Grange Festival’s Fledermaus is a sprawling new production which improves with each act and ends with rib-tickling gags from flamboyant cabaret artiste Myra du Bois. By the time you’ve finished…
Category: Performances
At Fifty, OTSL Comes Full Circle with Don Pasquale
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis is celebrating fifty fabulous years with this festival, and by returning to the first opera it ever presented, Don Pasquale, it has mined anniversary gold.…
Haunting House in the Gateway City
With its stylish festival level performance of the fiercely original piece, This House, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis continues its almost unrivaled record for commissioning and staging World Premieres. This…
A journey through space and time with Benjamin Appl
Schubert’s Winterreise is listed under the catalogue number D911 as part of the Deutsch-Verzeichnis, the method by which all his works are uniquely identified. More often than not, this sole…
A Mafia Widow: Lehár’s ever-popular score undergoes a transplant
It’s been a while: well, over 40 years, since I heard Lehár’s Die lustige Witwe, in an amdram production just outside of Manchester in which I was playing French horn.…
Saint Louis Strauss Drives Audiences Batty
Unrelenting, raucous animation was the salient characteristic that pervaded Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ lively version of that evergreen favorite, Die Fledermaus (The Bat), and the capacity audience roared in…
A Dreamy Midsummer Night in Saint Louis
From the downbeat to Britten’s A Midsummer Night Dream at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, we instantly sensed there was musical magic in the air, for the esteemed Leonard Slatkin…
Mozart’s La scuola degli amanti in Lyon
Ossia Cosi fan tutti, as you never could have possibly imagined it. French stage director Marie-Éve Signeyrole flipped the opera’s two titles, setting the second of the Mozart / DaPonte…
Manon in Paris
Les années folles in France [the roaring twenties in the USA] brought dancer Josephine Baker to Paris with her Bal Negre. In more recent times, the 2020 the Covid infection…
Monteverdi Choir and Masaaki Suzuki at St Martin-in-the-Fields
Making his debut with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, Masaaki Suzuki directed an all-Bach concert celebrating the 300th anniversary of five works (four cantatas and a Sinfonia) written in…