Opera

The San Francisco Opera has front-loaded its season, and coming up this week is Renee Fleming's appearance in the title role of Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia.

Like a well-trained infantryperson, Heart of a Soldier
triumphed in its first battle with opera’s ultimate enemy, public
indifference: Patrons greeted the premiere in the War Memorial Opera
House with a sustained standing ovation.

A true-to-the-original production of Gershwin’s masterwork is blessed by four outstanding women singer/actors, but marred by lax baton work.

The Grand Finale of the Merolini serves as a coming-out party for singers who may rise to the top of the operatic world or settle in the middle ranks.

A noted opera director reflects on collaborating with San Francisco Opera on a new work based on the 9/11 attacks.

Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts receives a colorful, if often inscrutable, remounting at Yerba Buena Center.

And this Sunday Dolora Zajick sings for free as part of the San Francisco Opera's performance at Stern Grove. That's right: $100 a ticket to see her in the opera house, free at Stern Grove. And then there's this: even if you arrive late – heck, even if you picnic in the parking lot – you'll still hear her loud and clear.

The stage director/choreographer strives to get his singers to embody their roles, so the audience can sense that their story is alive and present onstage.

Philip Glass’ Orphée earns high marks as a 20th-century alternative to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. It just deserves a better production than the blunt, charmless staging mounted by the Ensemble Parallèle at Herbst Theatre over the weekend.

Works of fiction that become operas often suffer some degree of degradation in the translation. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is generally acknowledged a masterpiece: Dostoyevsky called it “flawless as a work of art.” Yet David Carlson’s opera Anna Karenina seems destined to go down in operatic history as a valiant attempt, at best.