La bohème at Lyric Opera of Chicago: A Fresh Look at a Traditional Work

The production of Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème featured during the current season at Lyric Opera of Chicago provides the opportunity to experience both vocal and dramatic elements of this work…

Zorro in San Jose [CA]

It was only a matter of time — first a novella (1917), a pulp magazine series (1919-1954), a few high profile movies (1920, 1940, 1998), a TV series (1957), a…

Searingly powerful Peter Grimes from Welsh National Opera

With vivid memories of WNO’s outstanding Death in Venice last season, expectations ran high for this new production of Benjamin Britten’s operatic masterpiece. We were not disappointed, and largely the…

A movida Figaro at the Royal College of Music

The Royal College of Music last presented Le nozze di Figaro in 2018, in a masterly production by Sir Thomas Allen, a rare example of a director who has sung…

A Colourful Realisation of a Galuppi Opera in Its First Modern Performance

Arcifanfo is the recently rediscovered collaboration between two 18th century Venetians, Baldassare Galuppi and Carlo Goldoni, whose work on many operas together was seminal in the development of opera buffa.…

Pier Luigi Pizzi offers a dark, tense vision for La Fenice’s first Anna Bolena in more than a century and a half

Donizetti’s Anna Bolena regained a place on the operatic stage since at least the rediscovery of bel canto repertoire after the Second World War, through the advocacy of singers such…

The Ghosts of Hamlet

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is all about its melancholic title character. Yet the Danish Prince’s eloquence seduces most of us to overlook the play’s melodramatic plot: a murdered king, usurping brother,…

London Handel Festival Double Bill: Tales of Apollo and Hercules

Quotations about – not from – myth festoon both stage (pre-performance) and the accompanying freesheet: ‘The lover of myth is in a sense a philosopher; for myth is composed of…

La forza del destino in Lyon

Each early spring the Opéra national de Lyon imagines three operas within a vague thematic framework to comprise its Winter Festival. This year the theme is “Se saisir de l’avenir”…

L’Avenir nous le dira and 7 Minutes in Lyon

The first a premiere, the second of recent vintage. Both constructed on count downs (the first, one hour, the second, two hours) — thus the Opéra de Lyon’s Winter Festival…