opera – Page 2 – Repeat Performances

August 11, 2018

The darkest corners of opera shine through in West Edge Opera’s “Quartett”

Beginning their 2018 Festival with Debussy’s only opera, a love triangle sketched in delicate sensuality, West Edge Opera closed its summer offerings with Luca Francesconi’s Quartett, an operatic staging of Heiner Muller’s 1982 play of the same name, both inspired by Laclos’ 18th-century novel, Les liaisons dangereuses. Very different fare. There are crucial similarities, however, not only the operas’ focus on love and sexuality, suppressed or distorted, but more...

Categories: opera

August 5, 2018

Mata Hari, an offering to the exotic and the difficult

Always open to radically new and contemporary writing, West Edge Opera opened its second production of the season this past Sunday with the 2017 opera by Matt Marks and Paul Peers, Mata Hari. The opera, which premiered at New York’s Prototype Festival, combines spoken voice with classical singers. At the Craneway Conference Center, West Edge Opera’s current venue, Emily Senturia conducted the opera’s four-member instrumental ensemble of violin, piano, accordion and electric...

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August 4, 2018

West Edge Opera’s captivating “Pelléas et Mélisande”

West Edge Opera opened its 2018 season with an enchanting performance of Pelléas et Mélisande, the 1902 opera by Claude Debussy to the theater libretto of Belgian playwright and poet Maurice Maeterlinck. It was an inspired program choice, tenderly sung and evocatively produced, revealing what a fine jewel of a company West Edge Opera is. This year all West Edge Opera Festival performances take place at the Craneway Conference Center in Richmond. Teetering between the end of...

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June 17, 2018

A glittering Ring

The lyrics and even the action of the Ring Cycle are a series of repeating stories in which different characters retell past and future moments, all of which move inexorably toward the culminating deaths in Götterdämerung, the cycle’s concluding opera. It’s almost as if Wagner was worried the audience might forget the storyline during the cycle’s 17 hours of high-octane emotion. More likely, he was just obsessed, a living paragon of Romantic excess. Of the many stories sung,...

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June 12, 2018

Grabbing the Ring at SF Opera

The opening music of Wagner’s Ring Cycle begins with a single note played by the lower strings. Low woodwinds join in and then horns, until slowly a chord is formed. Wagner believed this first low note was a primal sound, an aural indication of a first slouching-toward-creation. It’s hard to argue his interpretation, for the sound as it carried out from the orchestra on Tuesday’s opening night seemed saturated with the terror of newness and ominous birth. As quickly as the notes cohered...

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June 2, 2018

A gripping “Carmen” at West Bay Opera

Artistic Director José Luis Moscovich led an out-sized production of the opera Carmen on Saturday, June 2 in the South Bay’s intimate Lucie Stern Theater. Brought to musical life by French composer Georges Bizet from a novel by Prosper Mérimée, this steamy pot-boiler was the backdrop for one of the best casts that I have heard here. And hearing that cast in this modest theater was a triumph of nuance over the usual operatic excess, with the title character’s range and deft...

Categories: opera