June 29, 2013
Cosi Fan Tutte in SF
Faith and pheromones at the Opera House.
Hijinks and low cunning filled the stage of the San Francisco Opera last Saturday night for one of the most delightful endeavors of the...
opera
June 7, 2013
Opera Parallèle produces “Gesualdo”
Madness in the madrigal form…
San Francisco’s ever-adventurous Opera Parallèle staged a working reading of Dante da Silva’s Gesualdo, Prince of...
May 24, 2013
Otello at West Bay Opera
Vittoria! Evviva! Giuseppe Verdi’s Otello, co-produced by West Bay Opera of Palo Alto and Festival Opera of Walnut Creek, affirms the vitality and relevance of Bay Area regional opera. This unique collaboration shows both a prudent response to financial challenges of producing opera and creates an exciting partnership that brings into our communities a cultural experience of magnitude and beauty. An enthusiastic full house packed Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern...
April 27, 2013
Trouble in Tahiti in SF
Opera Parallèle takes no prisoners
Nicole Paiement and Brian Staufenbiel rekindled their magic last weekend at San Francisco’s Z Space, with an unsparing production of Leonard Bernstein’s fraught suburban Trouble in Tahiti. This real-life couple is the creative powerhouse behind Opera Parallèle, Paiement as conductor and artistic director and Staufenbiel supplying the concept and stage direction.
After a triumphant season...
April 6, 2013
Bonjour M. Gauguin at West Edge Opera
At some point in life the desire to leave the familiar behind in exchange for the unknown has seemed liberating. But some discover that the grass is in fact not always greener on the other side, and escaping is not the answer to misery. Such is the story of French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.
On Saturday, April 6, 2013, the West Edge Opera Company presented the American premier of Italian composer Fabrizio Corlone’s Bonjour M. Gauguin, a chamber opera...
March 2, 2013
A Secret Garden at Zellerbach
A garden blooms in Berkeley
I’m not a gardener. Sun plants tend to wilt at my hands, and shade plants fry. But the Secret Garden, a new operatic adaptation of a children’s classic premiering this week at Zellerbach Hall, would inspire all of us to try our hand at gardening, or at the least to dig into the loam of British children’s literature.
A collaborative venture between the San Francisco Opera and Cal Performances, the...