SANTA FE, NM—–A dawdling Mark Twain said it best, tongue-in-cheek, when late to a lecture in German: “We’ll get there in time for the verb” (which comes at the end). The Santa Fe Opera made a grand and memorable stab at its first oversize opera ever, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” a huge work for huge voices few thought ever possible in this indoor-outdoor theater with scant flies lacking elaborate stage machinery and giant orchestra pit while projecting the opera world’s…
Opera Parallèle was not content just staging a chamber opera, but rather mounting a troika of simultaneous images in one of the most imaginative productions ever in San Francisco. In the process, it linked a fantasy fairy tale that is millennia old with a vintage 1946 French film as well as a recent Philip Glass score in dazzling counterpoint with one another, assisted by Brian Staufenbiel’s recent movie footage running in between. The triple play elevated the Glass instrumental ensemble’s…
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—For this early opera, if you generously award 1.5 stars to Richard Wagner, you have to give at least four stars to Pocket Opera for its spanking-fresh semi-staged production. San Francisco‘s smallest opera troupe brought off an animated, sparkling show with Wagner’s “No Love Allowed” (Das Liebesverbot), an early production before Wagner became Wagner. Instead of the usual stab at German mythology and grim machinations, here we get a pseudo-Italian frivolity sounding like Donizetti, featuring an assignation-with-wife plot…
PALO ALTO, CA—World-renowned are Stanford University’s technology expertise and her women’s sports teams. But across town, there’s a little miracle called West Bay Opera, which despite a postage-stamp-sized auditorium to play in, brings off productions that are both presentable and downright moving. Cheers rang out with WBO resuming performances after the two-year Covid padlock, hitting its stride in its 66th season. Imagine a theater incapable of scene changes. Half the musicians are sitting in the wings like caged birds, barely…
Though in a huge setting, it was a very intimate contemporary opera, with front-row patrons close enough to turn pages for the conductor. And the dark of the tall edifice only intensified the uneasiness of little Sophia escaping for her life in the scary woods which may or may not harbor ghosts and goblins galore. This is “Sophia’s Forest.” If reminiscent of the spiritual inquietude of old works like “Hansel und Gretel,” “Turn of the Screw” and “Transfigured Night,” it’s…
They did right by Beethoven at the S.F. Opera, staging his only (and foresightedly heroic) opera “Fidelio” nearly a year after his 250st birthday, with Covid19 acting as the black-hat hold-up man at the War Memorial Opera House. If the performance was a bit spotty, no matter—the key word was revolutionary, his message of freedom and individuals bucking repression and suppression by corrupt authorities. And how revolutionary it was in 1805 to have a woman disguising herself as a man…
I dearly love this “shabby little shocker,” as the great musicologist Joseph Kerman once termed it, surfeited as it is with melodrama. The opera “Tosca” embodies the most greed, real-world corruption, duplicity, betrayal, revolutionary activism, hypocrisy and sheer sexual desire of any of Puccini’s operas, all set in familiar sites of Rome, adding up to a stunning social critique of the composer’s homeland. It shows this very establishment composer as a political activist, protester and reformer for once. Naturally, no…
If the Santa Fe Opera’s “Eugene Onegin” lacks the direct punch of the Pushkin poem originating it, perhaps it’s that Tchaikovsky never wrote an opera at all, but rather these “lyric scenes,” as he called them. The SFO brought it off rather miraculously, once again dealing with major cast changes attributable to Covid and related border lockdowns—by now, General Director Robert Meya has likely had enough casting headaches to deal with to run his own headache commercials. Here, Lucas Meachem…
SANTA FE, NM—Another brave start to live, in-person performances, where apart from your required masks, you can pretend there’s no pandemic any more. After the 2020 shutdown, the Santa Fe Opera (summer) Festival has resumed with a near-full complement of four operas, playing in the semi-outdoor Crosby Theatre with its spectacular views of the high desert and Sangre de Cristo Mountains. This is arguably the most breath-taking site for opera in America, with open side vistas and yet a solid…
SANTA FE, N.M.—The best review of the new opera runs thusly: “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Never mind that the quote came from Winston Churchill the better part of a century ago, never mind that it dealt with an unrelated topic. The great new enigma spanning millennia is John Corigliano’s “The Lord of Cries.” In Mark Adamo’s evasive and elusive libretto you get spooks, Greek gods, werewolves, oracles, nightmares, a very bloody murder with…