Two recent one-acts cleverly combined by stage director Brian Staufenbiel into one grand, operatic sporting event. San Francisco’s alternative opera company, Opera Parallele pulled off a slam dunk show. It…
Author: Michael Milenski
Simon Boccanegra and The Exterminating Angel in Paris
Both operas staged by famed (for many) or infamous (for others) Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito. Both Parisian Bieito productions bore this stage director’s signature touches — a complex, abstract…
La fanciulla del West in Lyon
Forget the West of San Francisco born David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West (the source of Puccini’s opera), not to be confused with Peter Sellers’ The Girls of…
Pique Dame in Lyon
The Russian Avant-garde has attacked Lyon, Pique Dame is left in ruin! Enfant terrible (now forty years old) Russian avant-gardiste stage director Timofeï Kouliabine fled Russia in protest of its…
La traviata in Marseille
Three fine singers saved Marseille Opéra’s recent 5 performance run of La traviata. Marred by a bizarre pit and weird staging conceits, Verdi’s middle period masterwork emerged, in spite of…
Adriana Lecouvreur in Paris
The one by Francesco Cilea. There are several others by forgotten composers. This one sits uneasily in the verismo category given its hyper contrived plot and its historical setting. Leading…
Giulio Cesare in Paris
This Laurent Pelly production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare is wily indeed, enriching Handel’s estimation of antiquity’s most famous female with supreme wit. Were it pure Baroque opera seria these current…
Beatrice di Tenda in Paris
Bellini’s second to last opera, Beatrice di Tenda, was not a success at its 1833 Venice premiere, though subsequent performances are said to have overcome the opera’s macabre horrors through…
Die Frau ohne Schatten in Toulouse
The fifth opera in the Richard Strauss canon — the one that is truly gigantic — staged just now at Toulouse’s acoustically famed 1150 seat Theatre du Capitole in the…
The Elixir of Love in San Francisco
That’s L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s bel canto gem, dolled up somewhere on the Italian riviera by the same team that set San Francisco Opera’s 2012 Lohengrin in a Soviet era, bookless…