Producing festival quality opera in these challenging times for the arts can be murder, but Glimmerglass is knocking ‘em dead with its thrilling and fulfilling new production of Elizabeth Cree.…
Category: Staged Operas
Glimmerglass: Rollicking Pirates Rock the Stage
Gilbert and Sullivan’s enduring favorite, The Pirates of Penzance, handily captured the hearts of the capacity audience at the Glimmerglass Festival and held them hostage in rapt amusement throughout a…
The Turn of the Screw – a triumph for Waterperry Opera Festival
No better choice could have been conceived for Waterperry Opera’s first foray into a full-length Britten opera than The Turn of the Screw. And no better performance space for its…
Tristan und Isolde in Bayreuth
It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the…
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century…
Longborough Festival’s La bohème doesn’t fail to tug at the heartstrings
Good summer weather outside may have coincided with this run of La bohème, but Sarah Fahie’s production reminds us that Acts One and Two are set at Christmas Eve, with…
Santa Fe Opera’s Ravishing Rosenkavalier
Let me cut right to the chase and say that Santa Fe Opera’s stunning production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier has driven me stark raving glad. It was a long-awaited thrill…
Nikolaus Lehnhoff strips back action and ideas to create a calm dream-like state for Tristan und Isolde
‘A monument to this most beautiful of all dreams’ is how Wagner described the intoxicating contemplation of love that is his Tristan und Isolde, and it is essentially as a…
Bodacious Bordeaux: Santa Fe Elixir
Santa Fe Opera’s piquant, frolicsome version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) is currently regaling audiences with a revival of its popular 2009 staging. Director Stephen Lawless and…
An Unusual Bel Canto Revival in New York: Carolina Uccelli, Anna di Resburgo (1835)
With New York’s Metropolitan Opera struggling to hype star singers, commission enduring new works, fill a mammoth space, and balance its budget, the vitality of the city’s opera scene has…