Reviews of opera, new and old
February 9, 2024
My love for Terence Blanchard goes back a long time, to a nervous young college kid hesitantly using his ID to enter a club for the first time. I was new to New York, and the Village Vanguard was showcasing a trumpeter whose name I recognized from his score for Malcolm X and his work on Cedar Walton’s Roots album.…
Absent from the Atlanta Opera’s repertoire for nine years, Giacomo Puccini’s eternal La Boheme graced the stage of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center once again on Saturday, January 20th. Though well received by the nearly sold-out audience, the opening night performance inspired a disparate and puzzling reaction in me, ultimately demanding my attendance to the presentation held the following Friday.…
Missing from the Atlanta Opera repertoire for almost a decade, Verdi’s Rigoletto returned the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center this past Saturday, opening the Atlanta Opera’s 2023-24 season of mainstage productions. As in the case with the previous presentation of Verdi’s middle period masterpiece which took place in March of 2015, this production of Rigoletto (a co-production between the Atlanta Opera, Houston Grand Opera and the Dallas Opera) is conceptual, though this time around it goes further than its predecessor in its attempt to recreate some of the effects that the composer may have originally had in mind. …
Following the success of Moravec’s The Shining, The Atlanta Opera unveiled the next offering in its dark and moody 2023-24 season this past Saturday at the Cobb Energy Center’s stage with the premiere of Michael Shapiro’s Frankenstein: The Movie Opera. Unlike the case of Moravec’s uneven offering, Mr.…
As the brutal summer of 2023 comes to a close, the Atlanta Opera rolls out the red carpet and welcomes autumn with the first offering of its 2023-2024 season: The southeastern premiere of Paul Moravec’s opera, The Shining, as part of its acclaimed Discoveries Series.…
Frequent readers of this blog may have noted a certain “pandemic induced anxiety,” shall we call it, which more often than not limited this writer from dabbling beyond the local opera company’s offerings. Comfort zone, accessibility and the safety of familiarity has kept me mostly state bound ever since we got sent home back in March of 2020, but vibrant performance art schedules becomes a feature of the post-lockdown world once again, I hearby declare a newfound hunger to venture outside self-inflicted isolation (reassured by official reports of the pandemic’s diminishing threat of course,) and vow to make a concerted effort to once again cover the great regional opera companies that grace our country.…
This past Saturday evening, the Atlanta Opera company bid farewell to its 2022-2023 season this past with a performance of historic significance. For the first time in its history, before a sold out audience, the company unveiled Wagner’s Das Rheingold in a production designed to showcase the opera within its context as the first installment of Wagner’s monumental tetralogy.…
Absent from the stage of the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Center since 2012, Atlanta Opera audiences welcomed back Mozart’s Don Giovanni this past Saturday with open arms, and for good reason. Mozart’s version of Don Juan, a perennial classic in the repertoire, has a guaranteed home in the operatic stages the world over, and Atlanta is no exception.…
There was palpable electricity in the air this past Saturday, as the Atlanta Opera unveiled its 2022-23 mainstage season with the first of four performances of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, a production originally intended to open the 2020-2021 season but was one of the many casualties of delays associated with the Covid pandemic.…
Under the banner of its acclaimed Discovery Series, the Atlanta Opera welcomed its 2022-2023 season last weekend with an acclaimed staging of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. The production, the brainchild of stage director Daisy Evans and conductor Stephen Higgins, premiered last November at London’s Theatre of Sound to glowing reviews, and makes its American premiere with these performances at Kennesaw State University’s Bailey Performance Center.…