Carmen in San Francisco

Francesca Zambello’s 2006 Covent Garden Carmen rehashed once again by San Francisco Opera. This time with French mezzo-soprano Eve-Maud Hubeaux in the title role. In 2017 alone Mme. Hubeaux transformed…

Everest by San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle

San Francisco’s alternative opera company has just now revived its 2021 production of Everest, a 2015 Dallas Opera commission about climbers on Mount Everest, here reimagined as a graphic novel…

Tristan and Isolde in San Francisco

In the 1870’s Richard Wagner built a special theater for his operas, a theater where the words of his poems might flow clearly from the stage into the hall. One…

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…

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…

Falstaff in Paris

It was magic from the start, Verdi’s in medias res chords exploded and tumbled, Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt established the solid, brisk beat, brilliantly illuminating Verdi’s vast musical complexities to…

Bianca e Falliero at the Rossini Opera Festival

Expectations were high in Pesaro just now, not for the new production of Bianca e Falliero by French stage director Jean-Louis Grinda (expectations were low), but of the Rossini Opera…

Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival

Ermione (Hermione in the Greek myth, though Rossini’s opera has nothing to do with the myth or Euripides tragedy) was anticipated with great expectations both because Michele Mariotti, Pesaro’s conducting…

The Gambler (Игрокъ) and The Idiot (Идиот) at Salzburg’s Rock Riding School

The Salzburg Festival’s Felsenreitschule is home to most of its productions of twentieth century opera, just now two Russian operas based on novels by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s The…

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…