OPERA THEATER REVIEWS

Opera Theatre of St. Louis draws us into a truly enchanted forest.  In staging Benjamin Britten’s 'A Midsummer Night’s Dream' they create a marvelous amalgam of strange and gorgeous music, superlative voices, and design and directorial genius.  And they are unerringly true to Shakespeare’s i...

Even ardent opera fans may struggle to recall the story or the score for Mazeppa. Based on a poem by Pushkin, Tchaikovsky's opera has been unjustly overshadowed by his Eugene Onegin. Last staged at the London Coliseum in 1984, Grange Park Opera have landed a coup by engaging the English National O...

One of the operas at the top of my list for next season at the Met is the Deborah Warner staging of Tchaikovsky’s EUGENE ONEGIN that brings back soprano Asmik Grigorian for the first time since her 2024 debut in MADAMA BUTTERFLY. Not that there’s anything wrong with Puccini, the major composer ...

Susanne Burgess sings Norina, the quintessential bel canto soprano role. She’s astonishing! She defines that vocal style....

Just how much fun can you have at an oratorio about a Old Testament tale of jealousy, madness and death? Well, quite a lot as it happens at the return of Barry Kosky's remarkable production of Handel's Saul. This staging is opera at its most theatrical, with severed heads, a breast-feeding witch, a ...

Grange Park Opera has opened its new season with a crowd-pleaser. Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly remains problematic, with its story of a Japanese teenage geisha, impregnated and cruelly abandoned by an American lieutenant. However, it is still wildly popular, mainly due to its ravishing score....

Opera Holland Park has never shied away from audacious programming, and with Jonathan Dove’s Itch, it plunges boldly into radioactive territory—literally. Originally seen here in 2023 and based on Simon Mayo’s YA novel about a teenage element hunter who stumbles upon a potentially world-alteri...

'This House', a world premiere opera at Opera Theatre of St. Louis is the saga of a Harlem family that is both blest and cursed....

The Metropolitan Opera's revival of Tchaikovsky’s *The Queen of Spades*, which opened on Friday, May 23, 2025, offered a visually opulent and musically ambitious evening, though not without its challenges. Elijah Moshinsky’s elegant 1995 production, with its sumptuous sets and period costumes, p...

Stormy weather and an enthusiastic audience mark Julia Burbach’s The Flying Dutchman as it proves a smashing success to open the 2025 season of Opera Holland Park....

For nearly half a century the Opera Theatre of St. Louis has been bringing quite glorious opera to our fair city.  It just opened its semicentennial season with a brilliant and lively production of Die Fledermaus, by Johann Strauss II. ...

The pivotal and star-crossed main characters and the Catfish Row community come alive in the highly influential, thought-provoking, and engrossing opera Porgy and Bess. This much discussed opera has its partisans and detractors but there is a distinct need to ponder and consider a work of this quali...

Celebrating its sixth revival, David McVicar’s critically acclaimed production of Faust is a spectacular success with stunning sets and costumes, a magnificent cast, and some of Gounod’s greatest music....

This past weekend, composer Kevin Puts’s BRIGHTNESS OF LIGHT, based on the long, abundant correspondence of artist Georgia O’Keeffe and photographer/gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, had its long overdue New York premiere, with the New York Philharmonic under debuting conductor Brett Mitchell, and sop...

When mezzo Aigul Akhmetshina stepped on stage in the Met’s new production of CARMEN, back on New Year’s Eve of 2023, it was hard to imagine her in any other role because of the way she completely inhabited it. Would we ever be able to watch her in anything else, despite credits from other...

Opera buffa is an ever-popular genre of the art, and more than two centuries after its composition, Rossini's Il barbière di Siviglia remains one this genre's most often staged operas. The music and lyrics are pure genius, but the success of this particular opera comes from an inherent understand...

There’s an old expression, “A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” While John Adams didn’t decide to take on the libretto for his latest opera, Monday night’s Met premiere, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, all on his own, I wonder whether he might have bypassed the one resource that m...

Ending the season with a memorable production of one of opera’s most tour de force masterpieces is sure to motivate audiences to return for Seattle Opera’s next season...

By definition, the historical view of the oratorio is that it’s typically religious in nature, performed unstaged and without costumes or scenery. Going by that description, The Oratorio Society of New York’s (OSNY) program at Carnegie Hall this week—a combination of contemporary and cl...

An evening of the myriad modes of music that constitute the American Experience was celebrated at the Kennedy Center’s production of American Rhapsody. The evening was a rich treasure trove of the glory that is American music from opera, spirituals, modern composers, classic songwriters, and Broad...

A rich and lively production of an Ibsen classic--with Grieg's full instrumental music. The St. Louis Symphony, with director Stéphane Denève, interpret Grieg’s music with their usual perfection.  All in all it’s a memorable presentation of a very great work of music and theater....

It’s not so strange, really, that there’s  a serious opera about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. His life’s work is usually invoked before every production of the last decade or more, when audiences are asked to silence their smartphones....

Super show that lightens a very dark subject (corecive control), but does not diminish it...

Even without an over-the-top production—and the Met has had a couple of those—Richard Strauss’s SALOME has been outraging audiences for more than 120 years. This week’s new take by director Claus Guth in his Met debut was no exception....

When we last saw Brunnhilde in Atlanta, in the second segment of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, DIE WALKURE, she’d been punished by the gods for saving Sieglinde, but rescued by her father, Wotan. She was forced into sleep on a rock surrounded by a ring of fire, until wakened some day by a hero. T...