Mary Edwards

When Union Avenue Opera opens its 2014 season on July 11 with Verdi’s La Traviata, it will be with a company that is vastly different than the one that mounted its first production 20 years ago. UAO founding artistic director and conductor Scott Schoonover recalled that he had just finished his degree, wanted a chance to conduct and knew a number of singers who needed work. He had just moved to St. Louis to take the position as music director of Union Avenue Christian Church and the church encouraged him to mount an opera there.

Web marketer Romondo Davis and his wife love to go to concerts so frequently take advantage of the many free concerts offered in the St. Louis area.  After frequent posts on Facebook about concerts they attended, a friend suggested  that they start a website promoting them.

For four years, the Missouri Chamber Music Festival has offered a series of chamber music concerts in the month of June at the First Congregational Church of Webster Groves. But for the first time, the festival will conclude with a grand finale at The Sheldon Concert Hall in Grand Center.

When Opera Theatre of Saint Louis approached Ricky Ian Gordon about writing an opera for mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, he was thrilled. “Stephanie is sort of a phenomenon. She’s probably the only singer that makes the Met feel too small,” said Gordon to Cityscape host Steve Potter. “It’s very exciting writing for a singer that bears that kind of vocal stature on the stage.  And the minute her name was mentioned to me as someone to write an opera for, I said ‘Gertrude Stein’ because I thought the personality has to match the voice.”

It’s safe to say that the life of every person is at some time touched by cancer. That is the unifying factor in the 5th Annual “Sing for Siteman” benefit concert. Eight principal singers from Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ 2014 season will perform in a concert directed and accompanied by pianist Carol Wong on June 9 to benefit Siteman Cancer Center’s Discovery Fund. The emcee will be St. Louis Post-Dispatch Classical Music Critic Sarah Bryan Miller.

A new production of an old favorite opens Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ 2014 season.  Fashion icon Isaac Mizrahi returns as director and designer of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Opening May 24, the production features tenor Sean Panikkar in the role of Tamino and noted Mozart expert Jane Glover conducts.

The members of the Circus Flora family were stunned and saddened when their beloved patriarch David Balding passed away on Friday, May 9. One of the members of that family is theater director Cecil MacKinnon who is also known as Yo-Yo, the Narrator. She joined Cityscape host Steve Potter to remember Balding.

In 2012 St. Louis County voters approved a $.06 tax increase to fund a capital improvement plan for the St. Louis County Library. As Phase I of the project gets underway, the library’s new director Kristen Sorth was Don Marsh’s guest on St. Louis on the Air to discuss the project and new initiatives at the library.

When a friend asked St. Louis vocalist Denise Thimes to come to Detroit to sing for her father’s 75th birthday party, she didn’t tell her until she got there that one of the guests was Aretha Franklin. “I was shaking in my boots, to say the least,” Thimes told Cityscape host Steve Potter, but she pulled herself together and sang for the diva and the others in the audience. “She wanted to hear “The Way We Were” and I really tried to sing it to the best of my ability.  And she was very pleased with that.”

Although former Post-Dispatch columnist Elaine Viets now lives in Fort Lauderdale, both of her book series have St. Louis connections.  Her Josie Marcus Mystery Shopper series is set in Maplewood while the main character in her Dead-End Job Mystery series is a St. Louis woman on the run in South Florida.