A 1977 opera by Thea Musgrave, not to be confused with Gaetano Donizetti’s 1835 Maria Stuarda. Unlike the bel canto execution of Mary (b. 1542, d. 1567), it is a…
Author: Michael Milenski
Simon Boccanegra in San Francisco
The famed German stage director Claus Guth’s 2006 Hamburg State Opera production of Simon Boccanegra is the destruction by cosmic weight of 14th century Genoese doge Simon Boccanegra’s hopeless love…
Fellow Travelers at Glimmerglass
Is Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers an opera that moves us, or is it a document of a decade we prefer to forget, and to ignore its aftermath? The opera is…
The Egyptian Helen at Bard
This ninth opera in the Richard Strauss catalogue is famed as the only opera, ever, with a singing seashell. There is little else to recommend it. Fortunately Bard College’s famed…
Tolomeo at Caramoor
The San Francisco Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra joined Southern California’s Long Beach Opera to perform Handel’s Tolomeo at New York’s Caramoor estate near Katonah in the Hudson Valley. Georg…
Butterfly and Così at Glimmerglass
That’s Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Kelley Rourke and Eric Einhorn’s Cosi, not to be confused with Cosi fan tutte (though Cosi was set to Mozart’s slaughtered Cosi fan tutte score).…
Les Arts Florissants at Caramoor
Maybe it’s old news that Les Arts Florissants is actually an opera, not just the name of Early Music guru William Christie’s famed eponymous group of players. It is a…
Suddenly Last Summer at Bard’s SummerScape
First a one-act play by famed playwright Tennessee Williams (1958), then a famous movie (1959), and now, finally, an opera composed by Courtney Bryan — a 2023 MacArthur Fellow. More…
Elektra in San Francisco
Richard Strauss’ 1909, second break-out opera Elektra just now was set in the same Greek antiquities museum as it had been in 2017. But that’s not the big news. The…
Il barbiere in San Francisco
It was not a ho-hum affair after all, though I had fears that it might be, given the ubiquity of Rossini’s most famous title, to the exclusion of most of…