Despite my huge reluctance at returning from a glorious month in my native Hawaii, once more I realized exactly why I live in New York when I attended Joyce DiDonato’s utterly magical concert and release party for her ravishing new CD, “Stella di Napoli.” It celebrates the birth of bel canto opera in 19th century Naples, and the event took place at the Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn, a working metal factory by day alongside that toxic canal which, on the night of October 3, managed to look as enchanting as any in Venice. The concert was presented in collaboration with LoftOpera, one of those essential small companies that has rushed into the breach left by the sad demise of New York City Opera. It is staging “The Barber of Seville,” and offered samples, featuring wonderful Mexican baritone José Adán Pérez in the title role, who sang with such ardor, musicality, and acting élan  that I am not going to miss this production for the world (loftopera.com).

The evening, however, was DiDonato’s all the way. Renee Fleming has somehow been dubbed “The People’s Diva,” but I feel this appellation suits DiDonato far more, and she proved it once more with her singular choice of this perfect, unexpected venue and the passion with which she performed and even lectured the audience — comprised of many young hipsters, obviously opera newbies — about the history and wonders of bel canto. She made this miraculous era of music-making fully come to life, and her soaring voice beautifully served the arching melodies of Bellini, Donizetti, and Rossini, as well as lesser known but quite marvelous composers like Pacini and Mercadante.

In a spirit of hospitality combining both Brooklyn and Italia, free beer was served all night, as well as pizza after the concert. Instead of being whisked away to some luxe after-soiree with millionaire patrons, DiDonato simply changed out of her gorgeous Vivienne Westwood sequined gown into a more casual sequined party shift, grabbed a brewski, and hung out all night. She told me how excited she was to be doing Handel’s “Alcina” at Carnegie Hall on October 26 (Carnegiehall.org), for which Westwood is again designing her dress, “making my character’s transformation something wonderfully reptilian!”

Anti-gay bullying is one of DiDonato’s special concerns, and she performed beautifully at last spring’s terrific “Broadway Battles Bullying” benefit at NYU and was recently filmed by PBS singing Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament” at the Stonewall Inn, “in tribute,” she said, “to victims of this kind of senseless violence which I cannot believe is happening in this day and age. (joycedidonato.com)

Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato topped classical music charts internationally this fall with her new release “Stella di Napoli,” but she uses pop culture to describe what’s on the album: “It’s as if you found out the Beatles have 20 hit tunes they didn’t release.”

The album revisits opera’s nearly lost hits of 19th-century Naples, including deep cuts by well-known composers, such as Rossini and Donizetti, plus once-famous composers whose star status faded over the centuries. Three arias on the album have not been previously recorded.

She’s now taking these rarities directly to 21st-century Brooklyn hipsters: on Friday, she’ll perform a live-streamed launch concert at the Gowanus Ballroom, an alternative arts space sharing a warehouse with a metal shop in a neighborhood best known for its polluted canal.

Though this Grammy Award-winner has sung on the world’s greatest stages – from the Metropolitan Opera in New York to La Scala in Milan – her unconventional choice of venue supports her goal of expanding the audience for opera. “The whole idea is, how can we bring it into a space that is welcoming, cool and fabulous… getting it out of the formality of the theater?” she said.

The concert will be streamed live on the web, via the online platform livestream.com, and is something of a double bill: The famed mezzo-soprano will share the stage with LoftOpera, a scrappy Brooklyn-based company known for full-length productions in loft-style spaces and $30 tickets.

“They are young singers and musicians. I’m trying to shine a light on them,” said Ms. DiDonato. “They’re doing opera — hard-core opera — and they sell out in matter of hours.”

LoftOpera (whose members all have day jobs) has never before worked with a star of Ms. DiDonato’s caliber, but they found common ground in their shared mission. “Opera doesn’t deserve to die,” said LoftOpera general manager Brianna Maury.

A similar sentiment fueled Ms. DiDonato’s work on “Stella di Napoli,” which takes its name from the rarely performed opera by Giovanni Pacini. (Yes, Pacini. Not Puccini.) The majority of the music was found by musicologist and conductor Riccardo Minasi, who went to Naples hoping to unearth gems that would surprise listeners – and spark a few double takes.

Most opera buffs have a recording of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” but this album includes the world premiere recording of an aria from “Le nozze di Lammermoor” by Michele Carafa. And if you know Bellini’s “La sonnambula,” you’ll want to hear “Il sonnambulo” by Carlo Valentini.

If the names aren’t familiar, that’s the point, writes Mr. Minasi in the album’s liner notes: “We came across many neglected composers who deserved a place on the musical Olympus where history had placed only Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti.”

Ms. DiDonato, who wears a Hollywood-worthy dress by Alexander McQueen on the album cover, again reverts to popular culture to describe the creativity of the mid-1800s in one Italian town: “That short period in Naples evokes the sense of what Andy Warhol’s factory must have been like.”

And for the upcoming joint concert, LoftOpera is taking the factory reference quite literally. Said Ms. Maury: “We are going to have someone welding at the top of the show.”

If anyone is looking for a sign that opera is on the verge of a big change they need to look no further than the launch party for Joyce DiDonato’s new album, Stella di Napoli. Not surprisingly, it has made huge international waves not only for its quality, but its uniqueness as well. It is a set of unheard and forgotten songs from the 19th Century by prolific composers like Rossini and Donizetti. However, it’s not so much the album’s content that have turned heads these past few weeks, rather it’s the location DiDonato chose to hold the party. Under the Sputnik-inspired, Swarovsky chandeliers of the Met? Nope. At the recently saved and rejuvenated San Diego Opera? Guess again. In the center of Napoli? Wrong. Loft Opera, a tiny but innovative new opera company in Brooklyn, received the call of lifetime: opera’s darling, superstar mezzo wanted to honor Loft’s ardent, avante-garde company with a concert performance of her new album.

You can pick your jaw up now. But why Loft? Well, it is Brooklyn – perhaps the universe’s epicenter for everything hip. But this goes beyond trying to sell an album. This is an acknowledgement from the top tier that a shift in the identity of opera is not only necessary, but is already happening. Moreover, DiDonato indirectly makes it acceptable in the eyes of those who believe that the last century of opera performance is the only way to go; with taste buds merely able to palate that which is grand.

DiDonato uses her status generously and responsibly. In one simple gesture she shows the world that she supports the growth of new companies and innovative new places – big or small. There are not many other forces out there that are doing the job as well. The media is always outdating opera, even when they don’t mean to. For example, on Tuesday the Wall Street Journal posted a blog on Speakeasy on this very topic. Pia Catton summed up the events nicely, but in her attempt to weave a recurring pop-culture theme with the hip atmosphere of Loft she trivializes the connection that DiDonato tries to make in her comparisons of opera, arts and eras. Why is it surprising that Ms. DiDonato refers to the Beatles or Warhol’s factory? Could it not just be that a beautiful, sexy and talented singer liked the look of a Hollywood-style dress enough to feature it on the cover of her album and that, like most conversationalists do to emphasize a point, relate an unknown but important subject to that of a popular and historically significant subject. If Ms. DiDonato had been coached on how to best promote her new album and was trained to connect to a pop-culture paradigm then one would have to believe names like The Strokes, Nirvana, Michael Jackson, and Spencer Tunick would have graced her tongue. Instead, this deceptively harmful prose, which is laden in the media’s handling of the classical arts, only serves to separate the form even more. It creates a sense of surprise and border between the reader and the artist. Why distance it? For, if opera’s due credit were given, we’d find that it is more avante-garde, more innovative and perhaps more risqué when compared to any other popular form. It needs no such qualification through prose, but merely to be talked about in a relaxed, modern tone.

We applaud you Ms. DiDonato for using your stardom in a generous way. Such public acts seem to be working as Joshua Bell even did such a thing in Union Station this week playfully giving a second chance to the thousands that passed him by years back when he performed there unannounced. Needless to say, he had onlookers in a tizzy. I’ll bet you’re curious if there are tickets available for Loft’s big night this Friday. Well, maybe you can be one of the lucky ones to score a ticket to such an internationally curious, yet intimately plugged-in occasion.

Joyce DiDonato will launch her new “Stella di Napoli” CD with a intimeperformance in partership with LoftOpera at the Gowanus Ballroom in Brooklyn. The event will include selections from the disc as well as a preview of the company’s impending production of Il barbiere di Siviglia. Details on tickets and such are all on the LoftOpera website.

On the heels of the demise of the nonprofit that was trying to plan for a big celebration in Balboa Park in 2015, San Diego’s cultural community took another blow Wednesday with the news that the San Diego Opera would finish the year and be done forever.

The company will put on the rest of its performances for 2014. The board had only one dissenting vote in the decision to shut down after this year. The general and artistic director, Ian Campbell, would not say who it was.

Campbell told me that he and the board of directors were watching with increasing fear over the last couple of years and that they decided they would not ethically be able to take money for tickets for the 2015 season knowing that they were likely to run out of money.

“It’s not a case of overspending or being profligate. It’s the revenue side, which was the issue,” Campbell said.

Campbell said they were “losing to death many of our strongest supporters.” And he said other cultural institutions in town should also think about what will happen as their donors get older.

“I do have a concern that we’re losing many supporters as they age and if you look at the programs of the opera, symphony, Playhouse, Old Globe, many of the same names are listed. This should be a wake-up call,” Campbell said.

There seemed to be a lot of people wondering why the Opera didn’t alert the community to this and whether there was a donor or several who could have come through.

“All of the people you’re thinking of were asked,” Campbell said.

I asked Bill Stensrud, a former member of the board of the Opera and of Voice of San Diego, what he thought of the news. He was a major donor and is an aficionado of classical music and opera.

“Grand opera costs too much to produce on a regional scale,” Stensrud wrote to me in an email. “The markets will not support it and no entity downsizes well.”

Then he added a vision of the future of opera. He said it’s in offerings like Loft Operain New York, a group of young artists who stage opera-infused performances in lofts and other new spaces.

“Their performances are exciting, low-cost and I have been the oldest person in the place every time I have gone.  This is a sustainable model,” Stensrud wrote.

Campbell really wanted people to know that the shows for this year are going on. He’s most worried, he said, about his staff.

“This whole thing is upsetting and frightening for everyone. If anyone is looking for good not-for-profit staff, we’ve got them,” Campbell said.

The Opera’s most recent financial report is here. Campbell said last year’s budget was $17.4 million and this year would come in under $15 million.

The L train was out-of-order and the night was freezing, but that didn’t stop a crowd from packing into a Bushwick warehouse earlier this month for the last weekend of Puccini’s La Bohème, staged by the Brooklyn-based LoftOpera.

Larisa Martinez as Musetta in LoftOpera’s “La Bohème” (click to enlarge)


Started in 2013 by Daniel Ellis-Ferris and Brianna Maury, the organization is aiming to bring opera to a community that might not ordinarily engage with the art form, which in its usual venues can seem untouchable, distant, and stuffy. LoftOpera also gives young performers a place to perform, and get paid.

“There were interesting shows happening in the Brooklyn loft music space, but opera was noticeably missing,” Ellis-Ferris said in an interview with Grey magazine. “Many of my opera singer friends told me that there were limited opportunities for young people to sing in the city.”

LoftOpera dedicated their first year to Mozart, tackling Don Giovanni last May and staging the Marriage of Figaro in Gowanus in November. La Bohème, the classic drama of artists attempting to survive in 1830s Paris, was transferred to a Brooklyn setting, its libretto slimmed down a bit, and its usually elaborate stagings left behind for benches on three sides of the 1896 warehouse off the Jefferson stop, the subtitles projected onto one of the worn brick walls. It wasn’t a total modernization, though; the music was still the enthralling emotional arias, and a full orchestra filled the broad space with layers of sound that you don’t ordinarily get from the cheap seats in the family circle of Lincoln Center (tickets were an affordable $20, and sold out).

I first heard about LoftOpera when a colleague mentioned that it had been popping up on her Instagram feed. Curious, I looked it up, and it turns out to be exactly what it sounds like: Operas staged in Brooklynloft spaces. The company grew out of a community of music students, and has mounted three productions since May 2013. On Saturday, I went to the closing night of its most recent show, La bohème, held in an Ingraham Street warehouse near the Jefferson L stop. Here's what I learned:  

La bohème belongs in Bushwick
It's perfect. After all, the story—about a group of young, broke artists living and loving in 1830s Paris—inspired the musical Rent. The warehouse location didn't just lend underground cred to the proceedings, it was exactly the right contemporary setting for Puccini's bohemian tale. Other small 2014 updates—including four-letter expletives and a Lower East Side shout-out—helped localize the already relatable theme of trying to make it in the big city.

Opera audiences aren't snooty
Despite the complete outage of the L train, it was a full house, and people had to be turned away at the door. Uptowners arrived via MTA shuttle bus, respectable-looking middle-aged audience members rolled up their coats and sat on the floor, and during intermission, an elderly couple with a cane waited stoically in line for the Porta-Potty without so much as a peep about standing in the cold on an industrial Brooklyn block.

Opera might be getting cool
Currently, LoftOpera has cultural cachet: It's young, it has an underground flavor, it operates outside the highbrow establishment, and it's cheap enough ($20 tickets, $5 drinks) to entice an audience that the Met doesn't. Each production's run is short and increasingly buzzed-about, and we're told more are in the works. So keep an eye on LoftOpera's website—this is the thing you want to go to before your friends have heard about it.

The last place you’d expect to find opera at all, let alone good, exciting opera, is in still-scrappy Bushwick, Brooklyn. But that’s where a new and vital company called LoftOpera has popped up for a two-weekend run of Puccini’s La Bohème in a performance that is as true and moving as any I can remember in 40 years of opera-going.

The venue is not an opera house or even a theater, but rather a vast warehouse called The 1896—coincidentally the very year La Bohème had its world premiere, in Turin. It is ordinarily used for photo shoots and dance parties. The distressed brick walls and exposed beams echo the chic, romanticized bohemianism of Puccini’s opera. Jay Scheib has arranged the room into a broad playing area surrounded by three banks of bench seating.

More important, the singing was generally very fine. Most spectacular was tenor Won Whi Choi as the poet Rodolfo, unfurling a big, virile sound that rocketed fearlessly up to a high C so secure he dared to run across the stage while holding the note. His baby face and slightly clumsy demeanor took the sting off the character’s jealousy: Here was a reminder that the “young artists” of Puccini’s opera are in fact teenagers with raging hormones. For once, the plot’s incessant fallings in and out of love made perfect sense.

Soprano Liana Guberman made an offbeat Mimi, the voice a little cooler than what one expects in Italian opera, but she compensated with passionate phrasing and an unusually rich lower register. Zaftig and blond, she was hardly the wispy dark girl described in the libretto but rather something of a kook, popping prescription pills and nonchalantly crafting an origami flower out of Rodolfo’s writing paper. She and Mr. Choi achieved an easy, funny rapport onstage, continuing even into the curtain calls, when the “dead” Mimi gave her helplessly weeping co-star a warm, supportive hug.

Unusually for any opera, even those performed on the grandest stages, this cast was without a weak link. Joshua Jeremiah’s dark, grainy baritone gave the painter Marcello a dash of menace, and Pnini Grubner’s sleek bass traced an elegantly lyrical account of the philosopher Colline’s moving farewell to his overcoat—or, in this case, his hoodie. The outsider of the group was Joel Herold’s Schaunard, his preppy outfit suggesting a slumming frat boy. Despite some overcomplicated stage business involving a birdcage, a live canary and a handgun (don’t ask), he landed the character’s fast-paced, first-act solo with easy, pinging high notes.

In a more traditional venue, Larisa Martinez’s light soprano would likely get lost in Musetta’s lively music, but in this intimate setting, she stopped the show with a purring Waltz song climaxing with a perfect diminuendo on high B. And she managed this feat while dancing on a table in 6-inch heels.

Bass Paul An played the traditional doubling of the usually unrelated roles of the landlord Benoit and Musetta’s sugar daddy, Alcindoro, with a relaxed, firm bass. In this version, the two seemed to be the same person under different names, an offbeat but intriguing variation.

Ordinarily, the weakest link in any small opera production is the orchestra, with short rehearsal times resulting in poor ensemble and atonal intonation. What a delightful surprise it was, then, that LoftOpera’s 19-player band sounded just fine, with warm tone and sensitive responsiveness to the singers’ phrasing. From his vantage point tucked into an alcove behind the main seating area, conductor Dean Buck supported the voices smoothly. The dynamic range is spine tingling, from practically whispered lines to great thundering vocal climaxes that seemed to set the whole building throbbing.

Among the bundle of smart ideas stage director Laine Rettmer had for the work was updating the original 1840s setting to modern-day Brooklyn. This was more than just a gimmick, since the bohemians onstage were virtually indistinguishable from the young, hipster-y audience. A particularly winning detail came at the end of the first act: As the young lovers walked off into the night, Mr. Jeremiah danced across the stage holding aloft a giant white balloon on which was projected a photograph of the moon. It was silly, but it was young, fresh and heartbreaking, which is exactly what La Bohème is meant to be.

Would that some of LoftOpera’s pixie dust had rubbed off on a new production of Massenet’s Werther that limped into the Met Feb. 18.  Compared to La Bohème, it’s an uneven work, two weak undramatic acts followed by two that are both theatrically gripping and filled with rich melody. The opera’s virtues, however gentle, deserve a better frame than Richard Eyre’s fusty, fussy staging and Alain Altinoglu’s noisy, lurching musical direction.

The singing, too, was problematic. This Werther is a vehicle for superstar Jonas Kaufmann, who was in frustrating form opening night. He is indubitably a star, so magnetic that his first appearance onstage won a burst of applause from the audience, and the voice is absolutely world class, distinctively dark and powerful. But as in last season’s Parsifal, Mr. Kaufmann sometimes sings so softly he can hardly be heard for minutes at a time; it sounds as if he is performing only for himself. When he pulls the stops out, as in a passionate reading of the third act lament “Pourquoi me réveiller,” the effect is electrifying, but you can’t help thinking: Where has this voice been all night?

Mr. Kaufmann wasn’t helped by Mr. Eyre’s staging, which pointlessly updates the action from the proto-Romantic “Sturm und Drang” era of the 1780s to circa 1900, when the hero’s brand of morbid sensitivity would read as decadence rather than idealism. Designer Rob Howell enveloped the tenor in an ill-fitting black trench coat that hung around his slim, broad-shouldered frame like a woolen muumuu. Mr. Eyre seemingly directed him to play Werther glum and introverted, which in combination with his undersinging left the character practically invisible.

Curiously, Sophie Koch, as Charlotte, the demure married woman Werther adores, played the drama queen in her Met debut, twirling onstage for her first entrance like an operetta diva and then carrying on in the second half of the opera as if she were doing Didon’s death scene from Les Troyens. In further contrast to Mr. Kaufmann, she tended to push her voice, so the cool, elegant timbre somtimes turned hard and blowsy.

Another debuting artist, baritone David Bizic, made a strong impression in the thankless role of Charlotte’s husband, Albert, his voice crisp and colorful. Even costumed as Anne of Green Gables, soprano Lisette Oropesa shimmered as Charlotte’s little sister, Sophie, her light soprano darting like a starling though her tiny arias.

I could go on about what was wrong with this Werther: the irrelevant, distracting video projections that looked like opening credits for a Lifetime movie or the bizarre set for the first two acts that looked like an explosion in a picture frame factory. But what’s the point? This Werther is dead on arrival. If you’re looking for McCourt’s “hints of a promise,” check out the Met’s Prince Igor—or make the trek to Bushwick.