More Snapshots from West Edge Opera

West Edge Opera presented its second set of Snapshots in its new series of selections of opera composed by Bay Area librettists and composers. Saturday’s performance at the David Brower Center was just as diverse as the last month’s selection. The instrumentalists just as accomplished and...

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Opera San José’s “Silent Night”

Silent Night, which opened its run at Opera San José on February 11, was the first opera of American composer Kevin Puts. It debuted in 2011 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in 2012 Kevin Puts was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the music. The opera delves...

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Lamplighters do “Patience”

Of milkmaids in Mountain View There is nothing quite like the frothy comic operas of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. That unlikely pair joined forces to write fourteen endearing operas over their long career, bridging high art with popular appeal and plastering them heavily with distressed damsels, fevered wit and the bumbling forces of the law. ...

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Flight unfastens your musical seatbelt

Opera Parallèle takes wing again In the quiet hours of the airport, after most have flown off to destinations known and unknown, the Controller sings with the Refugee. Beginning with soaring vocalese, soprano Nikki Einfeld and countertenor Tai Oney meet in some solitary musical space between earth...

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“Don Pasquale” in Alameda

When life mimics opera The Island City Opera, now in its third season, brought an accomplished production to Alameda last Sunday, January 22, held at the imposing Elks Lodge Ballroom, where oak thrones and red velvets and elk horns create a space that encourages the suspension of disbelief. And that was perfect for Don Pasquale, a comic opera tossed off by Gaetano Donizetti in just 11 days in 1842 but considered to be at the top of the buffa...

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