Highlights from New Opera Season

New England Public Radio's new opera season starts on Saturday, May 12 at 1pm on 88.5 WFCR and the five translator stations in the Berkshires. Every Saturday at 1pm through December 1st, we will be presenting operas from the great American opera houses, from a world premier to the standards of the repertoire. Operas from Chicago Lyric Opera, Los Angeles Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Houston Grand Opera will be featured. New England Public Radio is committed to opera 52 weeks a year. Highlights of the new season are below.

From Lyric Opera of Chicago, bass James Morris portrays the four villains of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann (May 12); Nathan Gunn appears as Gaylord Ravenal in Jerome Kern's Showboat (June 16) and Sondra Radvanovsky and Marcello Giordani sing the roles of the doomed lovers of Verdi's Aida (June 30).  

From LA Opera on Air, a superb quartet of singers (Alexandra Kurzak, Ruxandra Donose, Saimir Pirgu & Ildebrando d'Arcangelo) play out the comedy of Mozart's Così fan tutte (July 14), Nino Machaidze and Vittorio Grigolo assume the title roles of Gounod's Roméo et Juliette (July 21) and Plácido Domingo takes on one of the great baritone roles, Verdi's Simon Boccanegra (July 28).

From San Francisco Opera, Thomas Hampson heads the cast of the new opera by Christopher Theofanides, Heart of a Soldier (September 8), Renée Fleming luxuriates in the bel canto music of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (September 22) and Susan Graham goes for Baroque in Handel's Serse (September 29).  

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