opera

Hybrid life The partially open curtain reveals a man naked from the waist up. He has clattered to the front of the stage, and he reveals in words what he disguises behind a waist-high screen inscribed with a white circle—that he is a centaur: a half-man, half-horse monster. After telling a series of histories about deformed children caused by an “excess” of sperm, he draws a parallel between himself and a manmade phenomenon of Baroque opera: the castrato. The...

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The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many a summer dies the swan. So Tennyson opens his long poem on the hazards of immortality, placed in the words of the Trojan hero, Tithonos, a man doomed to immortality by his lover Eos, the goddess of Dawn. Doomed, because Eos in her request for unending life forgets to include never-ending youth. Each morning, the goddess awakes...

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Mozart on the intimate stage This past weekend the San Francisco Lyric Opera opened its 2009 season with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The singing was excellent, ringing through the resonant acoustics of Cowell Theater; the fine cast was led by the formidable talents of Romanian-born baritone Eugene Branconeauvu. Branconeauvu first appeared on Bay Area stages while an Adler Fellow at San Francisco Opera in 2005–2006, and he has continued appearing on those stages...

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Mommy Dearest all over again Any study in narcissism ought to be way up there in terms of social relevance for any culture. Watching out for oneself is a necessary component of survival. But since the ’70s and...

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Preview When Peter Sellars called photographer David Michalek to talk about his staging of György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments, he described the world that singer Dawn Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall would inhabit during their hour-long performance of the hermetic composer’s settings of Kafka’s text. Sellars and Upshaw “felt there was something extraordinary in this piece but it needed to be contextualized differently so that people could find a way...

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Mix me an elixir, 101 in the shade Who cannot love Donizetti? Especially at his wittiest and most playful: L’elisir d’amore, or Elixir of Love, as it is titled in San Francisco Opera’s current production. Imagine Donizetti and his librettist, Felice Romani, recasting the story of Tristan and Isolde, deciding, with roguish glee, to juxtapose that mythic story of frustrated desire and magical love to the tale of a mischievous village girl taunting her...

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Categories: opera