OPERA THEATER REVIEWS

Richard Strauss’s ELEKTRA is simply overwhelming--particularly when you have Nina Stemme and, especially, Lise Davidsen, as the title character and her sister Chrysothemis, ably abetted by Greer Grimsley as their brother, Orest, and an incredible supporting cast top to bottom....

Gounod’s overture introduces ROMEO AND JULIET with a prophetic mix of lyrical romance and tragedy. Yves Abel, the Principal Conductor of the San Diego Opera, is an expert in French opera and made sure that resonant brass and lush strings produced the mood a Parisian composer of the time would have...

The 2013 production of Tchaikovsky's Pushkin-inspired opera EUGENE ONEGIN has triumphantly returned to the Met. I attended the final dress rehearsal and can attest to the fact that the story of Tatyana's infatuation with, and later rejection of, the eponymous 'hero' is vocally in superb hands. Both ...

I couldn’t help thinking of a new science fiction-comedy series on Amazon during the local premiere of UPLOAD, the opera by Michel van der Aa at the Park Avenue Armory on Tuesday. Both had the same name. Both explore a near future where technology controls everything, including the afterlife, as a...

Another work salvaged from this year’s Covid-aborted Prototype Festival has shown up in New York--at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse, this time--and it couldn’t have been further away from the last I experienced, Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, if it tried. BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS is the work of co...

If Friday night’s performance of Handel’s RODELINDA sometimes seemed like it was never going to end--it was quickly approaching the witching hour by the time the curtain calls were over, having started at 7:30--it certainly wasn’t the fault of the cast but Handel himself and librettist Nicola ...

The original title of the Sondheim-Laurents ANYONE CAN WHISTLE was THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS, though the crowd at Carnegie Hall on Thursday for the MasterVoices concert performance of the trouble musical were hardly fidgety. They were willing and able to sit through the cockamamie book and story Arth...

I love seeing in the arts when a company takes a classic work and reimagines it for a modern audience. This often allows for more imaginative and innovative production that brings a brand new audience to your company. As they begin their 50th Season, Des Moines Metro Opera brings Wolfgang Amadeus Mo...

A romantic burlesque turns out to be an abstract path to nothingness through perverse vanity. Must see....

The Washington National Opera has gathered a company of first rate singers for a portmanteau of four, one-act operas called Written in Stone. Unfortunately, their fine skills and exceptional voices cannot make silk purses out of scores, libretti, and orchestrations that evade aesthetics, emphasize n...

I flipped over Lise Davidsen when she made her Met debut in QUEEN OF SPADES—the voice, the acting, the overall subtlety--but I was still unprepared for the performance she gave as the Prima Donna who became Princess Ariadne of Crete in Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS. She was altogether divine....

DON CARLOS--Verdi’s original French language version, for the first time at the Met, of the opera better known in these parts as the Italian DON CARLO--was as grim as its setting in the Spanish inquisition in the new David McVicar production introduced last night. And about as long (though for onc...

When this year’s PROTOTYPE Festival was put off for a year because of Covid concerns, some of the pieces went into mothballs. Taylor Mac’s THE HANG, under the auspices of HERE, one of New York’s major downtown arts organizations, based in Tribeca, decided to, uh, hang around....

I admire the plucky inventiveness of the San Diego Opera. On an annual budget of roughly three percent of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, it has managed to mount a consistently appealing and entertaining variety of productions, traditional and contemporary, in both good times and plague times. The ...

It’s no secret that many of the standard repertoire’s most famous operas had troubled premieres but Beethoven’s FIDELIO had more than its share. Thanks to the efforts of Heartbeat Opera, which performed its revised version at New York’s Met Museum this past weekend (before a short tour), we ...

Bold new production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s iconic rendering of the classic Greek tragedy...

Another revival of a beautifully realised crowdpleaser that works perfectly in the difficult days of February 2022....

INTIMATE APPAREL appeared this week at LCT’s Mitzi Newhouse Theater, directed adroitly by Bartlett Sher, with a thoughtful libretto by Lynn Nottage based on her award-winning play and a ragtime-inflected score by composer Ricky Ian Gordon....

It took longer to read the notes for Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1” than it did for the New York Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden to kick off the first program in its current concert series, “Authentic Selves: The Beauty Within”. But it was a fitting opening for the...

Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, in their new opera for New York City Opera and National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene, weren’t the only ones to be inspired by the famed 1962 novel THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS (IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI CONTINI) by Italian Giorgio Bassani. The film version, by Vit...

It's not every day that Audra McDonald stands twenty feet in front of you and says, 'Tonight, we are all a part of history.' Then again, it's not every day that music history gets made in Orlando - real-deal, textbook-worthy history - so when it does happen, I reckon Audra McDonald is as eager to be...

Puccini's 'La Boheme,' returned for its second run of the season this week and cast and conductor delivered the goods. There's nothing to say that has not already been said about La Boheme as an opera and the famous Zeffirelli production, so we won't dwell on it....

When I saw the George Grosz-ish curtain that introduced us to the new Barlett Sher “Weimar-inspired” production of Verdi’s RIGOLETTO at the Met on New Year’s Eve, I was excited about what lay ahead. Combined with Verdi’s great score, it seemed bound for success. What followed was disappoin...

What is there to say about Puccini’s TOSCA that hasn’t been said in the last hundred-plus years since its premiere in Rome (to echo the locations in the opera)? It is a marvel of brevity, with librettists Illica and Giacosa shaving locations, characters and action from the original play, written...

It seems variety is the spice of classical music and opera in San Diego. The city’s symphony orchestra plans to appear in a dozen or more venues next year, and the opera company has used a different venue for each of its three recent recital concerts. The latest of these featured Mexican-born teno...