Category: Staged Operas

With its riveting production of André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis has dramatically reinforced its stature as one of the nation’s finest summer festivals. First,…

Although not the earliest opera, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607) is the first masterpiece of the genre, and surprisingly Glyndebourne has never staged it before. It fits in with the festival’s present…

Wagner described his epoch-making Tristan und Isolde as a monument erected to the ‘most beautiful dream’ of happiness in love, implying that this is an illusion lying beyond everyday reality,…

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis is currently presenting an uncommonly compelling staging of Gounod’s luminous musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, performed in English, a key part of the branding…

Gilbert and Sullivan’s evergreen enchantment, that is known as The Pirates of Penzance, rowdily seized the approval of the capacity audience at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and sustained an…

Rather like the theological principle of the via negativa as a way of discoursing about the divine, it is perhaps easier to say what John Tavener’s last work, Krishna (completed…

Richard Strauss’ 1909, second break-out opera Elektra just now was set in the same Greek antiquities museum as it had been in 2017. But that’s not the big news. The…

First presented in 2016 and now revived twice at Grange Park’s West Horsley address, this Don Carlo retains all of Verdi’s dark solemnities, and with Jo Davies’ removal of the original Fontainebleau scenes,…