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Shirley Verrett, the vocally lustrous and dramatically compelling American opera singer who began as a mezzo-soprano and went on to sing soprano roles to international acclaim, died Friday morning at her home in Ann Arbor, Mich. She was 79.

Desmond Tutu says by bringing int'l artists to perform, TA Opera House "advances Israel's fallacious claim to being a 'civilized democracy.'" Talkbacks (23) Cape Town's renowned opera troupe has rejected a call from retired Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu to cancel a performance in Israel scheduled next month. The opera's managing director Michael Williams said in a statement Wednesday that the opera would not take a political position and cut cultural ties with Israel or the Palestinian territory. Tutu, who earned a Nobel Prize for his peaceful opposition to apartheid, urged Cape Town's renowned opera troupe not to tour Israel until...

Joan Sutherland, one of the most acclaimed sopranos of the 20th century, a singer of such power and range that she was crowned “La Stupenda,” died on Sunday at her home in Switzerland. She was 83...It was Italy’s notoriously picky critics who dubbed the Australian-born Ms. Sutherland the Stupendous One after her Italian debut, in Venice in 1960. And for 40 years the name endured with opera lovers around the world. Her 1961 debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” generated so much excitement that standees began lining up at 7:30 that morning. Her...

Communism has taken over theaters in Los Angeles – the largest Spanish-speaking city in the U.S. – boasted the official publication of the Community Party USA. "Communism has taken over the stage at the Los Angeles Opera," began a review of a new Spanish opera, "Il Postino," by Mexican composer Daniel Catán, now receiving its world premier at L.A.'s opera house. The review, published in People's World Weekly, the newspaper of the Communist Party USA, hailed the Spanish-language opera and the number of Latinos present in the audience. "The fact that it is written and performed in Spanish is significant...

The internet of the future is likely to look very different from the distinct pages and sites we visit today – that was the message as Microsoft launched the latest version of their much-maligned Internet Explorer web browser. And while every major manufacturer always claims that theirs is a revolutionary product, the company that remains best known for Windows and Office might just be on the right track this time. Headlines around the world greeted IE9 as Microsoft’s most ambitious yet, while others called it revolutionary. Respected British website Techradar.com went so far as to call it “ie-mazing”. Almost since...

YouTube acts Compete. Acts that were discovered by viewers on the popular website YouTube perform live in Hollywood, hoping to win their chance to compete alongside 16 others semifinalists for the $1 million prize and the title of the most talented act in America. Jacqueline Marie "Jackie" Evancho (born April 9, 2000) is a young soprano from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Evancho was born to Michael and Lisa Evancho and has an older brother, a younger brother, and a younger sister. She started singing when she was eight years old, after watching the movie Phantom of the Opera. Her mother heard Evancho...

OK, I have a bee trifecta for you here. To begin with, I have a start with I have a stupid criminal video for you to enjoy.  What you will see is a very short video clip of two would be criminals wanting to break into a business. What the surveillance video shows is that they obviously pissed off a hive of bees. That is the swarm of bugs you see flying around the camera. The second video is a musical interlude called "The Flight of the Bumblebee" from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Tale of the Tsar Saltan.  It...

On Saturday, April 24th, the Opera Company of Philadelphia teamed up with the Reading Terminal Market Italian Festival for a large-scale "Flash Opera" event! Over 30 members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus and principal cast members of LA TRAVIATA performed the famed "Brindisi" in the aisles of Reading Terminal Market, entertaining hundreds of Philadelphians, and proving that the perfect accompaniment for all things Italian is a little Verdi! The Opera Company sincerely thanks members of the Opera Company of Philadelphia Chorus and cast for generously volunteering their time and talents... BRAVI TUTTI!!... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zmwRitYO3w

Charlotte Church today showed signs of her strain at being a single mother bringing up two little ones. Charlotte, 24, struggled with a host of bags, toys and bottles as she took her two children out for the day. Meanwhile her estranged fiancé, peramatanned Gavin Henson, has been out living it up, looking relaxed and care-free.

Ahmedido Domingo (aka Ahmadinejad), Erdogano Pavarotti (aka Erdogan) and Assad Carreras (aka Bashar Assad) singing about the benefits of terrorism. full text: Based on Funiculi Funicula Sung by the Three Terrors: Erdogano Pavarotti, Assad Carreras and Ahmedido Domingo Erdogan: I say -- it's time that I restore the Empire Let's get to work (let's get to work!) Because in Europe everybody knows that I'm just a jerk (he's just a jerk!) Assad: And I , the serial killer who should spend all his life in jail (oy vey oy vey) To reach the hearts of all the world media We...

Sydney Opera House will be reaching out to an entirely new audience demographic next month when it stages a musical event aimed at canine listeners. The performance, which will take place on the northern boardwalk outside the venue, is the work of New York wife and husband team Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed. The music stems from works that Anderson has been writing over the last 11 years for her rat terrier named Lollabelle. Most of the pitches will be too high for the dogs’ owners to hear, but they will be able to monitor the sounds on meters and,...

Traditional phishing attacks are reasonably easy to avoid, just don’t click links in suspicious e-mails (or, for the really paranoid, any e-mail). But Firefox Creative Lead Aza Raskin has found a far more devious way to launch an attack — by hijacking your unattended browser tabs. The attack works by first detecting that the tab the page is in does not have focus. Then the attacking script can change the tab favicon and title before loading a new site, say a fake version of Gmail, in the background. Even scarier, the attack can parse through your history to find sites...

If American Idol had existed during the 40's, this would have gone viral... Florence Foster Jenkins was a soprano who became famous for her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability. Click here to be transported to a place of ethereal beauty...

Blanche Thebom, one of the great operatic mezzos of the postwar era, died at her home in San Francisco on March 23. Increasingly isolated due to dementia, Miss Thebom, as she was known to most, or “Miss T,” as she was called by many of her students, died a week after contracting pneumonia.During her career, Thebom was prized equally for the rich maturity of her voice, her face and figure (which also received their due in a number of films, including The Great Caruso), her profound acting ability and innate musical intelligence, and even her long tresses (at one time,...

The premiere of the opera War and Peace, to take place in Glasgow later this month, will not only be staged on a staggering scale, but a world first for Sergei Prokofiev’s original score, reconstructed without its Soviet-era political editing, has never before been staged.

Even though I guess I shall be glued to the screen, I can’t say I’m thrilled to see that ITV is about to launch (on January 15) a new “classical reality” show entitled Pop Star to Opera Star. The basic idea isn’t a bad one - pop performers like Kym Marsh, Darius Danesh (now Darius Campbell), and Alex James will be trained and ‘mentored’ to sing opera arias...

If you go by conventional thinking Internet Explorer 8 is the slowest of the current web browsers, followed by Opera, with Firefox in third place, Safari taking the silver and Google Chrome leaping ahead in first. Time for a rethink. Opera has announced v10.5 of its browser this week in an ‘alpha’ format (read: this isn’t even beta yet, casual users stay away). Despite this, however, it represents a potential game changing update for the company. According to the respected benchmark of suites run by specialist site betanews.com Opera 10.5 not only boosts the speed of its web browsing performance,...

The Met opened its season on Monday night with a new production of Puccini’s “Tosca” by the adventurous Swiss-born director Luc Bondy. When Mr. Bondy and the production team appeared on stage during curtain calls, the audience erupted in boos. If there were cheers among the jeers, they were drowned out.

Sarah Palin isn’t vice president. And she probably won’t ever be president. Heck - she’s not even a governor anymore. But the Alaskan pol has achieved one measure of fame - someone’s written an opera about her. “Say It Ain’t So, Joe,” a presentation by Guerilla Opera, opens Saturday at Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater. The work is composer Curtis Hughes’ musical take on America’s favorite moose-hunting winker, you betcha. It focuses on that contentious - and sometimes comical - debate from October 2008 between Palin and Joe Biden, though the show also includes cameos from Hillary Clinton, Gwen Ifill,...

She was dumped by a boyfriend who no longer wished to follow her around the world. She found herself heartbroken and sick and finally went to a doctor who said he had news -- at 39, she was with child. Impossible, she replied: Throughout her previous 17-year marriage she tried repeatedly to get pregnant,