Eduardo e Cristina in Pesaro

Rossini’s twenty-eighth opera in a new critical edition by the Fondazione Rossini — no actual Rossini autograph exists — in a new production by Italian stage director Stefano Poda. A…

Films d’Opéra in Entrecasteaux

Festival International Film d’Opéra d’Entrecasteaux (FIFOE) debuts this September in this small village nestled among the vineyards in the hills of Provence. The village is Entrecasteaux, famed for its farmhouse…

Wozzeck at the Aix Festival

Finally! Cancelled in 2003 by a strike, postponed in 2020 by Covid, Alban Berg’s expressionist masterpiece Wozzeck has just been given 5 performances at Aix’s Grand Théâtre de Provence —…

Cosi fan tutte at the Aix Festival

The Aix Festival was founded 75 summers ago as an altar to the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in French it is pronounced Mose-art). This year Cosi is up again…

Le Prophète and Picture a Day Like This at the Aix Festival

Giacomo Meyerbeer was born near Berlin as Jacob Beer. Early in his professional life he joined his maternal grandfather’s given name, Meyer, to his father’s family name, taking on the…

Ballets Russes at the Aix Festival

Not to be confused with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes or Wassily de Basil’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, it was Igor Stravinsky’s trilogy of ballet scores created for Paris based,…

L’Opéra de Quat’Sous at the Aix Festival

That’s The Three Penny Opera. While four “sous” wouldn’t get you in the door, the price of admission was far less than the usual offering at this lofty altar to…

El ultimo sueño de Frida y Diego in San Francisco

History according to opera is a wondrous thing. Just now in San Francisco Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera have gone off into the sunset (eternity) together, happily reconciled. All this…

Die Frau ohne Schatten in San Francisco

The fifth opera of the lengthy Richard Strauss canon, The Woman Without a Shadow (1915) is surely the richest work of them all, traversing real and imaginary worlds while proving…

Saariaho’s Adriana Mater in San Francisco

June in San Francisco may become one of the world’s great opera festivals. In recent years the San Francisco Symphony has added a staged opera in its concert hall to…