“Who are you? Who do you want to be?” The search for one’s identity is explored in American composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer’s brand new opera If I Were You.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” went the introduction to the 1940s radio program The Shadow, an apt description for the San Francisco Opera’s production of Rusalka.
Once again we got a very frustrating performance of Orlando; this time a beautiful and completely coherent production marred by some sub-optimal singing.
“Tame” seemed to be the appropriate adjective to describe San Francisco Opera’s Carmen.
San Francisco Opera continues its competition with Lyric Opera of Chicago for the title of “World’s Dullest Opera Company.”
There comes a time where everything falls into place, and more importantly, when your head and heart are also in the right mindset. That’s when when the opera becomes cathartic, life-changing experience.
How do we celebrate a long career in opera, particularly one as illustrious as Plácido Domingo‘s?
Beautiful singing, thoughtful staging, lovely melodies… a perfect escape from daily life.
For this revisiting of Tosca, San Francisco Opera decided to highlight the glamorous lifestyle of the Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio.
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.
Siegfried is, in a sense, The Ring’s odd one out.
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.
Tell us: What was the best of 2025?
Parterre Box concludes the thrilling first year of Talk of the Town by inviting your lightning rod opinions on several more categories of operatic argumentation.
