Reviews

Lisa Hirsch - June 12, 2010

Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the second opera of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, opened at San Francisco Opera on Thursday night with a thrilling, deeply moving performance that bodes extremely well for the full Ring to be presented in June 2011.

Steven Winn - June 10, 2010

Audience members who may feel tempted to bail out early on San Francisco Opera’s The Girl of the Golden West should be advised that the best — and briefest — act of this often wayward and wearisome production comes last. 

Jeff Kaliss - June 9, 2010

There seemed something prescient in one of the 17th-century motets presented by Magnificat on Monday night at Yoshi’s Jazz Club in San Francisco.

Jason Victor Serinus - June 7, 2010

This 2-disc DVD gives the lie to the notion that opera can remain relevant only if the setting is updated to contemporary times. Pier Luigi Pizzi’s historically based, thoroughly modern sets, costumes, and direction for this 2009 production of Claudio Monteverdi ’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria at Teatro Real, Madrid, are so compelling, and the authentic instrument performance by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants is so alive and colorful, that an opera first performed 369 years ago resounds with life and feeling.

John Bender - June 7, 2010

For the San Francisco Opera to stage Charles Gounod’s Faust now, 10 years into the 21st century, shows an odd kind of daring. Yet this traditional-looking production from the Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Jose Maria Condemi, with sets and costumes by Robert Perdziola, brings a museum piece to genuine new life.

Eric Freeman - June 6, 2010

The Jack Dubowsky Ensemble had its work cut out for it last Thursday at San Francisco's Eagle Tavern. The plan: Play through Depeche Mode’s classic 1990 album Violator with a small chamber group, and score it for (mostly) acoustic instruments — a reinterpretation that has the potential to delight.

Jeff Kaliss - June 3, 2010

We’re blessed here in the Bay Area with a bounty of good, small companies that get us up close and personal with opera in good, small venues. How much better the blessing is, then, when the operatic material is as powerfully and finely wrought as Tobias Picker’s Emmeline, now enjoying a three-week West Coast premiere run at Petaluma’s intimate Cinnabar Theater.

David Bratman - June 1, 2010

A concert by Cadenza, the former Santa Cruz Chamber Orchestra, is like taking a drink from a mountain spring: cool, clear, and refreshing — though more refreshing, in truth, than thirst-quenching. Saturday’s concert at Holy Cross Church lasted just over an hour, intermission included. When it ended, soon after 9 p.m., twilight had not quite finished fading.

Steven Winn - June 1, 2010

Listeners unacquainted with Thomas Adès can embark on a powerful, short-course introduction to the magnificently gifted young British composer with this EMI disc. The emotional pull, drama, expressive complexity, wit, and allusive richness of Adès’ music are all in evidence.

Georgia Rowe - May 30, 2010

It only took the better part of two decades, but Thursday evening at Davies Symphony Hall, Robin Holloway’s Clarissa Sequence finally received its first San Francisco Symphony performance. Holloway’s original Clarissa Sequence, that is, the one for soprano and orchestra.