We interrupt this 19th-century broadcast...

...To bring you a few non-Met operatic events, mostly of the 17th- and 20th-centuries, a change from my normal nonstop late-18th, 19th-, and selective 20th-century coverage around here. There is an article on non-Met opera in the NY Times today, but they missed a few things that I would consider potential season highlights (and most of them are pretty cheap, too).

1. I did catch Opera Omnia's L'incoronazione di Poppea at Le Poisson Rouge the other week, and it was utterly wonderful. Good singing, fun staging, great orchestra (orchestra? well, those folks in the pit, er, off to the side of the stage), nice venue, good beer. What more could you ask for? Maybe some Caccini next? Their future plans will be unveiled, hopefully soon, here.

2. The Wooster Group takes on opera. It's called La Didone and has some things in common with Cavalli's opera of the same title. They describe it thusly:

In The Wooster Group's production of LA DIDONE, Francesco Cavalli's opera, with libretto by Francesco Busenello, (1641) and Mario Brava's cult movie Terrore nello spazio (1965) collide in a war-like symbiosis, dropping Aeneas' ships onto a forbidding planetary landscape and forming a synergy between early baroque opera and pre-moonlanding sci-fi.

Those guys are so predictable. I totally saw this coming. Open rehearsals this month, full run in March, info here.

3. The mother of us all, La Cieca, has already highlighted an interesting production of The Tales of Hoffmann (yes, it's 19th-century, but it's on a dock in Brooklyn). Don't think I'll be able to make it, unfortunately, but you should, and tell me how it is.

4. As mentioned in the Times article, the Juilliard Opera Center will be doing an awesome-sounding triple bill of obscure works:

MUSSORGSKY / TCHEREPNIN The Marriage (Zhenit’ba) music and libretto by Modest Mussorgsky, based on the comedic social-satire by Gogol; KRENEK Heavyweight, or The Pride of the Nation, Op. 55 (Schwergewicht oder Die Ehre der Nation) a farce about European culture between the world wars, with music and libretto by Ernst Krenek; FLEISCHMANN / SHOSTAKOVICH Rothschild’s Violin (Skripka Rotshilda) music and libretto by Benjamin Fleischmann, completed and partly orchestrated by Dmitri Shostakovich, after a short story by Chekhov

Can't find a good website for this, but here's the calendar.

5. A little further down the road, looks like Philly will be the place to be this spring, particularly if you like really loud Italian stuff. AVA will be doing Respighi's La fiamma (January) and, on the traditional side, OCP's non-Zeff Turandot (February). Also one loud Austrian when Curtis Opera does Wozzeck in March (they are also producing a Peter Brooks version of Pelleas, Menotti's The Medium, and Il viaggio a Rheims, check it out).

6. No date yet, but I'll so be at Mark Morris's Haydn opera mentioned in the Times article.

Also, I so needed this (below). See you after La Didone, and then Opening Night (from the park, naturally). That is all.