ArtsSF

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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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