Santa Fe, NM—Did we see the Mother Lode country with its colorful miners living it up, maybe? Or the giant water sluices of Hoover Dam’s power plant? Any guess about site or scenery is possible at “The Flying Dutchman,” an opera that composer Richard Wagner thought he wrote about seafarers. And about a curse, like a majority of the operas the first week of August here. So once again (as in “Rusalka”), the revisionist decorators have struck with their zany…
SANTA FE, NM—-Monteverdi’s opera “Orfeo,” like the ancient Greek tragedy, executes all the high drama, gore and bloodshed offstage. But this staging has the title character jumping through hoops suspended high in the sky for close to a half-hour in the most startling operatic tour de force I’ve encountered in 60 years of opera-going. The acrobatic Orfeo is the dramatic tenor Rolando Villazón, who I hope gets a nightly hazard pay supplement, like at Covent Garden, where one veteran London…
The S.F. opera house was like a trip to Mexico City, starting with the lobby and numerous patrons in flower-capped formals, thanks to a contingent that had never been to opera before. Then came the new work in Spanish, and a fantasy based on the real-life couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, both of them art-world, New-World luminaries—-their loves, their spats, their splits, their reconciliation. For the 50-year-old composer with a strong lyrical bent, this was a promising initial venture…
Too bad composer Richard Strauss has fallen out of favor these days, given his great work in both opera and tone poems. Happily, for its centennial year the S.F. Opera has revived the spectacular fairy tale for adults, “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (The Woman without a Shadow), for which a crowd of critics congregated from near and far for the June 4 opening. This may well end up the superior operatic experience of 2023, just in time for the troupe’s…
SAN JOSE, CA—-Doubts abounded, with nay-sayers smirking that not even Verdi could set a Shakespearean comedy into a good opera. Those doubting Thomases were silenced when nearing the then-doddering age of 80, Verdi brought off that sparkling operatic masterpiece, “Falstaff,” which is getting its due and more from a highly animated production at Opera San José. Major companies, take note: This smaller troupe with its actor-singers, only in its 39th season, can run circles around many grand-opera troupes having major…
Call the opera “Orphée,” “Orfeo,” or, like the SF Opera, “Orpheus and Eurydice”—whatever the name, the production here offers breakthroughs in many directions—a dazzling feast of primary colors and lighting, acrobatic dancers, a goddess descending from heaven on a swing, and the most nimble of males ever in the title role. This reprise of Gluck’s early classical-period opus in this memorable new production is a feast for ears and eyes, despite the severe dramatic limitation of having merely three solo…
One of the real problems in John Adams’ new opera is that Shakespeare wrote plays but never opera librettos. Now, Will, “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Othello” are all well and good as stage plays, but couldn’t you think of baritones and sopranos too? In using Shakespeare and earlier texts for almost all of his libretto, composer Adams was stuck with lines rarely ending in vowels. He thus saddles the singers with drooping fade-out lines that suppress their attractiveness and expressiveness. Just…
Composer John Adams has made a welcome attempt to bring under control the unwieldy “Antony and Cleopatra” story out of Shakespeare. Evolving from there, past composer Samuel Barber’s grand 1966 Met failure, to Adams’ world premiere, it has been boiled down from some 40 scenes and two dozen solo voices (ouch!) to this sleek, late-model version in three hours, two acts debuting Sept. 10 to mark the 100th year of the San Francisco Opera. If you were waiting for gooey…
This is the sleek new 2022 model of Carmen, straight from the showrooms. Forget gypsies, forget Spain. The new Carmen is a cool sorority sister type and girl-next-door coed. And yes, the 2022 Carmen is wearing blue jeans; in the finale, she could well be transformed into a casino croupier. And oh yes, she’s hanging out in the dregs of a bankrupt amusement park with wrecks of merry-go-round and roller coaster. Ahh, modern-day symbolism! I think I heard, after a…
SANTA FE, N.M.—A story at once preposterous and all too real propels the new opera “M. Butterfly.” But where is the music that can propel the thoughts, the moods, the innermost personalities of the players? Composer Huang Ruo’s rugged score reproduced all the conflicts and disruptions in the libretto. But where is the music to let the singers expound, philosophize, emote and breathe? So much work, yet so aloof remain the protagonists. This story of multiple enigmas is based on…