Stage director Calixito Bieito’s 1999 production of Carmen made its way to the Opéra Bastille in 2017, one year after its performances in San Francisco, and three years after its…
Author: Michael Milenski
Eugene Onegin in Paris
Eugène Onéguine at the Opéra Garnier was an intimate exploration of the first opera in the Tchaikovsky operatic canon, directed by British actor Ralph Fiennes, an Onegin himself in the excellent…
Un ballo in maschera in Paris
Un Bal Masqué at the Bastille, the 41st performance of Belgian stage director Gilbert Deflo’s 2007 production (the sixth in this edition). This performance was the first with American soprano…
The Monkey King in San Francisco
A sixteenth century Chinese epic novel has found its way to the stage of San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House just now, namely “A Journey to the West” by Ming…
Parsifal in San Francisco
San Francisco Opera unveiled a handsome new production of Parsifal just now — new productions a fairly rare occurrence at SFO. More importantly this Parsifal continues San Francisco Opera’s music…
Dead Man Walking in San Francisco
Though one may chafe at the dramatic and musical naïveté of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, you will admit that it packs a wallop. A man is summarily murdered in…
Rigoletto in San Francisco
San Francisco’s 1932 War Memorial Opera House (honoring the city’s WWI dead soldiers) is among the world’s more lavish examples of theater architecture, surpassed, in my experience, only by the…
Zelmira, La cambiale di matrimonio, L’italiana in Algeri in Pesaro
The last of the Neapolitan tragic masterpieces, the very first farce, and the first of the famous comedies. The 2025 Rossini Opera Festival was of limited success. The success limited…
Giulio Cesare in Salzburg
Stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov sets Handel’s most performed opera in an air raid shelter (where else these days?), wittily deploying a direct hit on the shelter to announce Cleopatra’s scorching…
One Morning Turns into an Eternity in Salzburg
A concoction imagined by American stage director Peter Sellars and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is three orchestral masterpieces, fused, that host an abstract theater action — a body bag…