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It may seem unusual for a renowned film director to suddenly switch mediums and helm an opera, but such a thing has happened a number of times before: for example, Woody Allen has directed Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” for the Los Angeles Opera; legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has helmed Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” for the Aix-en-Provence Festival; Julie Taymor has directed Mozart's "The Magic Flute" for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as well as the Broadway musical adaptations of "The Lion King" and "Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark"; Roman Polanski has helmed Verdi's “Rigoletto” for the Bavarian State Opera; William Friedkin has directed a version of Alban Berg’s “Wozzeck”; and Werner Herzog has helmed a number of Wagner productions including “Doktor Faust,” “The Flying Dutchman” and “Parsifal”. Read More: Terry Gilliam: My Life In Eight Movies Terry Gilliam is among this elite group,...

Patrice Chéreau dead at 68: French director best known for ‘Queen Margot,’ gay-related dramas (photo: Patrice Chéreau; Isabelle Adjani in ‘Queen Margot’) Screenwriter, sometime actor, and stage, opera, and film director Patrice Chéreau, whose clinically cool — some might say sterile — films were arthouse favorites in some quarters, has died of lung cancer in Paris. Chéreau was 68. Born on November 2, 1944, in Lézigné, in France’s Maine-et-Loire department, and raised in Paris, Patrice Chéreau began directing plays in his late teens. In the mid-’60s, he became the director of a theater in Sartrouville, northwest of Paris, where he staged plays with a strong left-wing bent. Later on he moved to Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, and in the ’80s became the director of the Théâtre des Amandiers in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. His 1976 staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth was considered revolutionary. Patrice Chéreau...

Rome -- Bruno Bartoletti, an orchestra conductor who was associated with the Lyric Opera of Chicago for a half-century, and who championed modern opera as well as classic works, died on Sunday in his native Tuscany, a day before his 87th birthday.

The Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, where the maestro had served as artistic director from 1985 until 1991, said Bartoletti died in a Florence hospital after a long illness.

In a career that saw Bartoletti conduct well into his 80s – he directed Giacomo Puccini's `'Manon Lescaut"at Florence's Teatro Comunale in February 2011 – he served as the first music director of Chicago's Lyric Opera, starting as guest conductor there in 1956, when he was relatively unknown.

Bartoletti was 30 when the then 2-year-old Lyric Opera needed a replacement conductor for Giuseppe Verdi's `'Il Trovatore" in 1956. Baritone Tito Gobbi endorsed him, and Bartoletti made his American debut with the company. He conducted...

1. The Philharmonia Orchestra’s Wozzeck Alban Berg’s compact shocker of an opera is about cruelty and despair, but the Philharmonia’s concert performance in Avery Fisher Hall on November 19 was a celebratory event. Rare as it is to experience the score in the flesh, it’s rarer still to hear it done with such a volatile mixture of vitriol and love. The libretto, which Berg adapted from Georg Büchner’s episodic and truncated 1837 play, crackles with disdain. “I saw you pissing in the street like a dog!” exclaims a doctor to Wozzeck, his human lab rat. “Haven’t I proved that the sphincter is subject to the exercise of the will?” The score can be ferocious, too, full of lurid chords and panicky rhythms, but in the right hands—the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen’s, say—it’s also a thing of garish beauty. Salonen balanced the opera’s lush and bitter sides,...