The Opera Tattler
Reviews of Performances and their Audiences
Category: Opera Review
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* Notes * Duke Ellington's Queenie Pie closes this afternoon at Oakland Opera Theater. The unfinished work was arranged and orchestrated by Marc Bolin and the libretto completed by Tommy Shepherd. The opera was extremely charming, especially the first half, which takes place in Harlem. The sets looked great, especially the city scene back drops.…
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* Notes * The alternate cast of Seattle Opera‘s I Puritani was almost infuriating. It was as if the intensity had been sapped out of the whole cast, and then, for some sadistic reason, poured into the soprano. It is a pity that newcomer Eglise Gutierrez was not in the A cast as Elvira,…
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* Notes * Bellini’s last opera, I Puritani, had its Seattle Opera premiere at the beginning of the month, and Linda Brovsky’s production is magnificent. The sets, the work of Robert A. Dahlstrom, look inspired by the Getty Center, as there are many steel staircases and landings. This kept the action in the vertical…
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* Notes * Berkeley Opera is midway through a run of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. The double bill makes for a short evening, a mere 2 hours and 10 minutes including an intermission. I was skeptical of the "unique multi-media staging," as both productions involved projections on an…
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* Notes * The West Coast premiere of Rachel Portman’s The Little Prince was last night in Berkeley. Portman’s music is benign enough, quite light and pretty. The strongest point was the end of Act I, the lamplighter ensemble. It is not surprising the composer won an Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1996…
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* Notes * The April performances of Don Giovanni at Staatsoper Unter den Linden began last night, conducted by Asher Fisch. There were a few times that the orchestra and singers were not quite together, but worse was all the banging coming from backstage. Doubtless this will improve over time, but it was not particularly…
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* Notes * The 2008 season of Berkeley Opera opened last Saturday with a performance of the very silly opera L'Elisir d'Amore. The production is sweet, and the set only seemed to have two modes, one with one arch in the background and a few feet of stone wall, and another with three arches and…
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* Notes * A charming production of La Bohème opened at San Francisco Lyric Opera at Cowell Theater last night. The orchestra was not quite together, and at times the singers were not with the orchestra either. For the first act I was unable to stop listening to the orchestra, as it was on the…
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* Notes * Some students and alumni of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music presented Mark Adamo's Little Women last weekend. The plot is presented as a flash back, condensing the novel into a mere 2 hours. The opera is a bit like a cerebral musical, the libretto is charming, and the music switches back…
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* Notes * The Opernphrenologe went to Berlin for work, and managed to see this evening's performance of Norma at the Staatsoper. Annegret Ritzel's production was awful from the very beginning when the female chorus first pretended to be rocks and then proceded to crawl to a tree stump in the center. The choreography was…
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