Author: James Sohre

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…

Santa Fe Opera welcomed Verdi’s Falstaff back to its world-renowned festival with a stylish new production marked by wit and effervescence. No company undertakes this piece without knowing they have…

It is cause for celebration that Santa Fe Opera’s prestigious annual festival presented its 18th world premiere with composer Huang Ruo and librettist David Henry Hwang’s intriguing East-West fantasy, M.…

How was Des Moines Metro Opera’s closing performance of The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess a landmark event? Let me count the ways. First, it marked the successful completion of DMMO’s…

With all the doom, gloom and dispiriting events dominating the news cycle, Des Moines Metro Opera served up a perfect antidote with a sassy yet classy staging of Benjamin Britten…

As a component of its Fiftieth Anniversary Season, Des Moines Metro Opera added to its already prestigious reputation with a compelling world premiere of Kristin Kuster and Mark Campbell’s A…

In a notable departure from the complete works presented in past festivals, Des Moines Metro Opera adventurously programmed a mere fragment of an intriguing “work in progress,” American Apollo. To…