Opera

Longtime soap opera actress Maxine Stuart, 94, died June 6. She had regular roles on The Young and the Restless and The Edge of Night. Her daughter, Chris Ann Maxwell, told the Los Angeles Times her mother died of natural causes at home in Beverly Hills. Ms. Stuart began her career in the New York theater. She had small movie roles but was best known for her TV work, which included guest appearances on shows such as Peyton Place, NYPD Blue, and Judging Amy. She received a 1989 Emmy nomination for her role as a piano teacher in The Wonder Years.

Some big careers have grown up behind two inscrutable facades on Spruce Street, and now those buildings have grown to three. The Academy of Vocal Arts, long resident at 1918 and 1920 Spruce, acquired the brownstone at 1916 five years ago. But the recession and the related dip in the school's endowment prevented breaking through, renovating, and fully annexing it. The training program for opera singers bided its time, though, and this fall, after...

The houselights dim, the conductor brings down the baton and the curtain goes up on the 11 o'clock news. That's the way it is when Channel 12 airs John Adams' opera Nixon in China (3 p.m. tomorrow). The opera, obviously, is based on the momentous visit in 1972 of President Richard M. Nixon, his wife, Pat, and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to China. History changed in those five days, China began to open its doors and world political balances shifted radically. But is an opera a documentary?

In our town, we like to think we have it all at holiday time - the Pennsylvania Ballet's million-dollar production of The Nutcracker, the Philly Pops' jazz-lush standards, a Philadelphia Orchestra Christmas series of high orchestral-butterfat content, and any number of Messiahs. But there's an important piece missing in action, something you can't see and hear. Something you should. And something that's a lot more than a holiday chestnut - in fact, a piece that could be the answer to what ails a lot of arts groups both short- and long-term.

When it comes to opera, there's Vienna. There's Milan. New York. Now there's Pennsauken. Yes, Pennsauken - the town of 34,000 where an opera company that started in a living room is now hosting an American premiere. Mozart and Friends Festival, a Pennsauken-based community opera group, will present an American premier of The Beggar's Opera on Nov. 27 and 28 - an opera filled with colorful characters such as prostitutes, crooks and shady gentlemen. Beggar's is the fifth performance sponsored by Mozart and Friends, a nonprofit group that began in 1988, when Melinda Gaffney and 10 neighbors staged a performance of Mozart's The Magic Flute for their family and friends in her crowded Pennsauken living room.

Richard Strauss worshiped at the shrine of Mozart. Strauss, composer of gargantuan works that used orchestras of more than 100 players and incorporated wind machines, nevertheless proclaimed his admiration of Mozart's transparent instrumental pieces and the clarity of the operas that Mozart wrote with Lorenzo da Ponte. Der Rosenkavalier was, to Strauss, the counterpart of Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro, and when Strauss came to write the music for Die Frau ohne Schatten, he had Mozart's Die Zauberflote in mind as his model.

Arrigo Boito's great cantata on the Faust theme, Mefistofele, was staged Monday night at the Academy of Music in a way that argued for its continuing life as a cantata. The work, which will be repeated Friday, is the third in the Opera Company of Philadelphia series of operas on the Faust theme and the first with Paata Burchuladze in the pivotal role of Mefistofele. The choice of Burchuladze was significant, for the young Georgian bass is singing at the top of his form, his voice ringing through its full range.

Lee Breuer, librettist and director of American Music Theater's newly revived hit, The Gospel at Colonnus, was back in town Friday night. Lulu was back in town, too: Lulu, the 15-year-old nymphet who preceded Nabokov's Lolita. Few remember Frank Wedekind, the turn-of-the-century German playwright who created her and inspired Georg Pabst's film noir and Alban Berg's opera. Now, Breuer and composer/trumpeter Jon Faddis have made another Lulu opera. Lulu Noire simplifies the storyline Berg used and pares it down to five singers.

As Ilana Davidson rehearses her role in Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis, she concentrates on singing the right notes, finding the right place on stage, and listening for cues. The 23-year-old opera student at the Curtis Institute of Music can take in the beautiful score and appreciate the power of its story. But it won't be until the production at Curtis has ended its four-performance run, which begins today, that she'll be able to begin to think about the opera's composer and the circumstances under which the work was written.

Orchestra 2001, one of the area's more imaginative ensembles, concludes its season with excerpts from Andrew Rudin's brand new opera, The Three Sisters, based on the play by Chekhov. Soloists include the engaging mezzo-soprano Suzanne DuPlantis. The chamber orchestra, led by James Freeman, also will unveil a new work by Curtis student Shailen Tuli, which won the group's recent composition competition. Orchestra 2001 at Swarthmore College's Lang Concert Hall, College Avenue and Route 320, Swarthmore at 8 tonight and at the University of the Arts' Laurie Wagman Hall, 311 S. Broad St., at 8 p.m. Sunday.

Longtime soap opera actress Maxine Stuart, 94, died June 6. She had regular roles on The Young and the Restless and The Edge of Night. Her daughter, Chris Ann Maxwell, told the Los Angeles Times her mother died of natural causes at home in Beverly Hills. Ms. Stuart began her career in the New York theater. She had small movie roles but was best known for her TV work, which included guest appearances on shows such as Peyton Place, NYPD Blue, and Judging Amy. She received a 1989 Emmy nomination for her role as a piano teacher in The Wonder Years.

Some big careers have grown up behind two inscrutable facades on Spruce Street, and now those buildings have grown to three. The Academy of Vocal Arts, long resident at 1918 and 1920 Spruce, acquired the brownstone at 1916 five years ago. But the recession and the related dip in the school's endowment prevented breaking through, renovating, and fully annexing it. The training program for opera singers bided its time, though, and this fall, after...

Bruno Bartoletti, an orchestra conductor who was associated with the Lyric Opera of Chicago for a half-century and who championed modern opera as well as classic works, died Sunday in his native Tuscany, a day before his 87th birthday. The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, where the maestro had served as artistic director from 1985 until 1991, said Mr. Bartoletti died at a Florence hospital after a long illness. In a career that saw Mr. Bartoletti conduct well into his 80s - he directed Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut at Florence's Teatro Comunale in February 2011 - he served as the first music director of Chicago's Lyric Opera, starting as guest conductor there in 1956, when he was relatively unknown.

Her first concern was The Scene. Patricia Schuman had never sung Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, in Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face . But when Opera Philadelphia called to offer the role, it wasn't the unusually short notice - two weeks before the first rehearsal - that gave her pause. How would this production handle the opera's most notorious nonmusical element? Would the depiction of fellatio be nudged in a direction more or less explicit? "When I saw that they had already chosen the director, I asked to see the sets and costumes, and that told me a lot," Schuman said.

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Any other conductor would test an audience's loyalty with a Philadelphia Orchestra program featuring particularly bizarre modern music. But Simon Rattle knows his people. And though he programmed György Ligeti (as might Christoph Eschenbach), and, at one point, swiveled around and yelled toward the audience (as did Riccardo Muti), there was no loss of good will and, in fact, a standing ovation on Thursday for Ligeti's Mysteries of the Macabre . A significant ingredient was Barbara Hannigan, the Canadian new-music diva whose charisma, voice and unreserved sense of showmanship were put to great use in a scene from the Ligeti opera Le Grand Macabre , in which she plays a police chief hysterically, nonsensically warning that the end of the world is near.

Nancy Gustafson has canceled her performance as the Duchess of Argyll in Opera Philadelphia's June production of Thomas Adès' Powder Her Face . The singer has been sidelined while recovering from emergency dental surgery, the opera company said. Soprano/mezzo-soprano Patricia Schuman will take the part. She has sung Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni and Contessa Almaviva in Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera, Ilia in Idomeneno at La Scala, Alice Ford in Falstaff at Covent Garden, and Vitellia in La Clemenza di Tito at the Salzburg and Glyndebourne festivals.

"GOOD MORNING, Tattle readers. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read this first item about Tom Cruise signing on to play Ethan Hunt in a fifth edition of 'Mission: Impossible.' As always, should any member of your Tattle force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions, but please make sure they transfer their Daily News subscription to a young, living relative. This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck. " According to the Los Angeles Times , the $700 million worldwide box-office gross of 2011's "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol" has led to a "Mission" change.

MICHAEL ROSATI had never sung in an opera, but he was eager to participate when he had the opportunity to be part of the chorus in a production of "Aida" in New York's Central Park in June. So what if he was in his early 80s? It made no difference to him. He still had a voice and he was practicing to lend that voice to the special demands of opera. But it was not to be. He died Saturday of cancer. Michael Rosati, an Air Force veteran who worked in the family plumbing business and as a pipe fitter at the old Philadelphia Naval Shipyard and whose passions included singing, coaching baseball and golf, was 82 and lived in Malvern, Chester County.

NEW YORK - Five years in the making, star baritone Nathan Gunn's high-concept, high-style recital Wednesday at Carnegie Hall's Zankel auditorium could be heard as a precursor of his leading role in Jennifer Higdon's forthcoming Civil War-era opera Cold Mountain , co-commissioned by Opera Philadelphia and the Santa Fe Opera. The Anglo-American program concluded with Dooryard Bloom , a 25-minute Higdon work for baritone and orchestra that's among her best, heard here in the premiere of a new version replacing full orchestra with the Pacifica Quartet and pianist Julie Gunn, the singer's wife.