OPERA

by Alexander Cohen - July 01, 2025

Forget Arcadian landscapes and Corinthian columns. Oliver Mears’s new production of Handel’s Semele remoulds Greek myth to a 20th century manor house where mortals are servants of Gods who lounge around in velvet ball gowns. Semele is a maid plucked from service by master of the house, a cigarette c...

by Clementine Scott - June 30, 2025

You could be forgiven for thinking that there isn’t much more to be said about Le nozze di Figaro, the most performed opera in Glyndebourne’s history. However, Mozart’s classic role subversion comedy is deceptive in its simplicity: beneath the farce and improbable plot twists is a complex web of pow...

by Clementine Scott - June 25, 2025

A thoughtfully selected double bill making up the operetta segment of Opera Holland Park’s summer season shows the genre at its technical best, but also illuminates its troubling shortcomings....

by Richard Sasanow - June 20, 2025

The recent New York premiere of Yuval Sharon’s production of THE COMET/POPPEA at Lincoln Center kicked off the summer’s 5-week residency of the American Modern Opera Company (cheekily known as AMOC, after its penchant for taking a somewhat wild and crazy approach to the art form)....

by Steve Callahan - June 17, 2025

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 iconic ta...

by Aliya Al-Hassan - June 16, 2025

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 Ope...

by Richard Sasanow - June 15, 2025

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 I’ve...

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....