Opera is "brought to life" by virtual images, replacing traditional sets with a newly "immersive theatrical experience" - or so we are...

'Bel canto' means beautiful singing. Or oops, alternatively, beautiful song. Admit it, you don't have a clear idea of what it refers to,...

If Norma was all about guilt, La Sonnambula is about innocence. Both appeared in 1831, but innocence came first. It was a rare move by...

“This is the Everest of opera,” the soprano Renata Scotto, a brilliant, controversial Norma in the 1980s, said in a recent interview....

Beautiful singing, yes, but “bel canto” set singers amazing vocal challenges, not merely for ostentatious show, but for the marriage of...

We’re leaping across Rossini’s prolific output to his final and 39th opera, so different from the scintillating comedy gems we've enjoyed...

Welcome to a world premiere, reflecting on the meeting of indigenous Australians with the European arrivals. We're starting our term with...

Gilbert and Sullivan are usually credited with inventing the patter song in opera. They're certainly responsible for the classic...

Yes, but what is it that women are the same as? Mozart's Cosi fan tutte has always been controversial, and more so more recently, for...

It’s not very subtle and not at all PC. It requires three brilliant bel canto voices from actors with a wicked amount of comic ability,...

Commissioned to write an opera to celebrate the crowning of a king (Charles X, in 1825), Rossini responded with a perky piece about a...

He started with a true rescue-opera story from the French Revolution, he blessed it with some of his most sublime music, then took a...

'Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind,' he was reputed to have remarked. And also, 'Give me a laundry list and I'll set it...

Here's the program of choices for our end of term celebration of great female roles. We start with a tantrum - the Queen of the Night...

Donizetti wrote more than 70 works over a 30-year career, eight of them in three year period, composed one of his finest in 11 days and a...

O hehrstes Wunder! Herrliches Maid! (Oh noblest miracle! Glorious maiden!) Thus sings Sieglinde to Brünnhilde, who has rescued her from...

That's the punch line of the Prize Song that wins Eva in Wagner's late and only 'comic' opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). ...

Wagner didn’t make this story up (unlike the stories of some of his operas) but it hadn’t yet developed into Pirates of the Caribbean. ...

A joke about opera most commonly features a hollering, overweight Valkyrie in compulsory horned helmet. Later this term, we’ll turn to...

As an end of term special, our U3A Opera Group is holding a concert of performances by singers chosen by our members. Here's the program...