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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100th Anniversary Concert at San Francisco Opera
100th Anniversary Concert at San Francisco Opera
"San Francisco Opera marked its centennial with the kind of concert opera-lovers dream about—an evening-length program that looked back on the company’s storied history while celebrating its vibrant present. Hosted by SFO general director Matthew Shilvock and featuring three conductors—company SFO music director Eun Sun Kim, former SFO music director Donald Runnicles, and former principal guest conductor Patrick Summers—the concert in the War Memorial Opera House featured sixteen singers, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and John Keene’s Chorus in a wide-ranging program staged by Shawna Lucey."
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Don Giovanni at Teatro Grattacielo
Don Giovanni at Teatro Grattacielo
"Tasos Protopsaltou’s production design was inspired by Pedro Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, with the singers drifting around in an unspecified space wearing unflattering ’90s outfits and lounging onstage on futons decorated in Rubik’s Cube chic. Unfortunately, an aesthetic isn’t the same as a coherent concept, and in this misguided production the young singers, some performing complete roles for the first time, floundered. Asking any soprano, let alone an inexperienced one, to sing the most famous duet in the opera while preparing a smoothie is just unfair. It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but nothing in Stefanos Koroneos’s direction did."
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Ghost Opera at the Ojai Music Festival
Ghost Opera at the Ojai Music Festival
"Few contemporary composers make us listen as closely and as exactingly as Tan Dun. We savor the tone, quality, and texture of each moment, we scrutinize the sounds that arise from unusual combinations of instruments, melodies, and voices, and we listen, above all perhaps, to the silence to which the music gives definition and meaning. Ghost Opera is not strictly an opera—in Tan Dun’s composition list it is labeled as “performance art”—but one of the most distinguishing functions of operatic music is its capacity to fill a space, so that space and music become one. Tan Dun is one of the masters of this particular art and this work clearly showed us how he is."
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Bound at Seattle Opera
Bound at Seattle Opera
"At the end of an opera season with several new or recent works in which social justice issues and storytelling pushed emotional buttons that music often failed to support, Bound was a refreshing change. Its story, in a libretto by Bao-Long Chu, is the true one of Diane Tran, a Vietnamese immigrant and straight-A high-school student in Texas who, working two jobs to support herself and her siblings, missed enough school to be jailed for truancy. Soprano Karen Vuong, shortly after a fine and glamorous Rusalka in Portland, looked tiny and crushed as Diane as she with great intensity lamented her state and conflicting loyalties in the most beautiful aria in any new or recent work."
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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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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."