ArtsSF

Orinda, CA—Give an E for Effort to the feisty West Edge Opera resuming live outdoor opera despite all adversity and fielding a strong central cast to try to make you forget all its shortcomings. After 16 months with our center stages hogged by virus and little else, WEO celebrated the improving health dip by producing the wrenching drama of love lost, “Katya Kabanova” by the Czech composer Leos Janacek, one of the great late bloomers in operatic history—live, on stage,…

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Necessity is anew the mother of invention. Even in opera premieres, a tradition dating back four centuries. When singers and orchestras couldn’t congregate during the pandemic, Opera Parallèle brought to bear imagination with a capital I. They went at their challenge piecemeal with an arresting experiment in animation. Using adaptation techniques from robotics, they brought on well-drawn faces, closeups and graphic-novel formats for Joby Talbot’s one-act mountain-climbing saga reworked for streaming, “Everest,” based on the Dallas Opera world premiere production…

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If you have the heart of a gambler with the talent to carry off a tennis doubles tournament, you could be running a company like the East Bay’s West Edge Opera. Meet Mark Streshinsky, general director of spunky West Edge, who is selecting the best possible creative team for a world premiere opera a good two years down the road. All without mirrors, tricks, or foundation underwriting. There’s both the heart and the gambling. And then, resembling a tennis tourney,…

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Currently streaming free over the web, Mozart’s early opera “Idomeneo” is a flawed masterwork wrapped in a rare treat. It fairly glows with the composer’s mature musical style in arias, ensembles and scenas, but it lacks the conciseness and sparkling libretto characteristic of his later stage pieces. For the next few weeks at any time, you can catch a very presentable, elegant and at times compelling version over the web. This was the 2011 production by Opera San Jose recalling…

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PALO ALTO, CA—The romance of Valentine’s Day came face to face with ghoulish rituals and murder most foul by that usurper Macbeth. Disastrous? Hardly. The plucky little opera company virtually sold out the house February 14th, emulating the mouse that roared. And it brought on high drama on its opening night, overcoming almost all adversity. This was that jinxed operatic “Macbeth,” by Verdi, out of Shakespeare—an unsettling tale so fearsome that theaters everywhere still leave one light burning on stage…

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Credit the Bach Soloists for filling the week’s vacuum around New Year’s with goodies, specifically by addressing that yawning concert void we have before and after the most celebrated Eve since, well, maybe Adam. On the year’s final afternoon they paraded forth a splendid cornucopia of baroque operatic arias with two imported vocalists, and even an authentic period-instruments orchestra of 27 playing as if Frederick the Great himself was in the boxes at Herbst Theatre, demanding the best. I’m delighted…

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It was the Wagner Rush or the Wagner High, hitting again with flashes of lightning, as overwhelming as it is dazzling. It was just a one-hour sampler (out of that 15-hour “Ring” tetralogy), but you wonder if you could ever stay standing coherently and rationally after a full 15-hour, 4-day hit. Well, there’s some semblance of sanity locally, as there are no plans anywhere on the horizon for the “Ring” being staged at the S.F. Opera; so the S.F. Symphony’s…

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It’s been called the perfect comic opera, “The Marriage of Figaro” or, more accurately, “Figaro’s Wedding.” And the current go-round at the S.F. Opera, while not perfect, catches its humor and dexterity as only Mozart and his librettist Da Ponte could have created. Think about it: In the elegant drawing rooms, intrigue upon intrigue. Assignations in switched identities. Hired help conspiring to outwit the libertine count. The women outwitting the men. Figaro desperately trying to wiggle out of a long-forgotten…

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The unlikeliest hit opera: an immense all-male cast of 75; setting aboard a warship at sea, without touching land or engaging in battle; no dance, no festivities; and a severe tragedy with the ingratiating title character executed because of insane wartime regulations. This is “Billy Budd” (1951), a searing bigger-than-life British drama (after Herman Melville’s virtually forgotten posthumous novella) which opened at the S.F. Opera Sept. 7. The neoclassical musical power of composer Benjamin Britten carries over past the voices…

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SANTA FE, NM—-With new leadership at the helm, the Opera here is making news this summer with two shows for very different reasons: One, an emotion-torn, gut-wrenching “Jenufa” that was the summer’s runaway hit drama, the other a world-premiere fairy-tale for big people. The human tragedy “Jenufa” is built around the village saga of two dramatic sopranos playing the title role and the stepmother respectively: Jenufa, jilted by the playboy Steva and faced with disgrace for her birth out of…

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