The company, accompanied by musicians from the Pittsburgh Symphony, will perform composer Jonathan Dove's reduced version of the four-opera cycle, which was first presented by England's Birmingham City Opera in the 1990s. The first half, an evening-length combination of Das Rheingold and Die Walk‹re, will be performed July 15-17. Siegfried and G‹tterd‹mmerung will follow in 2006.

Jonathan Eaton, artistic director of OTP, directs the staging, a co-production with Long Beach Opera; Danila Korogodsky is the set designer. Anthony Negus will conduct.

Eaton hopes that the performances will mark the beginning of a new summer opera festival in Pittsburgh. "Streamlining Wagner's great epic may render it more accessible to the audience without losing the authenticity of the work." he said. "This is the first experiment to see if we can get audiences in the summer because no one has done it."