opera – Page 7 – Repeat Performances

January 19, 2018

Two one-act operas in Alameda

A wintry beauty… In a surprisingly polished pair of performances, Island City Opera, Alameda’s resident opera company, opened two one-act operas by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov last Friday, Jan. 19. While known for his powerful use of orchestral color and deep sympathy for native Russian folk themes, Rimsky-Korsakov wrote these two operas in very different styles. Mozart and Salieri, composed to a libretto by Alexander Pushkin, offered the idea that the composer Salieri...

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January 18, 2018

“Harriet’s Spirit” rises in young voices

Once again Opera Parallèle, that unique and valuable company founded and directed by Artistic Director and Conductor Nicole Paiement and Creative Director Brian Staffenbiel, showed us the relevance of opera to contemporary life. Not through reworkings of traditional opera but through the active writing and producing of new opera. For several years, Opera Parallèle has developed an educational program that offers multiple opportunities for school children – from attending rehearsals to...

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November 21, 2017

A shaky premiere for San Francisco Opera: John Adams and Peter Sellars’ “Girls of the Golden West”

In the first act of Girls of the Golden West a huge gold frame descends to the stage and a black-and-white engraving of wilderness appears in its center. A stagehand in black turns a crank moving the spools that wind the picture along until another engraving replaces it. This special effect, the moving panorama, was popular in the mid 19th-century. And it’s not a bad metaphor for John Adams and Peter Sellars’ new opera Girls of the Golden West. For although the moving...

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November 10, 2017

William Kentridge’s stunning turn through time

“There is a utopian perfection in inverting time,” explains South African artist William Kentridge. Time and how film changes time and the material world, which he as a visual artist is deeply connected to, are a focus of his drawings and videos. He sees the ability to use film to reverse and control time as connected to “the longing to undo things we’ve done.” Although he may not have achieved this form of utopianism in his performance opera, Refuse the Hour, presented by...

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November 7, 2017

Girls just want to have jewels: San Francisco Opera’s “Manon”

San Francisco Opera has opened a sleek new production of Jules Massenet’s Manon with colorful balloons, vivid costumes and elegantly conducted music. Perhaps a cautionary tale on the dangers of leaving naive and ethically ambiguous young women unchaperoned in the courtyard of an inn while traveling, the opera follows its greedy heroine from her escape from convent life into the arms of the ardent Chevalier des Grieux. And then through a high life of champagne, jewels, lovers and ennui...

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September 23, 2017

“La Traviata” at SF Opera

Troubling and timeless… There is a timelessness to great music. That timeless quality was immediately apparent at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, where Giuseppe Verdi’s teasing textures, joyous dances, divine progressions and hair-raising harmonies were faithfully rendered by the SF Opera Orchestra under the baton of Nicola Luisotti. In creating that great music Verdi mirrored...

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