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Ira Siff (born February 15, 1946) is an opera director, singer, teacher, journalist, and reviewer. He is currently commentator of the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts. IRA SIFF is a New York-based voice and interpretation teacher, performer and weekly commentator on the Saturday-afternoon Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Internationally acclaimed stage director, voice teacher, author and founder of the Gran Scena Opera.

Siff was born in New York City, the son of a stock broker. He began attending the Metropolitan Opera at the age of 15. At university he obtained a degree in Fine Arts. He studied singing privately during the same period, eventually realizing he preferred voice to the visual arts. He began to teach voice and sing professionally as a baritone-tenor.

Siff formed La Gran Scena, an opera parody company, in New York in 1981 "as a tribute to the opera diva".

Ira Siff is a native New Yorker who grew up on the standing-room line of the old Metropolitan Opera, worshiping the famous singers of the 1960s. A graduate of the Cooper Union with a degree in fine arts, Mr. Siff also studied voice, making his debut as a tenor in 1970.

For the next decade he performed roles in opera, operetta, and musicals in New York, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, Circle in the Square, Playwrights Horizons, and many other venues. Turning to cabaret, Mr. Siff created an act using vocal parody of opera, jazz, and other styles of music. In 1981, he founded La Gran Scena Opera Co. di New York, the internationally acclaimed travesty troupe, whose gifted falsetto “divas” spoofed opera with great affection for over two decades, in New York annually and on tours to some of the great festivals, theaters, and opera houses of the world, including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Edinburgh Festival, the opera houses of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Caracas, Wiesbaden, and Berlin, the Munich Festival, Heidelberg Castle Festival, Venice Festival, Wexford Festival Opera and Belfast Festival (Ireland), Covent Garden Festival, Barcelona Olympics Festival of the Arts, Madrid’s Autumn Festival (performing the show in Castilian), five extensive tours to The Netherlands, and countless others. Their DVDs, “La Gran Scena Live in Munich” and “Vera…Life of a Diva,” are favorite party tapes for opera lovers. As Madame Vera, prima “donna” of La Gran Scena, Mr. Siff continues to appear as soloist in parodies of diva farewell recitals, called The Annual Farewell, and has been a guest at serious opera companies, as well as appearing on public radio for two years in New York City. Madame Vera’s DVD, “The Annual Farewell Recital” was released by VAI in 2004. Ira is proud that Gran Scena is a favorite of many opera luminaries, including James Levine, Leontyne Price, Joan Sutherland, Renata Scotto, Sherrill Milnes, Aprile Millo, the late Anna Moffo, and many others.

For the past thirty years, Mr. Siff has been a voice teacher and interpretive coach, teaching in New York, Memphis, Italy, Israel, Holland and China. He gives master classes for the Met Opera Guild and was on the faculty of the Renata Scotto Opera Academy.

In 2000, he turned to stage directing, gaining critical acclaim for his debut, a staging of Tosca starring Aprile Millo. He semi-staged Les Huguenots at Carnegie Hall, in a production starring Marcello Giordani; he has also staged Offenbach’s La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein in Copenhagen, Madama Butterfly in Lima, an award-winning Mikado in Boston, another Butterfly in New York; and directed Lucia di Lammermoor for the Sarasota Opera.

He returned to Carnegie Hall in March 2002 for Adriana Lecouvreur, starring Ms. Millo, Dolora Zajick, and Marcello Giordani; Lima for Il trovatore; and his Così fan tutte for the Canterbury Opera, New Zealand, conducted by Richard Bonynge, was highly successful. Mr. Siff and La Gran Scena gave farewell performances at the Liceu Opera House in Barcelona; he also staged Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci for the New Jersey State Opera and Die Fledermaus for the Utah Symphony and Opera. He returned to New Zealand for La traviata—for which he also designed the costumes—to Sarasota for Werther, and Carnegie Hall to semi-stage La Gioconda for Aprile Millo.

2004-05 brought critically acclaimed work on La fanciulla del west with Ms. Millo for Opera Orchestra of N.Y., Dido and Aeneas for New York Chamber Opera, Lakmé at Sarasota Opera, three Annual Comeback Recitals by Ira as Madame Vera at Symphony Space, an appearance as Vera at Avery Fisher Hall hosting and singing in the Music For Life Gala, La sonnambula for Sumi Jo at the Caramoor Festival, La bohème for Puerto Rico Opera.

In 2006 he reprised Lakmé, starring Eglise Gutierrez, in a semi-staging at Carnegie Hall, where he subsequently semi-staged La sonnambula with Ms. Gutierrez. In March 2006, Madame Vera celebrated twenty years of Annual Farewells with three sold-out recitals at Symphony Space.

Ira directed Turandot, starring Sharon Sweet, in Princeton in March 2007, returned there for Fledermaus in 2009. In summer 2007, Ira was in residency at the Tanglewood Music Center, staging a critically acclaimed Cosí fan tutte, conducted by James Levine, repeated at Naples Opera in 2008.

He returned to Tanglewood to direct the Opera Scenes program in 2008, and in 2009 to stage another highly acclaimed Mozart production, Don Giovanni, conducted by Maestro Levine; this season he adds Ariadne auf Naxos to his Tanglewood credits.

In addition to directing, singing, and teaching, Ira Siff writes features and reviews for Opera News, and CD notes for Opera D’Oro. This season he returns for the fourth year as guest commentator on all the Saturday-afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts.

Personal life
Siff, who is gay, married his partner, Dutch opera singer Hans Pieter Herman, in August 2009, in a ceremony performed by Job Cohen, the mayor of Amsterdam.