February 2017

February 26, 2017

“The Source” at SF Opera Lab

  SF Opera Lab opened its second season with The Source. It’s a complex and compelling piece that deals with war and the ways in which the U.S. military obscures what it does in conflict. The Source focuses on Pvt. Chelsea...

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Categories: opera

February 25, 2017

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...

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Categories: opera

February 24, 2017

North German Masters of the Baroque

Paving the way for Bach… In a concert by the California Bach Society titled “North German Masters before Bach,” we were treated to lovely and little-known music. And that begged a fascinating question: who were the composers that inspired Bach? Paul Flight led a journey through the seventeenth century world of Tunder and Buxtehude, finding Italian influences reshaped by the Protestant Reformation, and a lovely interplay of lines that Bach would...

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Categories: music

February 19, 2017

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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Categories: opera

February 18, 2017

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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Categories: opera