Ruddigore has always had a problematic status in the G&S canon. Following hot on the heels of The Mikado, its premiere in 1887 was met with catcalls and jeers. Some…
Category: Staged Operas
Santa Fe Rusalka: Freudian Slip-up
Santa Fe Opera staged another local premiere this summer with the welcome company addition of Antonín Dvořák and Jaroslav Kvapil’s splendid opera, Rusalka, directed by the acclaimed Sir David Pountney.…
Enigmatic Debussy Riches in New Mexico
Santa Fe Opera is to be applauded for including Debussy’s inscrutable masterpiece, Pelléas and Mélisande in this summer’s festival season. This important work is more admired than loved, and a…
Santa Fe Orfeo: Jumbled Journey to Meow Wolf
In Santa Fe Opera’s first ever production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a funny thing happened on the way to Hades. Our hero seems to have wandered into an imaginative but perplexing…
The Falling and the Rising at Camp Dodge, Iowa
For several seasons now, Des Moines Metro Opera has nurtured a fruitful collaboration with the Headquarters of the Iowa National Guard at Camp Dodge in a northwest part of the…
An uplifting celebration of hybridity: Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Longborough
‘A rubbishy old play.’ Michael Burden, editor of the Eulenberg edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (the first to include the complete spoken text and music), explains that Restoration and…
DMMO’s dwb: Tackling Social Injustice
“Every time you leave, I’ll try to let go a little more. But every time, I’ll be waiting to hear your key in our front door.” – The Mother in…
Semele at Glyndebourne
“No Oratorio, but a baudy [sic] opera.” Such was the assessment of Handel’s Semele offered by Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel’s Messiah. He was probably echoing the somewhat cold…
Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore at Dorset Opera
Despite the revival of interest in Massenet’s operas, Le roi de Lahore does not seem to have been staged in the UK since 1879. It is that still relatively unfashionable…
Astonishing Castle Among Iowa’s Cornfields
Miraculous. That pretty much encapsulates my reaction to the staggering accomplishment of Des Moines Metro Opera’s festival production of Bartok’s masterpiece, Bluebeard’s Castle. This taut, barely sixty-minute performance was brimming…