Richard Sasanow

Sometimes great singing can save a bad production. It happened with the Met’s previous attempt at Bellini’s LA SONNAMBULA, which had been DOA at its premiere, despite a star, cast but rose like a phoenix when it was revived with other stars a year later. This time around, in the misguided, often silly take under the direction of the former tenor Rolando Villazon, soprano Nadine Sierra tried her considerable best as Amina to bring it to life but Villazon was a problem that her great singing couldn’t totally surmount.

Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI was one of my first operas and remains among my favorites, despite its misogyny and the difficulty in putting together the kind of cast that can do justice to the string of show-stoppers in the score. The season's premiere of the opera had much to admire.

Anyone familiar with Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prizer-winning THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY must be a bit bewildered at how a 700-page novel could be turned into a 3-hour opera. Or, for that matter, how a superhero named “The Escapist” could be sharing a stage this week with Puccini’s TURANDOT and Mozart’s DON GIOVANNI.

Though Bedrich Smetana’s DALIBOR—seen this week at Bard SummmerStage in a wonderful production by Jean-Romain Vesperini, with an ingenious set design by Bruno de Lavenere, a fine cast and the American Symphony Orchestra in impeccable form under Leon Botstein—was reputedly the composer’s favorite among his eight operas, it was a failure at its opening in Prague in 1868. There was never a fully staged production in this country until this current one. (I saw the July 30 matinee.)

“Timeless Transformations” is a key theme of the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s season at Geffen Hall this year (itself transformed from Avery Fisher Hall and, earlier, Philharmonic Hall). It certainly ran rampant last weekend, as British conductor Dame Jane Glover led the orchestral musicians and some bright soloists through their paces in works by Michael Abels (via Vivaldi), Tchaikovsky and Mozart.

There’s an old expression, “A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client.” While John Adams didn’t decide to take on the libretto for his latest opera, Monday night’s Met premiere, ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA, all on his own, I wonder whether he might have bypassed the one resource that might have been most useful: Arrigo Boito.

Even without an over-the-top production—and the Met has had a couple of those—Richard Strauss’s SALOME has been outraging audiences for more than 120 years. This week’s new take by director Claus Guth in his Met debut was no exception.

When we last saw Brunnhilde in Atlanta, in the second segment of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle, DIE WALKURE, she’d been punished by the gods for saving Sieglinde, but rescued by her father, Wotan. She was forced into sleep on a rock surrounded by a ring of fire, until wakened some day by a hero. Ta-da! SIEGFRIED’s eponymous hero, sung brilliantly by heldentenor Stefan Vinke, arrived to save the day.

The Oratorio Society of New York (OSNY) under Maestro Kent Tritle brings the world premiere performance of ALL SHALL RISE, by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell, to Carnegie Hall on May 5. It concludes their American Voices trilogy of choral works—this one about the history of voting rights in the US.

Macheath’s back in town! Or at least he was for a few short days, when the Berliner Ensemble brought its now-famous Barrie Kosky production of THREEPENNY OPERA to BAM, in association with St. Ann’s Warehouse.

What’s a Mozart lover to do? Great music and a more-than-decent cast don’t necessarily add up to an enchanting night at the opera. Yes, it’s true that LE NOZZE DI FIGARO ('The Marriage of Figaro') has some of Mozart’s most delicious music; there’s no denying that. Where do I start? “Dove sono” for the Countess, “Voi che sapete” for Cherubino, Susanna’s “Deh vieni non tardar” and Figaro’s “Non piu andrai” are only the tip of Mozart’s great iceberg of a score.

Political prisoner is rescued from dungeon by his faithful wife, only to find that she’s pregnant! Shocking! Not really: Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, who’s shown she indispensable in roles from Tchaikovsky’s QUEEN OF SPADES to Strauss’s ARIADNE AUF NAXOS starts her maternity leave at the end of her Met run of Beethoven’s only opera, FIDELIO, on March 15. She’s proven a fearless singer but in this week’s opening of the Beethoven work, as Leonore, she also showed herself a game actor.

MOBY-DICK--Herman Melville’s epic tale of obsession and man-versus-nature, succinctly adapted by composer Jake Heggie with Gene Scheer’s taut libretto--roared into the Met Monday night and begged only one question: What took so long for it to get here?

The people at Heartbeat Opera--that dazzling reinvention-machine for taking works that you think you might have heard one time too often and making them compelling--must have had a crystal ball when they programmed Strauss’s SALOME long before the current, decadent regime took control in US politics.

Michael Hersch took no prisoners with his new opera, AND WE, EACH, a production of the Baltimore musical organization, Mind on Fire, which had its New York premiere on February 6 at National Sawdust in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Anyone who’s spent enough time watching network TV knows an American criminal justice system that is built around simplistic stories of the good guys (hard-working prosecutors and police detectives) putting away the bad guys (“perps” of all stripes) with the help of brilliant DNA evidence that points the way to the truth. That’s not exactly the impression that we get from BLIND INJUSTICE—the opera by composer Scott Davenport Richards and librettist David Cote that had its New York debut this week.

The New York premiere of the Christopher Cerrone/Stephanie Fleischmann opera IN A GROVE, in Mary Birnbaum’s simply beautiful—or beautifully simple—production triumphed at La Mama Experimental Theatre Club on Saturday as part of the Prototype Festival. It is inspired by Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s classic story (best known from its film version, “Rashomon”).

The lobby of the HERE Theatre in SoHo was buzzing after Saturday’s performance of the new opera EAT THE DOCUMENT—not just for the performance we’d just watched but for the memories of the age that the piece evoked for many in the audience. Based on the novel of the same name by Dana Spiotta, DOCUMENT is a story of the ‘70s underground, with its activism, and a tale of sacrifice and living a secret.

Someone at the Met should have been giving out flu shots (before RFK Junior makes them illegal), because something is obviously going around the cast of the new AIDA. They should have handed out a scorecard to help the audience keep track of who-was-who.

Richard Strauss’s DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN (THE WOMAN WITHOUT A SHADOW), with a libretto by his long-time collaborator, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, has made a triumphant return to the Met with a stellar cast and the Met Orchestra in peak form under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. It dazzled and glowed like few other evenings in recent memory, in a production by Herbert Wernicke, who died young, not long after its debut in 2001.