Opera Warhorses

Historical figures with as different a perspective on French revolutionary thought as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Marie Antoinette were in agreement that the French “reform operas” of the Chevalier Christoph Willibald Gluck set new standards in operatic performance. Gluck’s masterpiece among the eight French operas in the reform category is “Iphigenie en Tauride”, which premiered in [...]

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San Francisco Opera up until now has seen little of Polish baritone Mariusz Kwiecien, who had appeared previously only as Marcello in the second cast of Puccini’s “La Boheme” in 2004.  Having established himself as one of the world’s pre-eminent interpreters of Mozart, he returned to San Francisco in the title role in a new [...]

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In recent decades, the San Francisco Opera has organized its performance schedules to present seven or eight operas as a “Fall Season” from September to December (and occasionally January) and another three operas in repertory as a “Summer Season” centered in June. Although originally the Summer and Fall seasons were administratively separated (you could subscribe [...]

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