Tour de force Tour de force

In their realization of Alcina, Harry Bicket and his ensemble recreated a dramatically vivid and musically nuanced character study out of the opera’s central figures.

Witchy women Witchy women

You’d think after nearly 40 years of opera going I’d have seen almost everything.. .twice. Yet I found myself at LA Opera Tuesday night for a special presentation of George Frideric Handel’s Alcina which was my first live experience with one of his operas.

In witch we serve In witch we serve

Sunday afternoon’s intermittently involving concert performance of Handel’s Alcina at Carnegie Hall starred an unusually intense Joyce DiDonato as a powerful sorceress blinded by her romantic delusions.