We salute the idea of introducing kids to opera with Carmen for Families: they smoke, they love, they party hard, she's promiscuous, and then he kills her. The beloved SF Opera abridged and translated productions for kids took a hiatus since the Elixir of Love for Families (he gets very drunk to seduce her and it works, other women love him for his money) in 2008 and the Magic Flute for Families (Papageno is barely saved from suicide, the Queen of the Night ask her daughter to kill her father figure) in 2007. But this year, it's back and the kids will get to experience wonderful live sung music. And we fully expect Fox News to denounce SF for being elitist (not true: $10 and up) and amoral at the same time. We love this town. more ›

The Fall musical season is giving way to they All-Handel-Messiah-all-the-time holiday season with a few Nutcrackers tossed in for good measure, so let's wrap up what happened at the Opera for 2011. more ›

Baritone Lucas Meachem stars as Don Giovanni in the Mozart opera currently on stage at the SF Opera (three shows left). Every year we see singers go through the ranks of the Merola and Adler programs. Those programs are like the SF Opera Triple-A affiliates of the major league team and we try each year to guess which singers will come back headlining big new productions. Well, Meachem did big time, landing gigs here, at the Met or at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. more ›

Don Giovanni belongs to the category of operas that are insubmersible: as long as the cast is able and has a pulse, neither bad staging nor poor set can sink the show. The new production of Mozart's opera, which opened last night, does not particularly enhance the experience, but the singers delivered. And thus, everyone goes home happy with their heads full of Mozart's wonderful tunes. more ›

The run of Heart of a Soldier just concluded, the spanking new world premiere commissioned by the SF Opera to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (or rather, to honor the fallen). There was a swirl of emotions surrounding the response to the opera, but you don't evoke the most traumatic event in recent history without stepping on a few open wounds. more ›

In Heart of a Soldier, SF Opera's tribute to 9/11, two platoon leaders discuss their thoughts on the Vietnam war. One says, he does not want to learn the names and lives of the men in his units. It makes it more difficult to bear when they die. The other can recitate the list of all the fatalities under his charge and those he failed to protect. We fall in the first camp when it comes to 9/11. Even ten years after the attacks, it seems too raw, too overwhelming to put on stage. We don't want to get any closer to these events, perhaps. Heart of a Soldier gives us a face, a story, an intimacy to one of the victims. We thought it's a bad idea when we first heard about it, and Saturday night's premiere did nothing to convince us. more ›

The curtain opened Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House on the David Hockney designed set of Turandot. Turandot? Had anyone surreptitiously advanced the SF Opera season opening night? Rather, the Merola program was closing their own season on the big stage, and -why not?- had borrowed the set. The singers selected in the Merola program might as well get used to it: their goal is to make it to production like this very Turandot, which will indeed feature four Merola alumni (Daniel Montenegro, Ryan Kuster, Hyung Yun, and Leah Crocetto). more ›

We love to see the future of opera in action, so we embarked onto the Noah's Ark of the Merola program's Il Barbiere of Siviglia last week-end: we saw two performances, two casts, two overall successes, and too much comedy. more ›

A few things to wrap up the 2010-11 classical music season: more ›

Melody Moore has been growing as a singer under our eyes, here in the Bay Area, we can claim her as ours. She came here from Cincinnati to attend the SF Opera Merola program, a summer camp for future opera stars. She stuck around as an Adler Fellow, another learning program of the opera where the young singers get to act as understudy for the big name singers and play supporting roles in the main stage productions. She got rewarded with several roles there that she totally nailed: the countess in The Marriage of Figaro or Mrs Pinkerton in Butterfly. And the biggest role to come this fall, married on stage to Thomas Hampson in the world premiere of The Heart of a Soldier. Now she alternates gigs all over the country with more local events like an homage to Pauline Viardot with Lotfi Mansouri, cabaret with the SF Ballet, or concerts with the New Century Chamber Orchestra. more ›

Lang-Lang is the antidote to recessions and deaths of classical music. There are only a few others than the Chinese piano superstar who can sell out Davies Symphony hall on a Tuesday evening for a solo recital of Beethoven, Albeniz and Prokofiev, as part of the SF Symphony Great performers series. more ›

A bunch of classical music events happening over the weekend: more ›

A few performances we caught, before the Thanksgiving holidays distracted us from writing them up: Bryn Terfel at Cal Performances, Aida at SF Opera and Yefim Bronfman with the SF Symphony more ›

The Makropulos Case has been the most exciting opera this season, with a convergence of superlative singing, lively conducting, a memorable set and a stage direction that pushes the envelope but makes sense. It helps that they have put together a dream team: Karita Mattila sings Emilia Marty, the main protagonist who has been alive over 300 years after being forced to take a youth potion in her teens. Karita embodies the role with such presence and talent, it does not seem preposterous she was alive ninety years ago to whisper what she wanted for the part into Janáček's ear. more ›

It's a shame that an opera about a soprano who stays literally hundreds of years in the limelight is so often confined to the dusty back shelves of the repertoire. The last production of the Makropulos Case at SF Opera, prior to the amazing run which opened last Wednesday, was in 1993, and this wait is surprisingly long given how successful the evening was. This show rocked. more ›

Tonight the Makropulos Case opens its run at the SF Opera, as if the scheduling gods wanted to contrast this rare, exciting, must-see opera headlined by superstar Karita Mattila, with the yet-another-Madama Butterly we heard last Friday. It was the second cast for Puccini's beloved opera, headlined by soprano Daniela Dessi and conducted by SF newcomer Julian Kovatchev. They replaced Svetla Vassileva and Nicola Luisotti, who had to head out of town to conduct Fanciulla at the Met. If you can see only one of these productions, we strongly encourage you to take a chance on the Makropulos Case as Butterflies come back pretty much every other year. more ›

With a relatively obscure opera and the biggest opera star on the planet, no one really cares about appreciating Cyrano. It's all about assessing Placido Domingo's performance. Does he still have it? Can he still fake an ardent young musketeer? Is this is last visit up here? Domingo is nearly seventy, and has nothing to prove. He is leading, as general director, the opera houses in L.A. and D.C. He has yet another career as a conductor. And he is the most prolific tenor of history, having sung about 130 roles over his 40 years career. That is absolutely insane. Once a regular visitor to the SF stage, he hasn't been here in nearly twenty years, we had to chase him in New York to see him last. His run with SF Opera in Alfano's Cyrano is of course sold out. more ›

If Harry Potter was an opera, baritone Quinn Kelsey would be Hagrid: a mountain of a man, undeniably very strong, yet gentle, approachable, with a genial bonhomie. While he'll have to wait for someone to compose that score, he's been sticking to the Italian repertoire with San Francisco opera. On this stage, he has recently sung Verdi (Count di Luna in Trovatore) or Puccini (Marcello in La Boheme), and he returns this season with more ...Verdi and Puccini, of course. When the second run of Aida comes around in November, he'll be her dad, Amonasro. And starting tonight, he'll be Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. This Butterfly is somewhat bittersweet: we grew accustomed to Zheng Cao in the role of Suzuki, and our thoughts go to her battle against cancer. more ›

Soprano sex kitten Danielle de Niese had her first San Francisco Opera performance last night as a sexy, perky Susanna in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. She has been described as having a dancer's body, as Too hot to Handel by playboy magazine, and her performances at the Glyndebourne, England, opera house "put the sex in Sussex." She does have a pretty tiny figure to match her big voice, and both were in graceful display last night in a buoyant production conducted with verve and humor from the fortepiano by maestro Luisotti, and directed by John Copley. more ›

First, a PSA: you can view for free the Sept. 24th performance of Aida in a live HD simulcast at the AT&T ballpark. Register here. Opera and garlic fries, the perfect combo. It's free, and you're actually helping the opera! more ›

The program notes for Massenet's Werther, which opened Wednesday night at the SF Opera, mention a 1894 critic who wrote: "Werther despairs in Act I, continues in despair in Acts II and III and becomes desperate in Act IV." Last night performance was faithful to this description: claustrophobic, oppressive, cloistered. In a sealed, hermetic stage, the characters are all mostly unhappy, and only dreams, or death, can provide an escape. more ›

How do you sing your goodbyes? So long, farewell, Auf wiedersehen, of course. Not the artists in the Merola program, they'll stick to what they know best: arias by Mozart, Strauss, Donizetti. They'll shut down this year's opera-star-in-training boot camp Saturday at 7:30pm with a Grand Finale at the Opera House, with the SF Opera orchestra in the pit conducted by Dean Williamson (program in pdf here). more ›

The kids are alright. Every summer, about twenty under-thirty singers get selected after an arduous audition process to participate in the Merola opera program, a ten-week training camp with singing, diction and acting coaches from the SF Opera. This program has been the launch pad for many an illustrious career (see Netrebko, Anna; Hampson, Thomas; Graham, Susan; Racette, Patricia, etc.) Part of the boot camp involves showing off their stuff with the SF Opera orchestra conducted by Mark Morash in a couple recitals and a couple staged productions. This year, or rather, in this economy, Donizetti's Elixir of Love, performed with two alternate casts August 5th through 8th, instead of the typical mix of an offbeat modern and a classic repertoire pieces of years past. more ›

The Girl of the Golden West (La Fanciulla del West), Puccini's oft-forgotten opera that's being billed as "the original Spaghetti Western," has a few more performances at the War Memorial Opera House, and suffice it to say it's real swell. It's great to see diva Deborah Voigt wearing a red leather cowgirl getup, astride a real live (!) horse, and whipping a bunch of sex-starved miners into shape at a bar called the Polka. more ›

Italian tenor Salvatore Licitra just made his San Francisco debut, and his role debut, as Dick Johnson (giggle) in La Fanciulla del West with the SF Opera. It's an A-list cast, with Deborah Voigt as Minnie, and maestro Nicola Luisotti conducting. The opera takes place during the Gold Rush somewhere in the Sierra foothills, and Licitra arrives on stage at the drinking hole, asking for his bourbon with water. "Oh, he must be from San Francisco," react the rough miners who don't dilute their drinks. Are we being called pansies by an opera composer who named his character after watching Austin Powers? more ›

If the fat lady with a Viking helmet became a symbol for opera, it's both a compliment and a condemnation of Richard Wagner. His staging of the Norse mythology has been influential and pervasive enough to suffuse the wider culture (and inspire costume contests); and at the same time, the cliché conveys the dreariness of many productions relying on the same tired props. Well, SF Opera's Valkyrie last night wore not horned headgear, and it was an exhilarating production where inventive staging, impressive singing and masterful conducting made sure that it would be stay exciting throughout. Four hour and a half of Wagner tedious? Heck no, not last night! more ›

It was Opening Night at the Opera on Saturday, for the short summer stretch of the season; Gounod's Faust is an over-roasted chestnut, on the top ten most performed list at most major opera houses. But for the occasion, that's not a bug. It's a feature to re-acquaint oneself with the art form after the spring break. Familiarity breeds comfort, and this production (from the Lyric Opera of Chicago) won't challenge this feeling of coming back to a well worn slipper. Still, with a few outstanding moments and some nice promotional discounts (code faustdeal10), it's quite enough for a very pleasant evening out. more ›

The superlative British mezzo-soprano Alice Coote will give her first solo recital in San Francisco tonight at Herbst theater, for SF Performances 30th anniversary season. The theme of the evening: English art songs. She impressed everyone in her SF debut at SF Opera in Alcina, and returned to great acclaim in Idomeneo, where the worst one could tell about her was that she impersonated her male character so well, she looked like Nicolas Sarkozy. Did we write that? Oops. She'll be back in September as Charlotte in Massenet's opera, Werther. more ›

Grammy-award winning mezzo-soprano Susan Graham just headlined a concert series six weeks ago with the San Francisco Symphony, which will be released on a CD as part of the SFS Mahler project. Obviously, we can't get enough of her: she returns this week to star in a concert version of Purcell's opera Dido and Aenas, with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. She chats about her upcoming Dido and looks back at her Mahler performance here. more ›

The SF Opera production of La Fille du Regiment definitively put to rest the notion that opera is not the proper format for comedy: who needs agonizing arias when you can get a wild, fun party. We do not recall have laughed that much in an opera house, ever. more ›