Review: Nothing Rusticana about the Met’s Premiere KAVALIER from Bates and Sheer
by Richard Sasanow - Sep 22, 2025
Anyone familiar with Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prizer-winning THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY must be a bit bewildered at how a 700-page novel could be turned into a 3-hour opera. Or, for that matter, how a superhero named “The Escapist” could be sharing a stage this week with Puccini’s Turandot and Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
The Dallas Opera Broadcasts 2024/2025 Season on WRR’s Concert Hall Program
by A.A. Cristi - Aug 20, 2025
The Dallas Opera will broadcast its 2024/2025 Season on WRR 101.1 FM’s Concert Hall program beginning August 25. Productions include La traviata, Pelléas et Mélisande, Orpheus and Eurydice, and La bohème, featuring international artists and Music Director Emmanuel Villaume.
Review: DIE FLEDERMAUS at Opera Theatre Of St. Louis
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.
Interview: Mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton Talks Boston Lyric Opera's Production of CAROUSEL
by R. Scott Reedy - Apr 4, 2025
The legend of Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre stems in part from the many pre-Broadway tryouts that have and continue to take place there, including not one but two now-iconic Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musicals, 1943’s “Oklahoma!” – when it was still being called “Away We Go!” – and 1945’s “Carousel.”
Boston Lyric Opera To Present CAROUSEL 80th Anniversary Production
by A.A. Cristi - Feb 19, 2025
Boston Lyric Opera will present an 80th anniversary production of “RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN'S ‘CAROUSEL,'” directed by BLO Artistic Associate Anne Bogart, conducted by BLO Music Director David Angus, and running April 4-13, 2025 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre.
Opera Theatre of St. Louis Announces Their 50th Anniversary Festival Season
by James Lindhorst - Jun 11, 2024
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis (OTSL) announced repertory and celebrations for a landmark 50th season in 2025, celebrating five decades of artistic innovation and discovery since the company’s founding in 1976. The 2025 Festival Season opens on May 24, 2025, with Johann Strauss II’s effervescent Die Fledermaus, which has not been seen at Opera Theatre since 1989. The season continues with the company’s 44th world premiere, This House, with music by Ricky Ian Gordon and libretto by Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. Next, Opera Theatre will present an all-new staging of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale — the very first opera that the company ever performed. Britten’s enchanting adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream rounds out the season. In addition to four mainstage productions, Opera Theatre will continue to present the annual young artist showcase, Center Stage. This concert shines a spotlight on the members of OTSL’s highly selective Young Artist Programs, accompanied onstage by members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, which has served as OTSL’s Festival Season orchestra since 1978.
Review: SONGBIRD at Kennedy Center
by Roger Catlin - Mar 12, 2024
There’s an awful lot of death in opera, Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, lamented on a recent opening night. And those plentiful tragedies are also often further burdened with overbearing scores, turgid storylines, super-large casts and strident if not shrill performances.
Strauss's THE SILENT WOMAN Opens At Bard SummerScape
by A.A. Cristi - Jun 14, 2022
Opening Friday, July 22, Richard Strauss's comic opera, The Silent Woman (“Die Schweigsame Frau”), receives a rare American presentation at Bard SummerScape. Harold Wilson, “a stentorian bass … with impressive focus, carrying power and quiet charisma” (New York Times), heads a strong cast in a new production by Christian Räth, whose SummerScape staging of Das Wunder der Heliane prompted Musical America to declare: “Opera productions don't get much better than this.”
Bard SummerScape Presents THE SILENT WOMAN in July
by Stephi Wild - Mar 29, 2022
Since its inception, the annual Bard SummerScape festival has presented a series of stellar revivals of important but neglected operas. This year's immersion in “Rachmaninoff and His World” features The Silent Woman (“Die Schweigsame Frau”), the only true comic opera by Rachmaninoff's close contemporary Richard Strauss.