The English Civil War provides obstacles to Bellini’s lovers, but instead of amping up the drama, the additional history ...

Condensing Melville’s vast and discursive work into a three-hour opera may have seemed as foolish as Captain Ahab’s increasingly desperate voyage to find the whale that maimed him, but Heggie and ...

It’s a let-down when a new production of an opera that spends two acts feeling dazzlingly invigorating and clever collapses in a careless mess in the third. My guess is that a key scene for the ...

From its insidious opening clarinet solo, Richard Strauss’s “Salome” is a creepy, unsettling piece of theater, its story rooted in unhealthy sexual obsession. For his new production at the ...

AMHERST — Opera channels our clearest emotions: those so innate that they splash out in naive singsong, and those so deep that, when released, they can only bear to be sung. “The Onion,” with a ...

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. — He comes here every day, to gather wood. Axe in hand, the woodcutter (baritone Geoffrey Schmelzer) sang as much when he introduced “In A Grove” with see-sawing modulation, ...

Mozart’s “Così fan tutte” is always a challenge: How does a director interpret its superficially misogynistic story—on a bet, two unsuspecting women are manipulated into trading lovers, the assumption ...

Opera directors sometimes shy away from this raw sincerity – probably for a perfectly good reason, which is that Paul, endlessly mourning his dead wife, Marie, then ends up strangling her living ...

Charles Gounod took Shakespeare’s tale of the star-crossed lovers and adapted it to create the 1867 opera, Roméo et Juliette, with an overture and Shakespeare’s explanatory prologue, delivered by the ...