Arts & Entertainment This Weekend's Vocalises We learned yesterday that star soprano Patricia Racette had to withdraw from singing today in the Verdi Requiem at the SF Opera house, and will be replaced by Adler fellow Heidi Melton. Racette,
Arts & Entertainment SFist Interviews Stephanie Blythe We're not too sure what to think of this lede: Some singers travel with their pets, a poodle or a dachshund, perhaps. Stephanie Blythe, one of the hottest properties in opera today, is
Arts & Entertainment SF Opera: La Bohème When the SF Opera 08-09 season was announced, we were all excited by the weirder stuff, the Bonesetter's Daughter, or die tote Stadt. "Who needs another La Bohème?" we shrugged at the time.
Arts & Entertainment SF Opera: Idomeneo The story goes like this: on his return from winning the Trojan war, the king of Crete, Idomeneo gets caught at sea in a storm. Neptune, God of the oceans, lets him go
Arts & Entertainment Die Tote Stadt So we get this surrealist story: Paul is depressed as he lost his wife Marie; however, he ran into another woman, Marietta, in the streets of Bruges (the dead city the title refers
Arts & Entertainment Opening Night at the Opera: Simon Boccanegra Yet, the performance still caught our attention, thanks to two amazing Slavic singers. Verdi's Simon Boccanegra is a story of curses, kidnappings and misplaced children. It mostly hinges on the love of Simon
Arts & Entertainment SF Opera's Rheingold But! You can't predict whether this production will work, if the American angle will infuse the operatic sequence a juicy underlying story. Das Rheingold is a prequel of sorts. And insofar as opera
Arts & Entertainment Happy Birthday, Pooch! You'll want to see other, um, microphones, too, when the provocative Angela Gheorghiu, who we were so smitten with in La Rondine, comes back for more Puccini via La Boheme. It seems that
Arts & Entertainment MahTlerT In our haste on Tuesday, we forgot to mention that you could hear more MahTlerT (MTT and Mahler have become so imbricated that we had to create a shortcut) here (links to sound
Arts & Entertainment The Philistine Salivates on the Opera's Next Season. Gockley had made changes, some good like moving the subtitles back to the top; some great like the live videocast on the civic center plaza; some so-so, like the redesign of the visual
Arts & Entertainment Tristan and Isolde So it was no surprise that last night’s performance of Tristan and Isolde turned out as a magistral musical display: from the prelude to the final curtain drop, Runnicles coaxed a splendid
