In Review
Pinned posts
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Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Treemonisha at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s forty-eighth festival season included works by Joplin, Floyd, Puccini and Mozart.
In review posts
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El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at San Francisco Opera
El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego at San Francisco Opera
"Part ghost story, part fervent romance, and a full-on celebration of Latin culture, the opening-night performance marked the first Spanish-language opera performed by the company in its 100-year history. It was worth the wait. Gabriela Lena Frank’s score—the first commissioned opera from a female composer ever produced on the company’s mainstage—is a work of enchanting beauty."
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Così Fan Tutte at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Così Fan Tutte at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"Director Tara Branham took a wildly intrusive approach to Così Fan Tutte, placing the work not in eighteenth-century Naples but in World War II-era England. It would be nice to report that this Così’s musical presentation helped redeem the dreadful production, but this was not the case. Conductor Jeri Lynne Johnson maintained tight coordination between stage and pit but offered her cast little opportunity for nuance: the music marched forward in fixed formation. Most of the singing was too loud, with the performers rarely aiming for dynamic levels below mezzo-forte."
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Tosca at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Tosca at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"This intelligent production did not mine Tosca’s full theatrical value, largely because it was hard to believe in the passionate connection between Katie Van Kooten’s Tosca and Robert Stahley’s Cavaradossi."
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Susannah at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
Susannah at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis
"Given OTSL’s longstanding commitment to American opera, it is remarkable that it had never offered Susannah until this season. Patricia Racette’s production filled the lacuna, telling the sad, simple story plainly and effectively and making a thoroughly convincing argument for the dramatic validity of Carlisle Floyd’s 1955 opera."
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Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival
Parsifal at the Bayreuth Festival
"Augmented reality reached the Bayreuth Festival this season. The festival originally planned to supply the entire audience for Jay Scheib’s new staging of Parsifal with specially designed glasses to experience the production’s three-dimensional moving images. Instead only 300 ticket holders received the glasses for each show. While Scheib offered a modern, well-thought-out reading of Parsifal’s text and music, the nonstop barrage of images threatened to turn the innovative aspects of this Parsifal into visual Muzak."
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Roméo et Juliette at Central City Opera
Roméo et Juliette at Central City Opera
"Those two beloved star-cross'd lovers may share top billing in Gounod's opera, but in Dan Wallace Miller’s consistently fine production for Central City Opera, Juliet stole the show in the person of Madison Leonard, a soprano of fearless prowess from the bottom to the top of her range, gifted with impressively natural acting chops and prodigious charm."
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“Great” Mass in C Minor & Dhikra at the Mostly Mozart Festival
“Great” Mass in C Minor & Dhikra at the Mostly Mozart Festival
"This year marks conductor Louis Langrée’s twenty-first and final year with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra. As a nod to one of his first concerts, which paired Indo-Persian music with Mozart’s Requiem, Langrée’s July 25 Mostly Mozart program coupled the composer’s unfinished 'Great' Mass in C Minor with Dhikra, a world premiere by Iraqi–American composer and musician Amir ElSaffar."
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Acis and Galatea at Caramoor
Acis and Galatea at Caramoor
"Under the enlivening musical direction of Richard Egarr, who also played the harpsichord, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra's playing was consistently terrific, clear and precise even when Egarr rushed things a bit."
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The Rake's Progress at the Teatro Colón
The Rake's Progress at the Teatro Colón
"Tenor Ben Bliss and baritone Christopher Purves were a perfectly oiled acting and singing pair as Rakewell and Nick Shadow. I had never seen or heard such a powerful defense of the classic Faustian pact between them: in Purves’s impeccable interpretation, Nick was at once Tom’s outer devil and as his inner shadowy self."