Presents stories of more than 300 operas, with musical examples. Also gives dates, places, and casts of significant premieres and revivals of each work.

“Delightful and anti-reverential”—Sunday Times (London) With an encyclopedic knowledge of opera and a delightful dash of irreverence, Sir Denis Forman throws open the world of opera—its structure, composers, conductors, and artists—in this hugely informative guide. A Night at the Opera dissects the eighty-three most popular operas recorded on compact disc, from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte. For each opera, Sir Denis details the plot and cast of characters, awarding stars to parts that are “worth looking out for,” “really good,” or, occasionally, “stunning.” He goes on to tell the history of each opera and its early reception. Finally, each work is graded from alpha to gamma (although the Ring cycle gets an “X”), and Sir Denis has no qualms about voicing his opinion: the first act of Fidelio is “a bit of a mess,” while the last scene of Don Giovanni “towers above the comic finales of Figaro and Così and whether or not [it] is Mozart's greatest opera, it is certainly his most powerful finale.” The guide also presents brief biographies of the great composers, conductors, and singers. A glossary of musical terms is included, as well as Operatica, or the essential elements of opera, from the proper place and style of the audience's applause (and boos) to the use of subtitles. A Night at the Opera is for connoisseurs and neophytes alike. It will entertain and inform, delight and (perhaps) infuriate, providing a subject for lively debate and ready reference for years to come.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 31st International Conference, ISC High Performance 2016 [formerly known as the International Supercomputing Conference] held in Frankfurt, Germany, in June 2016. The 25 revised full papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers cover the following topics: Autotuning and Thread Mapping; Data Locality and Decomposition; Scalable Applications; Machine Learning; Datacenters andCloud; Communication Runtime; Intel Xeon Phi; Manycore Architectures; Extreme-scale Computations; and Resilience.