opera

Don’t go to the opera for historical fact. That’s a time-tested axiom. And one San Francisco Opera’s production of Roberto Devereux not only supports but makes a virtue of. Donizetti’s 1837 opera is said to be based on a history and a tragedy, but at its heart it’s a simple Italian love triangle with exotic celebrity characters. Exotic because Queen Elizabeth I and her court were distant in both time and place from Donizetti’s operatic Naples. Director Stephen Lawless...

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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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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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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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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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Categories: opera