hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini and declared that...
View ArticleFallen Woman
When Verdi’s opera La Traviata, or The Fallen Woman, premiered in 1853, audiences cried over the story of Violetta, the original hooker with a heart of gold. But as Eric Molinsky reports, in some ways...
View ArticleSpecial Guest: William Bolcom
William Bolcom is a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer of song cycles, chamber pieces, rags, symphonies, and operas — including A Wedding and McTeague in which he collaborated with director Robert Altman....
View ArticleJerry Springer: The Opera
Turning Jerry Springer, the infamous American TV talk show, into an opera for the London stage was an artistic gamble in its own right. But it got more complicated recently when the opera aired on the...
View ArticleSalman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories
In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini — like an evil sorcerer in a fairy tale — condemned Salman Rushdie for heresy, essentially marking the writer for death wherever he was. Rushdie left his family and went...
View ArticleThe Librettist of Venice
How did an 18th century Italian Jew become over the course of his life a Catholic priest, a bookseller, a professor of Italian, a grocer in the United States -- and the librettist of some of the best...
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You'll Love This
This weekend saw the opening of 'I am Love,' an Italian film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Tilda Swinton (performing in Italian). It's beautiful to watch, but what's really exciting is how...
View ArticlePhantom of the Opera
Gabriel von Wayditch wrote 14 operas, some telling R-rated stories and one that's the longest in history. But hardly anyone's ever heard of him. Music curator Frank Oteri discovered von Wayditch back...
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