Photographer David Leventi's Romanian grandfather trained as a cantor and dreamed of a life as an opera star in the great concert halls of Europe. Instead, he ended up in a Soviet prison camp, performing for his captors, and later, after emigrating to the U.S., practicing arias in his living room. Prompted by his grandfather's thwarted ambitions, Leventi set out to photograph the world's most prestigious opera venues, taking the singers' center-stage perspective as his vantage point. "My presence in these houses was like living out a dream for him," says the young artist, whose pictures are compiled in the new book Opera (Damiani, $50). From the Opera Royal at Versailles (shown on the previous page) to Zaha Hadid's Guangzhou Opera House in China, Leventi captured each space using large-format eight-by-ten-inch film, composing lushly detailed images that reflect the influence of his mentor, architectural lensman Robert Polidori. Each shoot was an all-consuming hours-long process that Leventi compares to the musicians' own onstage experience. "I wasn't singing, but I was putting myself there," he observes. "The entire project could be seen as a piece of performance art."
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