For this revisiting of Tosca, San Francisco Opera decided to highlight the glamorous lifestyle of the Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio.
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Lightning struck again here when, after a wait of 39 years, San Francisco Opera unveiled a new production of Donizetti’s Roberto Devereux.
San Francisco Opera opened their 2018-19 Season Friday with a double bill of Italian verismo operas, Cavalleria rusticana and Pagliacci, which made a welcome return to War Memorial Opera House after 15 years.
As Brünnhilde invokes the gods of an empty Valhalla for one last time and strides confidently into a wall of flame, we pause for a moment, unsure of what will follow.
If Das Rheingold is an opera about infinitude, the illusory idea that the world is large enough to satisfy all of our desires, passions, and lusts, Die Walküre is an opera about scarcity.
Casting the Ring as a parable for the state of the current world, seen through the eyes of a progressive urban opera lover (and not an early German nationalist), offers us soothing self-justification.
San Francisco opera offers a new peak in drab, listless programming in their 2018-2019 “Leftovers and Stuff We Got With Coupons” gala season.
I really wished to avoid joining the pig pile of derision that has fallen on SF Opera’s premiere of John Adams and Peter Sellars’ Girls of the Golden West.
I’ve been picking away yet again at the mysterious symbiosis between an opera’s words and its music.
It is not easy for an opera company to follow a spectacular production of La Traviata with Massenet’s Manon.
There is a slight chill in the air during the final minutes of La Traviata.
You’ve got your “Night in the Museum,”and your “It’s All In Her Head” and your “Pantomimes of Childhood Trauma” and that’s all before halftime.
Brian Jagde‘s creative and charismatic Calaf was almost enough to make up for his counterpart Martina Serafin’s distant portrayal of Turandot.
Samantha Hankey, so impressive as Diana and Giove-in-Diana in Juilliard’s recent run of Cavalli’s La Calisto, was the perfect Cenerentola.
Anna Caterina Antonacci delivered a tour de force of French diction, subtlety of phrasing, variation of vocal timbre, and white-hot stage acting.
Isn’t it inspiring how deeply Francesca Zambello has sunk her tentacles into the heart of American opera?
San Francisco Opera in 2017-2018 presents the Ring cycle, a new John Adams/Peter Sellars collaboration called Girls of the Golden West, plus new productions of Elektra (Christine Goerke, Stephanie Blythe, Adrianne Pieczonka) and Manon (Nadine Sierra, Michael Fabiano.)
It is a good rule of thumb that if you emerge from a massive grand opera like Aida feeling any less than overwhelmed, you have a right to be somewhat disappointed.
In one important respect, a great production of Puccini resembles a great production of Wagner.
The entire action is set at a cocktail party at the Taylor-Burtons’ circa 1971
Janácek’s disconcerting commentary on youth and immortality received a full-throated performance.
That little place just two hours from the city is on the list of things I shall never understand, like the plot of Parsifal.
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