Merola Opera Program Summer Festival | Le comte Ory | Opera Canada
John Bender
Merola Opera Program Summer Festival
San Francisco Opera
The Handmaid’s Tale “Laden with internal conflict and external stress”
San Francisco Opera | The Handmaid’s Tale | Opera Canada
San Francisco Opera
Innocence “De Sévigné compensated with fine acting, while discharging the vocal line with precision and tonal beauty.”
San Francisco Opera: Innocence
San Francisco Opera
Omar “a striking and beautiful production”
Omar ibn Said was a rich Senegalese man and devoted Muslim scholar, learned in the Qur’an and several disciplines. In 1807, he was seized in Futa Toro, transported via the slave trade’s horrible “middle passage” to Charleston, S.C. and sold to a cruel master. In...
San Francisco Opera
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs “Olivia Smith was outstanding”
The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs by Mason Bates, with libretto by Mark Campbell, starts with Jobs’s frenzied 2007 launch of “the device” that has altered world culture and the habits of hundreds of millions of people--the actual name never proclaimed. It fits the hand,...
San Francisco Opera
Il trovatore “Eun Sun Kim has brought fresh life to the San Francisco Opera”
Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore is about a hallucinating witch and two men who do not know they are brothers. They both love the same woman. It is one of the great sing-fests in all of opera, lavishly piling glorious (often famous) numbers atop one another. The blood...
San Francisco OperaDie Frau Ohne Schatten “Productions like this, rare though they be, are why we live in hope every time we go to the opera”
The glorious history of Richard Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten at the San Francisco Opera—including its 1959 U.S. premiere and the still vivid 1976 staging under Karl Böhm and Nikolaus Lehnhoff—is continuing in brilliant form. Sir Donald Runnicles, the beloved past...
San Francisco Opera Eugene Onegin “Few opera productions live as long and travel as widely as this one has”
When Tchaikovsky based his lushly Romantic, quite personal, opera on Alexander Pushkin's then already classic novel in verse, he bravely cut both against the grain of its iconic author's scintillating, ironic manner (inspired by the English poet Lord Byron) and...
Canadians create “highlight” of SFO’s The Adlers: Live at the Drive-In
San Francisco Opera (SFO), like so many musical organizations, has countered the pandemic closure by showering its audience with online recitals, concerts, lectures and celebrations. But SFO has done much more: large-scaled live performances. This spring on a...