ARIA SERIOUS?

... has a nice ring to it, you have to admit. The lovely Opera Chic in Milan has posted a little profile on Ferruccio "Ace of Bass" Furlanetto's Don Quixote here in San Diego. You can click here to read it . He'd have my vote. -- Edward

Reviews. Sweet glorious reviews. We have a few in from Saturday night and they all have a theme in common. Don Quixote is a special night out. I'd been saying that all along but it is finally nice to have that verified by people who are smarter than I am. I tend to like reviews, good and bad, because I have a bunch of very smart critics who manage to teach me a thing or two each opera. I have my opinions watching each opera and sometimes it is nice to see that I'm noticing things that people who are paid to notice things are noticing. But really, let's be honest; I really only like the good ones. And boy these are good: "What do you get when you acquire the services of Italian basso Ferruccio Furlanetto to perform [the] opera’s title role here in San Diego?", asks David Gregson of SanDiego.com ."Eyes full of tears and a heart that feels a little floppy until you work off your vapors in a standing, cheering ovation." Marcus Overton of the San Diego Union...

Ferruccio Furlanetto and Ian Campbell spent a rainy Monday morning on KPBS radio talking about Don Quixote . Some of you might have heard it live. Some of you might have missed it. If you missed it, KPBS radio has just made a podcast available so you can listen to it at your leisure. You can click here to listen to the MP3 . It runs about 30 minutes. You'll want to turn your bass down, Ferruccio is just that commanding. So commanding in fact that throughout the interview all the women at KPBS ran down into the studio to peer at Ferruccio through the glass window. Next time, we'll bring a bottle of Windex. For those of you in the San Diego area, a special one-hour version of OperaSpotlight: Don Quixote airs tonight featuring wonderful interviews with Ferruccio, Ian, Denyce, Eduardo and the designers that brought this one to life. For a complete listing of dates and times for OperaSpotlight: Don Quixote , click here . For those of you outside of San Diego -- sorry, we won't ...

Don Quixote is a special opera. It is cute, quirky and clever. It is going to make you laugh in unexpected places and then it going to punch you in the gut. Last night in rehearsals, insanely tired and really wanting nothing more to do than go home, it hit me that I was watching something incredibly magical, one of those things that you only come across once in awhile. Even when you are actively searching for them. And yeah, it doesn't hurt that Ferruccio Furlanetto is singing at me from twenty feet away. He's the soul of this opera and an incredible chameleon. Last night he transformed from the tall well-built person I've worked with for 8 years into a frail wisp of a man. And there is a moment, when Sancho leads Don Quixote away at the end of Act IV, where Ferruccio makes a simple gesture that is so heartbreaking, so honest and so profound it took my breath away. But enough about what I think. Below are some images from last night's rehearsal taken by photographer Cor...

Tosca is onstage and the cast of Don Quixote has arrived including Ferruccio "Ace of Bass" Furlanetto, the beautiful Denyce Graves and Eduardo Chama who sings Sancho Panza. Last time Eduardo was in town we spent an afternoon listening to Don Quixote in my office and he told me one of his favorite roles was Sancho Panza. At the time he was quite sad because the role of Sancho Panza had been cast to someone else. But all things happen for a reason and Eduardo is now in town rehearsing the role he dreamed about many years ago. To celebrate, below are two clips of Eduardo as Sancho from the Teatro Colon in Argentina. You can catch Eduardo in the flesh when we open Don Quixote on Valentine's Day. -- Edward

We're pretty excited about Don Quixote this coming February. First, it is an opera we haven't done since 1969 and it is an opera I've personally never seen before. It features Ferruccio "Ace of Bass" Furlanetto and Denyce Graves. It is also a new production that we're designing here so I get to see all the creative people I work with get even more creative. Take Missy West for example. Missy is our Costume Shop manager but Missy has never designed an opera for us. Sure, she worked on the Zandra Rhodes production of The Magic Flute and The Pearl Fishers and designed many of the costumes for Wozzeck , but for Don Quixote Missy is the costume designer and that's pretty cool because nobody knows costumes better than Missy. Missy just shared some sketches of the costumes she's creating and we've decided to share them with you. We're currently building these costumes in the shop, so once some of them are finished we'll put some pictures up...

The second part of a series looking at what it takes to put on an opera on the stage by San Diego Director of Production, Ron Allen. You can read the first part here . Up above is a design sketch from Act II of Don Quixote. *** There are some advantages to a rented production. You know what you are getting; most of the technical problems have been worked out and it is much cheaper than building new. A rented production will cost $40,000 - $80,000 for sets and costumes. A new production usually cost a minimum of $300,000 and often cost as much as $1 million or more. (Ian has often complained he could build a house for that amount of money. I explain, yes, he could but a house doesn’t have to be engineered and built to take down and put in the back of trucks afterwards or to rotate or change into another house in 20 minutes.) The biggest issues with a rental production are – the set is someone else’s vision and not the companies and how will it look in our theatre. We can usually find a...

Ron Allen is our Director of Production. Ron is a busy man and rightly so -- he's in charge of everything you see on our stage as well as everything that you don't. There's a lot of activity behind the stage, under the stage and above the stage, too, more than most people realize. Making small talk with Ron one morning, I suggested he should blog about what it takes to put an opera together since we are creating a new production of Don Quixote (that's a sketch up above from Act I). Apparently people take me seriously and Ron has put together a wonderful look at what it takes to make an opera happen. There's more to it than any of us can imagine so we've decided to make a series about this topic. So without further ado, here's Part One of Fifteen Million of "Putting An Opera Together." *** Edward asked that I write about how long it takes to put an Opera together and to keep it short... What!? When I consider the hundreds of decisions that have to b...