opera – Page 6 – Repeat Performances

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

February 16, 2018

Fidelio at West Bay Opera

Freedom, a constant struggle. Big themes and a big orchestra filled Palo Alto’s Lucie Stern Theater last Friday, Feb. 16 for the opening of Beethoven’s Fidelio. It was his only opera and he cursed the ten years that he spent writing and revising it. Although Beethoven was the Grand Master of many musical forms from symphonic to sonata, his one attempt at opera was cautiously received in 1804 and then again in 1814 and still performed less than one might expect from the...

Categories: opera

February 15, 2018

Opera Parallèle’s on-pitch tribute to Bernstein and love

Opera Parallèle celebrated the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth this past weekend in a performance that included two short operas and several dramatized musical pieces woven into a loose narrative, rather like the one-act that was the finale of the evening, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Perhaps in honor of their collaboration with SFJAZZ at the Center where the performance was held, the evening began with a jazz-infused selection from West Side Story, blazingly...

Categories: opera

February 11, 2018

Opera San José’s haunting “Dutchman”

The curtain opened on a three-sided set of wood walls that rose from stage floor to flies. Projected on the surface of these walls was a film of stormy sky and sea separated by a line of seemingly enormous craggy cliffs. The deep blue sky was coursed by turbulent clouds; waves rose in turmoil. Agitated movement flowed across the entire stage, only to be replaced by equally striking imagery. Out of a blood-red world the silhouette of a ship appeared. Flames engulfed the stage as the Dutchman...

Categories: opera

February 4, 2018

Circa at Cal Performances

Defying genres and gravity Thirteen performers cast a spell of darkness and dislocation last Saturday at Zellerbach Hall, where Cal Performances invited a group to do what they called “blurring boundaries.” Defying the usual artistic genres, Circa, an Australian circus troupe, joined forces with two opera singers, director Yaron Lifschitz and composer Quincy Grant to reinvent Claudio Monteverdi’s early opera, Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. Written in 1639, and based...

Categories: dance, opera

February 2, 2018

More marriage and merriment à la Gilbert and Sullivan: The Lamplighters present “The Gondoliers”

Charming, silly and entertaining, The Gondoliers is undeniably Gilbert and Sullivan, but it’s also one of its creators’ sweetest operettas. It only glimpses into the world of topsy-turvy – the nonsensical world in which logic was set against itself to cause sorrow among the young, only to be resolved and lifted into joy with the same backwards logic. Topsy-turvy was the world that earmarked the Victorian sensibility of the author and composer and assured their success and their...

Categories: opera