You might think because I saw another production of La Traviata just two weeks ago that I might have little to say.  If so, you don’t know Violetta!  La Traviata (1853) by composer Giuseppe Verdi and librettist Francesco Maria Piave was Opera Baltimore’s second fully staged production, and like last year’s The Barber of Seville, the opera played to a packed house in both performances --- and deservedly so.  Look, I gave up March Madness to attend Friday night’s performance, and all through the performance I kept thinking that this experience was so much richer than anything on T ..read more

The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro, 1786) is one of the most beloved operas in the repertoire.  Why?  The old saying is that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely; power has been corrupting mankind since Adam and Eve.  Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, however, also saw that human beings are capable of magnanimity, reform, redemption, and plain silliness, as well as corruption, but most importantly, they understood that the healing grace is love.  The team’s profound insight that human goodness is a work in progre ..read more

I contend that La Traviata (1853) is the perfect opera (my son prefers Tosca, and I concede a case can be made for Madama Butterfly).  Traviata has three acts, each a standout dramatically, and each filled with some of the most catchy, beautiful music and arias you will ever hear.  Traviata will warm your heart with its love story and thrill you with its music, and in the end, will leave you weeping; but on the way home, you will start to hum and whistle the melodies you just enjoyed.  With operas that are performed so frequently, one never knows how a stage director might prese ..read more

Forgive the pun, but frankly, I was a little shocked by Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucco, knowing little about it going in.  First, I had not seen this opera because it hasn’t been performed in the mid-Atlantic since 2015 as best as I can tell, about the time I first became an opera fan, and as Giuseppe Verdi’s third opera and his first opera to achieve notable success, it frankly was a low priority item, given the many great ones of his to see first; I had just seen his Shakespearean masterpiece, Otello, performed the night before by Maryland Lyric Opera, and I have seen a dozen operas by Verdi ..read more

Maryland Lyric Opera’s powerful performance of Verdi’s Otello got through to me.  Their beautiful performance of this masterpiece based on Shakespeare’s Othello left me a bit shaken.  I rarely have epiphanies, but I think I finally got all of Giuseppe Verdi’s message and how important it is today.  Yes, the singers, the chorus, and orchestra were all excellent, but for me, it was Verdi’s understanding of humanity that commanded the auditorium Friday night in the Music Center at Strathmore in Bethesda; to their credit, the talented performers for this one were the medium, not the ..read more

There is little that I relish more in the opera world now than attending Opera Philadelphia’s annual opera festival in Sept/Oct each season.  This event which began in 2017 returned in 2022 as Festival O22 after a two-year hiatus imposed by the COVID pandemic.  Multiple events, often including new opera premieres and new productions, occur over a two-week period beginning in late September; I still fondly remember the fun of The Trial of Elizabeth Cree that premiered in 2017.  Each year, events are scheduled to push the boundaries of opera, such as the premiere in O22 of the roc ..read more

Public domain knight illustration by Paul Mercuri: http://www.oldbookart.com/2012/01/15/middle-ages-medieval-dress/. OperaGene reports annually on opera critics in the mid-Atlantic, a group who in good natured humor, I refer to as “Knights of the Opera Table”.  Their charge is to champion good performances and slay the bad ones, and…in all seriousness…to provide knowledgeable opinions and information about opera performances that the rest of us can learn from, compare our own responses against, and be provoked to think further about and discuss what we witnessed, deepening, and widening ..read more

First it was a 2007 book, then it was a 2016 opera, and later this year it will be a television miniseries…let me amend that slightly.  First, it was reality.  It is the story of how love died because the ground it sprang up in was poisoned, and then again, maybe it was just the different natures of the two lovers and it would not have survived anyway, and I wish we could know; we do know the poison was real.  The book is Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon, a work of fiction that we know in our hearts and the historical record to be true; the poison was homophobia, the rule, not ..read more

Opera Lafayette constructed a three-part series for its 2022-2023 season titled “The Era of Madame de Pompadour”, covering the time when she was official chief mistress, confidante, and adviser to Louis XV; Madame de Pompadour was well known for her salons and theater that held sway on the music of that period.  Each episode in the series features important music composed and played at that time in France; the company also offers its audiences opportunities to learn about social and political issues of those periods which influenced and were influenced by the music to be performed.&n ..read more

The American Opera Initiative’s “Three 20-Minute Operas” is always a highlight of my opera season.  Each year since 2012 (paused last year for the presentation of four, new short operas in “Written in Stone”), Washington National Opera provides teams of emerging composers and librettists with the space, resources, and mentors to create new chamber works and have them presented at the Kennedy Center; they also get to interact directly with the singers from WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists Program and the WNO musicians who will be singing and playing their compositions, which benefits the creati ..read more