Premiered in 1675 as a concert work, until now, Alessandro Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista has never been staged. Cue INseries, always striving to do something new and daring, starting their…
Year: 2025
Youthful flair in Paisiello’s Don Quixote at Naples
Paisiello was one of the composers closely associated with the important operatic tradition of 18th century Naples. By the time he came to study in the city in the mid-1750s,…
Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir present a composer who catches you by surprise
It was all going so well for him. He was already a celebrated opera composer, having made opera buffa something of a calling card, and in just 23 years had…
In from the cold: Schumann’s Das Paradies und die Peri at Hamburg State Opera
Fashions come and go. What might be hailed by one generation is often ridiculed by the next one. That was the fate of Schumann’s secular oratorio Das Paradies und die…
Dead Man Walking in San Francisco
Though one may chafe at the dramatic and musical naïveté of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, you will admit that it packs a wallop. A man is summarily murdered in…
Rigoletto in San Francisco
San Francisco’s 1932 War Memorial Opera House (honoring the city’s WWI dead soldiers) is among the world’s more lavish examples of theater architecture, surpassed, in my experience, only by the…
Hasse’s Attilio Regolo
Here’s a welcome treat from the radio vaults in Dresden: the first (and only) recording of one of Johann Adolf Hasse’s most important and most demanding operas. Fortunately, the performance…
Sunday in the Park with Lyric, 2025
On 7 September 2025, Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its annual concert in Millennium Park, during which a preview of the 2025/2026 season was combined with additional highlights from traditional…
He Who Laughs Last, Lasts Longest: Salieri’s La locandiera
For those familiar with Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus film, it was Salieri who had the last laugh. He outlived Mozart by 34 years, not dying until 1825, so this year marks…
Clare Presland & The Rape of Lucretia with English Touring Opera
Clare Presland sings the role of Lucretia in English Touring Opera’s new production of Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, opening at London’s Hackney Empire on 4 October before touring across…