OPERA

by Steve Callahan - June 10, 2025

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

by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 09, 2025

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 ...

by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 09, 2025

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....

by Franco Milazzo - June 04, 2025

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-altering dis...

by Steve Callahan - June 03, 2025

'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....

by Peter Danish - May 28, 2025

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, provi...

by Michael Higgs - May 28, 2025

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....

by Steve Callahan - May 27, 2025

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. ...

by David Friscic - May 27, 2025

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...

by Michael Higgs - May 24, 2025

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....