July 10, 2015
‘Incarnate: Memories, Dreams and Desires’
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opera
June 25, 2015
“The Trojans” a genuine spectacle at SF Opera
The flames of war and the flames of love…
The San Francisco Opera turned in a triumphant spectacle last Thursday with Hector Berlioz’ epic Les Troyens, a five hour opera based on the Trojan Wars and the wandering of Aeneas. This huge production required 134 artists onstage including principal singers, chorus, dancers, acrobats and supernumeraries, along with 95 musicians packed into the pit and off-stage. The sets, constructed in England, were...
May 22, 2015
West Bay Opera delivers triumphant Faust
The West Bay Opera, the Western United States’ second oldest opera company, is finishing its fifty-ninth season with a hair-raising Faust. Now showing in Palo...
April 24, 2015
“Max Understood” at Cowell Theater
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April 18, 2015
Philharmonia Baroque salutes the voice
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March 10, 2015
“Middlemarch in Spring” at Z Space
Rediscovering an English enchantment
Having trespassed on the shores of musicology whilst eschewing any regard for the Great Works of Literature, I really thought I could skim Middlemarch the night before the premiere of Allen Shearer’s Middlemarch in Spring, an opera based on that 19th century edifice of English fiction.
After wading through the first several pages of a “pocket” book that clocked in at 1,026 pages, I...