Minnesota Opera

Tune in this Wednesday at 8 p.m. as we broadcast the Minnesota Opera's 2010 production of "Orpheus and Eurydice." Also, hear John Birge's interview with performers David Daniels and Susanna Phillips.

Alison Young is joined by the President of St. John's University Father "Bob" Koopmann. He loves to listen to opera on his many drives to The Cities, and he tells me he needs to stay on cruise control or when the music gets dramatic, he might speed up to 90!

The winners of the Schubert Club's annual Student Scholarship competition perform in the Maud Moon Weyerhaueser Music Studio. Hear them at 4:30 p.m. on Classical MPR every day this week.

Bernard Herrmann was an Academy Award-winning American composer whose unforgettable collaborations include Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock, Citizen Kane with Orson Welles and Taxi Driver with Martin Scorsese. Minnesota Opera's new production of his only opera celebrates the centennial of the composer's birth and is the first major revival of this forgotten masterpiece since it was written in Minneapolis in 1951.

In this week's edition, Alison Young talks with one of our newest residents in Minnesota, Allan Naplan, the president and general director of the Minnesota Opera who only started work here last week. He shares some of his favorite arias as well as one of his own pieces that was the inaugural wake-up song for NASA astronauts.

In this week's edition, Alison Young talks with Ely Echo publisher Anne Swenson. When Anne was in her twenties, she lived in Italy and walked daily through the pine forest Respighi writes about in his tone poem "The Pines of Rome." Enjoy a sunny playlist from the far north.

MPR's 2011 Artists-in-Residence Cantus have been sharing the microphone with Alison Young each month, taking your questions and requests and sharing some of their favorite music. There's never enough time to answer all the questions on-air, so they've kindly agreed to do so online. Check it out, and send another if yours was missed for this Tuesday at noon's session.

Steve Staruch speaks with soprano Judith Howarth about her perfomance in the title role of the upcoming MN Opera production of Donizetti's "Mary Stuart"

It was a best-selling satire in 1927 - the classic novel by Sinclair Lewis about a drinking, brawling, womanizing football player - who becomes a suave evangelical preacher. And now, an opera. 'Elmer Gantry' has its Minnesota premier this weekend by the University of Minnesota Opera Theatre. Composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein discuss the opera with Alison Young at noon today.

Business Magazine named him one of "40 Under 40" in 2009 for his accomplishments in arts management and now Allan Naplan will take the top job at the Minnesota Opera.