How we respond to any production of Humperdinck’s musical Märchenspiel (Fairy Tale) may depend on whether we want to explore our inner child and be charmed by eye-catching visuals or a wish…
Category: Staged Operas
Glyndebourne’s Gloriously Colourful and Magnificently Sung Die Entführung aus dem Serail
Themes of fidelity and mercy in Mozart’s 1782 Singspiel might bring to mind similar notions nearly a decade later in Così fan tutti and La Clemenza di Tito. With its witty commentary on servant/master…
Fellow Travelers at Glimmerglass
Is Gregory Spears’ Fellow Travelers an opera that moves us, or is it a document of a decade we prefer to forget, and to ignore its aftermath? The opera is…
The Egyptian Helen at Bard
This ninth opera in the Richard Strauss catalogue is famed as the only opera, ever, with a singing seashell. There is little else to recommend it. Fortunately Bard College’s famed…
An American Prelude to Gianni Schicchi: A Bold Showcase for NNTT’s Rising Talent
Over the weekend of 25 and 26 July, the spotlight fell on the next generation of operatic talent at the New National Theatre Tokyo’s Summer Recital 2026—a showcase featuring the…
A Highly Impressive Samson et Dalila from Dorset Opera Festival
Of Camille Saint-Saëns’s thirteen operas, only his Samson et Dalila remains part of the repertory. Yet it’s not often performed outside London and rarely appears at country house settings. Dorset Opera’s first…
Tolomeo at Caramoor
The San Francisco Bay Area’s Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra joined Southern California’s Long Beach Opera to perform Handel’s Tolomeo at New York’s Caramoor estate near Katonah in the Hudson Valley. Georg…
Celebrating the Bicentennial of Italian Opera in America with Teatro Nuovo: Il Don Giovanni and Il Turco in Italia
Every summer Teatro Nuovo presents operas from the 18th and early 19th century in New York City. Its productions are “music-driven”: repertoire is often original, performance practice well-researched, diction intelligible,…
Butterfly and Così at Glimmerglass
That’s Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Kelley Rourke and Eric Einhorn’s Cosi, not to be confused with Cosi fan tutte (though Cosi was set to Mozart’s slaughtered Cosi fan tutte score).…
Richard Strauss, Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos should in many ways be the ideal Glyndebourne opera. It is indeed pretty much the ideal opera for any opera house, given its metatheatrical treatment not…