Living at the Opera

From SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW By: Harvey Steiman The current production of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess concluding its run at San Francisco Opera revels in the scope and scale of grand opera, the oversized emotions and big gestures, both musical and dramatic, that make the blood rush when opera takes wing. For the [...]

From SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW By: Harvey Steiman Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of San Francisco soloists, conducted by Donald Runnicles, San Francisco Opera. 13.6.2009 (HS) One mark of a true operatic superstar is that he or she never does anything quite like anyone else. That’s what lifts Anna Netrebko’s Violetta Valéry, the doomed [...]

By: Bernard Jacobson All you need to ensure a satisfactory performance of Il trovatore, Enrico Caruso declared, is the four greatest singers in the world. Well, I am not about to assert that that is what we were presented with in this staging of Verdi’s great piece of operatic blood-and-thunder. Nevertheless, Leone Cottrell-Adkins had managed [...]

From SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA REVIEW By: Jose M Irurzun There is no doubt that Juan Diego Flórez is one of the very greatest singers nowadays: in his own repertoire, he is literally incomparable with any other singer. What I have discovered in the last two years however is that the Peruvian divo has [...]

by: Paul Duclos Verdi, Requiem: Heidi Melton (soprano) Stephanie Blythe (mezzo) Stefano Secco (tenor) Andrea Silvestrell (bass) Ian Robertson (Chorus director) ; The San Francisco Opera Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Donald Runnicles, San Francisco Opera House, San Francisco, 30.5.2009 (PD) It was supposed to be all about Donald Runnicles, the outgoing artistic director of [...]