Canto Virginia 2025 Kicks Off With A Powerhouse Masterclass

Two days after a cohort of 20 select local and international singers arrived for this three-week program, Canto Virginia held its first event of their Midsummer Opera Dream festival on…

A Tremendous Salome Closes Pappano’s First Season with the LSO

Mahler, Ravel and Schoenberg all agreed that Richard Strauss’s Salome was amongst his greatest works and in a performance as compelling as this one it would have been almost convincing…

The Nine Jewelled Deer in Aix

Or was it ten? One lost count. But that was early in the evening of the telling of this sort of parable with accompanying instrumental improvisation by six earnest musicians. …

Charlottesville Opera’s The Pirates of Penzance: The Way Gilbert and Sullivan Should Be

In the charming city of Charlottesville in central Virginia lies a gem of an opera company that performs at the wonderful Paramount Theater nestled in a lovely square. The venue…

Shakespeare Opera Theatre’s Romeo and Juliet: Sumptuous Romance in the heart of Northern Virginia

Over the past ten years, Shakespeare Opera Theatre has made a name for itself by combining Shakespeare’s plays with operatic adaptations of his work. Managing director Dr. Lori Lind’s encyclopedic…

La Calisto in Aix

Dutch stage director Jetske Mijnssen transferred Francesco Cavalli’s whimsical 1651 comedy La Calisto from its native Venice to France, one hundred years later — 1751, where the arts of an…

DMMO’s Dutch Treat

It proved to be smooth sailing as Des Moines Metro Opera thrillingly met the substantial challenges of Wagner’s seminal work, The Flying Dutchman. They started by assembling a nonpareil cast…

Stunning Cunning Vixen in Iowa

Given the miraculously spellbinding production of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen at Des Moines Metro Opera, New Mexico just may have to cede its motto: Land of Enchantment. There is…

A Superb World-Premiere Recording of Leonardo (not da) Vinci’s Didone abbandonata (1726) from the Florence May Festival

This is one of three Leonardo Vinci recordings that I’ve had the privilege of reviewing in recent years. The other two were Siroe re di Persia (from the renowned Teatro…

Louise in Aix

Most of us know “Depuis le jour” from Louise, but few of us know Gustave Carpentier’s opera Louise. The Aix Festival has just now reintroduced the opera in a production…