Author: James Sohre

The venerable Wexford Festival’s M.O. is rehabilitating forgotten operas from the past, and few are further beyond recollection than Camille Erlanger’s competent potboiler, L’Aube rouge (The Red Dawn). The libretto…

Santa Fe Opera staged another local premiere this summer with the welcome company addition of Antonín Dvořák and Jaroslav Kvapil’s splendid opera, Rusalka, directed by the acclaimed Sir David Pountney.…

Santa Fe Opera is to be applauded for including Debussy’s inscrutable masterpiece, Pelléas and Mélisande in this summer’s festival season. This important work is more admired than loved, and a…

In Santa Fe Opera’s first ever production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a funny thing happened on the way to Hades. Our hero seems to have wandered into an imaginative but perplexing…

For several seasons now, Des Moines Metro Opera has nurtured a fruitful collaboration with the Headquarters of the Iowa National Guard at Camp Dodge in a northwest part of the…

“Every time you leave, I’ll try to let go a little more. But every time, I’ll be waiting to hear your key in our front door.” – The Mother in…

Miraculous. That pretty much encapsulates my reaction to the staggering accomplishment of Des Moines Metro Opera’s festival production of Bartok’s masterpiece, Bluebeard’s Castle. This taut, barely sixty-minute performance was brimming…

If you enjoy an occasional unapologetic, boisterous paean to shamelessly infectious comic absurdity, well, please plunk your silly ass down, right next to mine. In the case of Sergei Prokofiev…

It takes nearly forty minutes to get to the music Scott Joplin himself wrote for Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and I don’t mean that as a bad…

From the downbeat of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ riveting production of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, there was a palpable electricity in the air. In fact, even before the first note…