Verdi

Superstition comes easily to the colorful, slightly crazy world of the performing arts. La forza del destino will be performed at 8:15 p.m. Saturday and Oct. 12, 7:30 p.m. Oct. 10 and 3 p.m. Oct. 14 at Lyric Opera House, 110 W. Mount Royal Ave. $46 to $132, 410-727-6000, baltimoreopera.com.

Macbeth, poisoned by "vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself," remains one of Shakespeare's most arresting characters. Given the size of the bloody Scottish king's ego, and his fears, he's a natural for operatic treatment. Same for his ethically challenged wife. Giuseppe Verdi provided that treatment, resulting in one of his earliest (and often undervalued) masterworks. Washington National Opera's new production of Macbeth at the Kennedy Center - presented in conjunction with the citywide Shakespeare in Washington festival - underlines the theatrical flair and sweeping melodic power of Verdi's faithful homage to the Bard.

It was a calculated act of kindness that changed the opera world. A prescient impresario thrust a libretto with a biblical plot into the hands of a reluctant and depressed Giuseppe Verdi, who was then thinking about never composing again after the exceptionally modest success of his first opera and humiliating flop of his second. Something about that unsolicited libretto caught Verdi's imagination and led to his first certified hit, Nabucco - and the birth of his genius. Nabucco 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, 8:15 p.m. Friday, 3 p.m. Sunday, Lyric Opera House, 140 W. Mount Royal Ave. Tickets $45-$127.

J. Ernest Green and the Annapolis Chorale and Chamber Orchestra reached a new artistic pinnacle last weekend in concert-setting performances of Verdi's La Traviata. The music director's promise to "put the audience in the thick of the action, close to the singers so that music and drama envelop them" was fully realized, creating a memorable experience for the audience at Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts. On opera stages in Brazil, Paris and Hawaii, Green has become known as "a singer's conductor."

In 1982, the ever-provocative stage director Jonathan Miller famously put Verdi's Rigoletto into a time machine and hit the 1950s button, while turning on an equivalent geography-spinner. As a result, this opera about love, hedonism, physical deformity, paternal devotion and the cruelty of fate in 16th-century Mantua took place in a Mafiosi-milieu of New York's Little Italy. Rigoletto Opera Vivente, 8 p.m. Thursday and Saturday at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, 811 Cathedral St. Tickets $22-$42.

Faith didn't come easily, if at all, to Giuseppe Verdi. He saw too many failings in humankind to believe much in divine goodness, let alone an afterlife. But when confronted with the death of poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni, someone he idolized, Verdi turned to the ancient Latin Mass for the Dead to express his feelings. In his Requiem, the composer spoke for believers and nonbelievers alike about the fear of death and the nature of supplication. Understandably, coming from Italy's greatest creator of operas, Verdi's Requiem owes as much to the theater as to liturgical idioms.

In the 110 years since its premiere, La Boheme has become one of the world's most famous - and favorite - operas. It was discovered by mainstream filmgoers in the 1987 movie Moonstruck and by Broadway theatergoers in Baz Luhrmann's 2002 adaptation that moved the action forward from 1840 to 1957 Paris. But Opera Verdi Europa's production of Giacomo Puccini's classic opera at the Bob Hope Performing Arts Center on Nov. 8 - the second offering in the Naval Academy's Distinguished Artists Series - was restrained and slow to come alive.

Since its Parisian premiere 150 years ago, Verdi's I Vespri Siciliani - The Sicilian Vespers - has ranked among the also-rans of his operatic entries. Other than the overture and maybe one or two arias, the work just can't get a firm hold on the public. Some of the trouble is easily spotted. The plot creaks noisily. The music dips in quality here and there. And, even when the original third-act ballet is cut, as in Washington National Opera's new production at the Kennedy Center, the piece is not exactly concise.

When the Baltimore Choral Arts Society scheduled the monumental Requiem by Giuseppe Verdi for this season, no one could have known it would be performed in the wake of high-profile events that would have much of the world thinking anew about death and how to approach it. On Saturday night, as the fears and prayers that propel Verdi's music filled the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, it was hard sometimes to treat the experience as purely musical. There seemed to be nothing at all remote about the ancient Latin text, its images of the faint and weary, the groaning supplicant, the cross of suffering, the day of tears and mourning.

You've heard that those who can, do; and those who can't, teach. Well, sometimes, those who can, do - and teach, too. Victor Danchenko, for example. The Russian-born pedagogue, a veteran faculty member at two leading conservatories, Curtis and Peabody, gave an instructive recital Tuesday night at An die Musik LIVE. He demonstrated not just the calm authority you would expect from a professor and a competition-winning Moscow Conservatory graduate, but an unabashedly old-fashioned, romantic style.