Category: Performances

CENTRAL CITY, Colo. ó A year ago, when the Central City Opera announced plans to conclude its 2007 75th anniversary season with Gian Carlo Menottiís ìSaint of Bleecker Street,î the composer was aged but alive.

Itís clear today that Chinaís Cultural Revolution has led to a cultural revolution that ó in music at least ó has made the countryís artists frontrunners on the international scene.

In an evening brimming with sublime performances, Anja Siljja took grasp of her dramatic prowess and left us breathless, yearning for more. At the most sacred opera house in Italy, and perhaps the world, Jan·?ekís opera was thrillingly presented and is an example of our beloved genre at its finest.

“Who in the world am I?” proclaimed the posters all over Munich, reducing Lewis Carroll’s famous conundrum to a sound-bite.

If you are in need of a Romantic, Alt-Nuernberg, Beloved-Old-Vaterland-As-It-(Never)-Was sort of production of “Die Meistersinger,” you would probably do well to wait for the Met revival, and stay far far away (actually, add another “far” to that) from the Bayreuth Festpiel’s latest “Skandal”-ripe interpretation.

For twenty-eight years now the Ohio Light Opera Festival (OLO) has held forth in Wooster in the summertime, presenting no less than 99 different works (their big 100th comes next year), familiar and forgotten, by the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Offenbach, Sigmund Romberg, Carl Zeller and Emmerich K·lm·n — to refer only to the authors of the seven undertaken this year.

ìTea: Mirror of the Soulî with book by Xu Ying and music by Tan Dun, revised from an earlier version first produced in Japan in 2002, was to have been the novelty of the present Santa Fe Opera season. Instead, it was dead on arrival.

On a cold winterís day in Vienna, just before Christmas 1790, Mr. Haydn dined with Mr. Mozart for the last time.

The legend of Orpheus and Eurydice has come down through the centuries to us, on the way inspiring some sixty-four other known operas.