Jumbotron at the Opera: Madama Butterfly at LA Opera

All three acts of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly take place in a tiny Japanese cottage on an isolated hill overlooking Nagasaki. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval officer, has purchased…

Verdi’s Rigoletto at Lyric Opera of Chicago – Another View

The revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto now on stage at Lyric Opera of Chicago features several noteworthy debuts and a significant interpretation of the title character. The Duke of Mantua…

The Handmaid’s Tale in San Francisco

Feminist dystopian opera. The Royal Danish Opera’s 2022 production of The Handmaid’s Tale found fertile field in San Francisco!   In short Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel made into an opera…

Mixed performances within an austere Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House

Tchaikovsky’s tragic masterpiece can be presented with the minimum of means and on the smallest of scales, and this new production from American director Tedd Huffman, making his long-anticipated main…

Rigoletto at the Chicago Lyric

Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto tells the story of a small community in which one man’s absolute and arbitrary power eventually corrupts everyone around him. The tragedy is universal: if you find…

Un ballo in maschera in San Francisco

Where were the censors who once plagued Verdi’s Ballo just now when they should have saved us from an abysmal staging at San Francisco Opera! It was the 2016 production…

La Fenice’s Turandot emphasises the opera’s mythical element

The rich, vivid score, and dramatic – even sensational and violent – scenario of Puccini’s last opera (not quite complete at his death exactly one hundred years ago, in 1924)…

La Fenice’s double bill of short operas by father-in-law and son-in-law

By happy coincidence 2024 is an anniversary year for both Arnold Schoenberg (born 1874) and his son-in-law Luigi Nono (born 1924). Judging from the lack of works by either composer…

A comic take on Gazzaniga’s Alcina from Bampton Classical Opera

Bampton Classical Opera brought Giuseppe Gazzaniga’s L’Isole d’Alcina (Alcina’s Island) to London in Gilly French’s English translation in a production directed and designed by Jeremy Gray with Thomas Blunt conducting…

PROM 68: Garsington’s Midsummer Magic at the Proms

For its first outing to the Henry Wood Proms, Garsington Opera brought with it not only the luxury vehicle of the Philharmonia Orchestra, but a crack team of soloists –…