We will get to hear the microphone between the tits! Anna Netrebko, who kicked off her career in the US here in '96 (in Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila) will be back in La Traviata, the SF Opera announced today when unveiling their 2008-09 season. You'll want to see other, um, microphones too, as the darn sexy Angela Gheorghiu, who we were so smitten with in La Rondine, comes back for more Puccini with La Boheme. It's the 150th anniversary of the birth of Puccini this year, so you get two operas by him, Tosca being the other one. That's a bit lame, we say, since you typically get two operas by Puccini in any season. Say, La Rondine and Madama Butterfly, for instance. A true anniversary celebration would be to have all operas by Puccini, or even better, eleven different productions of Butterfly. That would rock....

Third opera in November, third reaction from the audience at curtain rise. After the enthusiastic applause for La Rondine's shiny marble sets after the bleak and silent shock of Macbeth's hole-in-the-wall sets, we got the giggles after catching sight of The Rake's Progress' opening oil field. The patrons were willing to entertain an oil well and a 1950s Americana re-setting that dramatically differs from Stravinsky's original 18th Century,even though they were a tad skeptical.......

So foul and poor a play we haven't seen. At least, not during this San Francisco Opera season. That is, until now: behold, the vile production that is Macbeth. It's easier to count the things that went right, because there were so few: Thomas Hampson (fan), the Adler fellows, and Raymond Aceto, who all more or less shine. The rest, sadly, was pretty awful. You know you're in for a long night when you're forced......

Angela Gheorghiu, the diva, made her SF Opera debut on Wednesday evening, in Puccini's La Rondine. That she made it onstage was somewhat of an accomplishment; she just had been fired from a production in Chicago for missing rehearsals. She was attending her husband, French tenor Roberto Alagna, concert at the Met, it seems. (Alagna's claim to fame has been walking off the stage at La Scala in the middle of Aida, after being booed.......