Author: James Sohre

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…

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.…