"Best Of Everything in Opera" 2004-2005 Season

OperaOnline.us announces its 2004-2005 top awards selections are just about ready ready to go.

(PRWEB) July 11, 2005 -- With 45 opera performances to choose from, OperaOnline.us announced today that its selections for the "Best of Everything in Opera" for the 2004-2005 opera season are now near completed and in a matter of weeks will be ready for unveiling in its September Internet publication "OperaOnline.us". "We have a few more operas to see before the season closes out," said OperaOnline.us' owner, Paul Joseph Walkowski.

"This was a difficult year," he said. "We had to make some tough choices, but after months of wrestling with who would be awarded top honors, we feel we have a pretty credible and interesting line-up to unveil. When we wrap up in August, we will have an exciting offering for our thousands of readers."

This is the second year OperaOnline.us will be announcing awards for Best of Everything, and according to its founder, interest just seems to be growing and growing. "We initially intended to leave the article up for a month, but then found that toward the end of the first month interest increased, so we left it up a second month, and new visitors wanted to see what we said, so we left it up a third month -- and on and on it went, until we decided to leave it posted on our front page for the entire opera season. It's one of the most visited sections of our web site."

Taking the idea from the Academy Awards, Walkowski readily admits that the selections are subjective and based on the reviews of two reviewers: himself, and Joseph Giannino, an opera fan who reviews for OperaOnline.us in D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia. Walkowski reviews operas from New York to Maine. "It's a long haul," Walkowski says, "and a busy season, especially since we wratcheted up the number of operas we do each year."

According to Walkowski he has been asked to review and link to his site more operas than he can attend. "It's not that I can't get there," he said of the interest companies have shown in being featured on his website, "it's that I can't afford to make the trips. It's that simple." Walkowski says that he's now looking for corporate and/or commercial advertisers to help defray the costs of travel. "I truly regret that I had to decline reviewing Opera Theatre of Pittsburgh's "Ring Cycle" Walkowski said. "We just did a feature story on Jonathan Dove, the composer who condensced Wagners nineteen hours into eleven, but the cost of travel from Boston to Pittsburgh, while only a couple hundred dollars was just too much for a small enterprise like mine."

While the Internet provides a "worldwide forum", and the OperaOnline.us site offers a central location for opera companies and singers to catch up on what's happening in the northeastern part of the United States (the site get an average of 25,000 verified hits a month), Walkowski says, he trys to remind people that his trips are paid for out of his own pocket. "I need deeper pockets," he says philosophically.

Money crunch or not, he says, his site managed to do 45 operas last season. "I want to add more operas," he said, "not reduce the number. And to do this, and pay my writers a nominal fee for their efforts (OperaOnline.us also has one writer, Stefan Hogan, who writes about opera from Bratislava, Slovakia)will take about $5,000 a year. And so that's what we're selling a spot on our page for. The spot is for the entire year."

Until that patron is found, Walkowski says, he will continue business as usual and do as many operas as he can to meet the growing demand his features and reviews bring to the site. "When we name everything from best male singer to the best set designer, best lighting designer, best chorus, best theater -- and the 'best of' a lot more, we draw readers, singers, opera companies, directors and fans of opera. The popularity of the site has grown beyond my expectations."

In addition to opera reviews, OperaOnline.us also has an extensive archive of past articles featuring conductors, singers, and artistic and general directors. "We also do about three commentaries a month, have an extensive CD/DVD section, and do daily updats as news reaches our desks that we think might interest readers, " he said.

Go to any seasrch engine, Walkowski says, and type in OperaOnline.us, and "we'll usually pop up right at the top of the list."

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