Opera Warhorses

San Diego Opera mounted Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” for the attractive, youthful-looking husband and wife team of leggiero tenor Stephen Costello and coloratura soprano Ailyn Perez. Both were debuting at San Diego Opera. Conductor Karen Keltner emphasized the score’s abundant lyricism. Several cuts in the opera were made. The formulaic French ballets, imposed on all [...]

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Hector Berlioz’ musical composition, “La Damnation de Faust”, never ceases to be both bewildering and beguiling. Much about it seems to belong in the opera house, but its mixture of  irresistible music and episodic subject matter has made its introduction to the operatic standard repertory as elusive as its message. Lyric Opera, which had never [...]

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This post continues the essay I began in the feature Opera in Live Performance: Thoughts and Assessments at the End of 2009, Part One. I don’t know if I would characterize the Part One as necessarily pessimistic, even though I argued that a considerable amount of the revenues that operatic performance received from philanthropy may be [...]

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