Opera Reviews

Ensemble Parallèle sold itself short by emphasizing that their two performances of Alban Berg’s nightmarish early-20th-century opera, Wozzeck, would fill the breach left since San Francisco Opera last performed the work in November, 1999. Heard and seen in the relative intimacy of Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the West Coast premiere of John Rea’s 21-musician chamber reorchestration needed no apologia. Ensemble Parallèle’s oft-devastating, 90-minute multimedia wow of a production was whole and complete unto itself.

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Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello is the final production of San Francisco Opera’s fall season. The opera might be more commonly performed, but it makes strenuous vocal demands on the protagonist and it's difficult to find singers who have mastered the role. Fortunately, Johan Botha, a South African dramatic tenor, is more than up to the job. He brings a strikingly powerful voice and notably easy vocalism to the task. It is rare, indeed, to hear a tenor who deftly navigates Otello’s vocal difficulties.

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“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death,” sings Salome, the eponymous central character in Richard Strauss’ 1905 opera.

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Giacomo Puccini often chose settings that brought opera up close and personal, and he thus worked vital changes on the form and made it ready for the 20th century. There’s a consequent advantage in witnessing Puccini in a smaller venue, such as the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, where the West Bay Opera continues its well-sung production of La bohème next weekend. 

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The Daughter of the Regiment (La Fille du Régiment) by Gaetano Donizetti is about singing as a direct route to the hearts both of characters and audiences. The opera’s apparent naiveté and, at times, blatant absurdity belie its perfection. In it the mature master composer of some 52 prior operas hides his own virtuosity in order allow his singers to reveal truth of feeling.

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It’s easy to understand why Cal Performances scheduled four preconcert educational events in association with the two-performance U.S. premiere of Evan Ziporyn’s new opera, A House in Bali, at UC Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. There’s little that’s literal about the work.

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Grand and glorious as Mozart's 1782 Die Entführung aus dem Seraglio (The Abduction from the Seraglio) is, it's not a through-composed, sung-only "grand opera." Now onstage at the San Francisco Opera, in a new coproduction with Chicago's Lyric Opera, "Abduction" is an early forerunner of the Broadway musical, a "singspiel" with a great deal of spoken dialogue. More about San Francisco Opera »

In a long-gone era of baseball, before they needed four days of rest between starts, pitchers routinely worked both games of a doubleheader. Soprano Patricia Racette goes them one better in San Francisco Opera’s Il trittico, by playing substantial roles in all three outings of this 1918 Puccini triple-header of one-act operas.

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It’s a curious fact about Il trovatore, Verdi’s "magnificent demonstration of unprincipled melodrama," as Joseph Kerman called it, that this 1853 potboiler contains so much dramatically still water. No sooner does the curtain rise than a captain launches into a lengthy, action-stalling account of events that happened years before. And that’s not the only instance of extended exposition in Salvatore Cammarano’s creaky libretto, based on the Antonio Garcia Gutierrez play. More about San Francisco Opera »

Those of us who saw San Francisco Opera’s production of Puccini’s La Rondine in fall 2007 may think that we know the opera. We don’t. SFO’s Nicolas Joël production, which was reprised at the Metropolitan last season and simultaneously shown in hi-def in many theaters around the world, is not the final word on Puccini’s Johnny-come-lately masterpiece. For that we must turn to the scholarship of Marta Domingo, and Decca’s newly released DVD of her radically revised version of La Rondine for Washington National Opera. More »