Author: James Sohre

If the Wexford Festival’s evening fare in their Women & War themed season is deadly serious, the afternoon offerings were chockful of amusing confections that are more fun than a…

When you enter the auditorium for the performance of Mark Tutino, Fabio Ceresa and Luca Rossi’s La ciociara (Two Women), the darkened stage is fronted on the far left apron…

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…