La bohème is an opera in four acts, composed by Giacomo Puccini to an Italian libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, based on Scènes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger. The world premiere of La bohème was in Turin on 1 February 1896 at the Teatro Regio, conducted by the 28-year-old Arturo Toscanini; its U.S. premiere took place the following year, 1897, in Los Angeles. Since then, La bohème has become part of the standard Italian opera repertory and is one of the most frequently performed operas worldwide.
Opera Australia is the principal opera company in Australia. Based in Sydney, its performance season at the Sydney Opera House accompanied by the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra runs for approximately eight months of the year, with the remainder of its time spent in the Arts Centre Melbourne, where it is accompanied by Orchestra Victoria. In 2004, the company gave 226 performances in its subscription seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, attended by more than 294,000 people.
Luciano Pavarotti, Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI was an Italian operatic tenor who also crossed over into popular music, eventually becoming one of the most commercially successful tenors of all time. He made numerous recordings of complete operas and individual arias, gaining worldwide fame for the quality of his tone, and eventually established himself as one of the finest tenors of the 20th century, achieving the honorific title The King Of High C's.
Josep Maria Carreras i Coll, better known as José Carreras, is a Spanish tenor who is particularly known for his performances in the operas of Verdi and Puccini.
Renée Lynn Fleming is an American opera singer and soprano. Fleming has a full lyric soprano voice. She has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano operatic roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. She has also sung chansons, jazz and indie rock. She speaks fluent German and French, along with limited Italian. Her signature roles include Countess Almaviva in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, Desdemona in Verdi's Otello, Violetta in Verdi's La traviata, the title role in Dvořák's Rusalka, the title role in Massenet's Manon, the title role in Massenet's Thaïs, the title role in Richard Strauss's Arabella, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, and the Countess in Capriccio.
La Vie de Bohème is a work by Henri Murger, published in 1851. Although it is commonly called a novel, it does not follow standard novel form. Rather, it is a collection of loosely related stories, all set in the Latin Quarter of Paris in the 1840s, romanticizing bohemian life in a playful way. Most of the stories were originally published individually in a local literary magazine, Le Corsaire. Many of them were semi-autobiographical, featuring characters based on actual individuals who would have been familiar to some of the magazine's readers.
Sir Antonio "Tony" Pappano is an English-Italian conductor and pianist. He has been music director of the Royal Opera House since 2002. In 2015 he received a Gold Medal from the Royal Philharmonic Society.
Nicole Cabell is an American opera singer. She is best known as the 2005 winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition.
Daniel Oren is an Israeli conductor.
Ferruccio Tagliavini was an Italian operatic tenor mainly active in the 1940s and 1950s. Tagliavini was hailed as the heir apparent to Tito Schipa and Beniamino Gigli in the lyric-opera repertory due to the exceptional beauty of his voice, but he did not sustain his great early promise across the full span of his career.
Patricia Lynn Racette is an American operatic soprano. A winner of the Richard Tucker Award in 1998, she has been a regular presence at major opera houses internationally. Racette has enjoyed long-term partnerships with the San Francisco Opera, where she has been a regular performer since 1989, and with the Metropolitan Opera, where she has performed since 1995. Also active on the concert stage, Racette has appeared with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She also received the Award for Best Opera Recording for her performance in the Los Angeles Opera's production of The Ghosts of Versailles at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards.
Ainhoa Arteta Ibarrolaburu is a Spanish classical and crossover soprano.
Giordano Bellincampi is an Italian-born Danish conductor and trombonist. He is the Music Director of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra. Previous position have included General Music Director of the Duisburg Philharmonic, Chief Conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra, General Music Director of the Danish National Opera in Aarhus and chief conductor of the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra.
Adam Spreadbury-Maher is an Australian/Irish theatre artistic director, producer and writer. He is the founding artistic director of the Cock Tavern Theatre, OperaUpClose and The Hope Theatre, and is the current artistic director of the King's Head Theatre. Spreadbury-Maher introduced the first unionised pay agreement for actors in a pub-theatre in 2011, and in 2017 introduced the first fringe creative pay agreement and gender policy.
Alyson Cambridge is an American operatic soprano. In addition to opera, she sings classical song, jazz, and American songbook and popular song. She is also known for her work as a model, actress and host.
Michael Fabiano is an American operatic tenor. Born in Montclair, New Jersey, he has performed in leading opera houses throughout the world, including the San Francisco Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Paris Opera, Teatro alla Scala, Canadian Opera Company, Teatro Real, and The Royal Opera among many others. Fabiano is the 2014 Richard Tucker Award winner and the 2014 Beverly Sills Artist Award winner, making him the first singer to win both awards in the same year.
Sonia Theodoridou is a soprano from Veria, Greece who has performed prestigious operatic roles internationally.
Domingo Garcia Hindoyan is a Venezuelan-Swiss conductor. He began his music studies as a violinist and member of the Venezuelan musical education program El Sistema. He went on to study conducting in Europe at the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève with Laurent Gay. In 2012, he was invited to join the Allianz International Conductor’s Academy, where he worked with the London Philharmonic and The Philharmonia Orchestra, under conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Sir Andrew Davis, as well as masterclasses with Bernard Haitink.
Sarah Joy Kabanuck, also known by her married name Sarah Joy Miller, is an American soprano singer.
Karin Wolverton is an American operatic soprano. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, she has performed several roles with the Minnesota Opera, including Antonia in Les contes d'Hoffmann, Donna Anna in Don Giovanni, Donna Ines in Maria Padilla and both Mimi and Musetta in La bohème among others. With that company she created the role of Anna Sorenson in the world premiere of Kevin Puts' Pulitzer Prize-winning opera Silent Night in 2011. That performance was filmed and broadcast nationally on PBS in 2013.
