Festspiel for the consecration of the French Quarter Festspiel for the consecration of the French Quarter

The inaugural New Orleans Opera Festival goes big across the Big Easy.

Da tempeste Da tempeste

My recollections of Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana twenty years ago today, come with a pair of odd bookends: it starts with Verdi’s Don Carlo and ends with Puccini’s Il trittico.

Star-crossed in Crescent City

La Cieca’s misnomered intime No Expert writes: The New Orleans Opera Association likes to describe New Orleans as “America’s First City of Opera,” and it’s true that opera performance has a long history in the Crescent City, dating back to at least 1796 when André Ernest Grétry’s Sylvain was presented.  Since then, New Orleans, and…