This is the sleek new 2022 model of Carmen, straight from the showrooms. Forget gypsies, forget Spain. The new Carmen is a cool sorority sister type and girl-next-door coed. And yes, the 2022 Carmen is wearing blue jeans; in the finale, she could well be transformed into a casino croupier. And oh yes, she’s hanging out in the dregs of a bankrupt amusement park with wrecks of merry-go-round and roller coaster. Ahh, modern-day symbolism! I think I heard, after a…
SANTA FE, N.M.—A story at once preposterous and all too real propels the new opera “M. Butterfly.” But where is the music that can propel the thoughts, the moods, the innermost personalities of the players? Composer Huang Ruo’s rugged score reproduced all the conflicts and disruptions in the libretto. But where is the music to let the singers expound, philosophize, emote and breathe? So much work, yet so aloof remain the protagonists. This story of multiple enigmas is based on…
SANTA FE, NM—–A dawdling Mark Twain said it best, tongue-in-cheek, when late to a lecture in German: “We’ll get there in time for the verb” (which comes at the end). The Santa Fe Opera made a grand and memorable stab at its first oversize opera ever, Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” a huge work for huge voices few thought ever possible in this indoor-outdoor theater with scant flies lacking elaborate stage machinery and giant orchestra pit while projecting the opera world’s…
SANTA CRUZ, CA—Resolute not to let Covid win for the third year in a row, the plucky Cabrillo Festival cobbled together a concert program with half an orchestra to prevent yet another cancellation. After the total washouts of 2020 and 2021, this week Cabrillo found no less than 16 orchestra members who were suddenly Covid positive, leaving it with only tatters of a woodwind and brass section. So with just percussion and a string orchestra intact, Music Director Christian Mãcelaru…