If satire is your thing you will not want to miss this opera about human testicles grafted onto a dog.
Author: Michael Milenski
Rusalka in Monaco
Every-once-in-a-while a Rusalka comes along, and this week there are even two here on the French Riviera — just now in Monaco and upcoming Saturday on movie screens all along the coast.
Eugene Onegin in Montpellier
Entering the hall there arose the Dantesque “abandon all hope ye who enter” feeling — a cluttered a vista socialist setting, a poster of Lenin and large letters proclaiming Moscow, December 1999.
Cosi fan tutte in Montpellier
This Cosi fan tutte completes the Montpellier Mozart/da Ponte trilogy staged by French metteur en scËne and esthËte Jean-Paul Scarpitta. Primarily studies in elegance and refinement these mises en scËnes have provoked all that that is most precious and perfect in Mozart’s scores.
Otello in Genoa
Forget Shakespeare, this was distinctly an Otello without the ‘h’. It was Italian melodramma to its core, the collaboration of its metteur en scËne Davide Livermore, wunderkind conductor Andrea Battistoni and its Desdemona, Maria Agresto.
Les Contes d’Hoffmann in Lyon
Maybe there can be no bigger feat than making it through Les Contes d’Hoffmann in the Laurent Pelly version without a hitch or two.
Porgy and Bess in San Francisco
It’s been renamed “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess,” it hails itself as “The American Musical” and further qualifies itself as “The Porgy and Bess for the Twenty-First Century.”
Falstaff in San Francisco
A rambunctious ensemble on the stage and in the pit. A star conductor. Falstaff showed its stuff as one of the repertory’s greatest masterpieces.