Liam Bonner is easy to find online. He has 1,999 Twitter followers, and he tweets about more than his busy opera schedule. He writes hash-tagged one-liners about beer, Pennsylvania sports teams, Pittsburgh (his hometown), dogs, art, and bad customer service.

“It took awhile to find my voice, but I’ve been dangerous ever since,” the 34-year-old opera singer said over coffee in downtown Portland. Read More

Think you’ve seen enough Carmens? Rest assured one more will be worth dressing up for. This time, Carmen will be far more complex than a seductress. Read More

Take superstar Kurt Elling, who crooned an hour-plus of ‘60s-era Sinatra hits in the first week of the annual Portland Jazz Festival, which ran from Feb. 18-March 1. Read More

Always drawing jazz royalty and trailblazing musicians, the Portland Jazz Festival has conscientiously booked international names — but not always world-famous ones, at least not yet. Read More

A party piece? A masterpiece? A piece of 19th-century confection that resists staleness? Read More

The production reprises Seattle Opera’s 2007 hit, so original in staging, set design, costumes, and pacing that it left audiences with a masterpiece impossible to pigeonhole by period. Read More

If any dance company avoids the obvious, it’s Portland’s 17-year-old imaginative and ultra-flexible BodyVox, which cannot be wedged into any genre or box, no matter how big and bendable the container. Ballet? Modern? Jazz? Full-stage projected videos? Computer graphics as backdrops? Opera collaborators? Wacky. Whimsical. The innovative company’s technically solid members make just about any move in a mix of styles, and make you laugh at their clever movement as they unfold, unlock and untangle. In what has evolved into a Portland starry summer tradition and star-spangled collaboration, BodyVox paired up with Chamber Music Northwest over the Fourth of July weekend. Read More

In Charlie Dennard’s multi-continental musical world, fusion is anything but a dirty word. Then again, when the term is limited to the passé, 1970s-era quasi-mind-bending melding of rock, funk and electronic music, it does translate as a four-letter word to Dennard, though he doesn’t swear too much. The 45-year-old jazz musician/ composer/Cirque du Soleil musical director is as conscious of his polite French roots reaching back centuries into American history (his label is Deneaux Music) as he is of his Southern heritage. Dennard’s southern ingredients include a childhood in Birmingham, Ala., and an adult life, off and on in New Orleans. He studied with jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis (father of brothers Wynton, Branford, et al.) in the late ‘90s at the University of New Orleans, where he earned a master’s degree in music. Read More

Love and death are opera’s go-to themes, but erase those traditional expectations when Postcard from Morocco opens Friday for a four-performance premier run at Portland’s Newmark Theater. Expect a brew of Beckett-like suspense flavored with quirky characters with such names as Woman with a Hatbox and Man with a Shoe Sample Kit. Instead of a conventional orchestra, eight instruments – guitar, alto saxophone and trombone included – will accompany the seven singers. Read More

Scottish moors and forbidding towers have ways of inspiring violence and insanity. Even Lady MacBeth’s blood-stained dress pales against Lucia’s blood-soaked wedding gown in Portland Opera’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which opened Friday at Keller Auditorium for a two-weekend run. Read More