ArtsSF

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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