| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 25-Feb-2013 Civic Opera House | Verdi's Rigoletto at Lyric Opera of Chicago |
 Of all the mischievous dramatic reversals that line Rigoletto’s plot – the hunchbacked jester tricked into abducting his own daughter, the daughter tricked into loving the brainless Duke (posing as a penniless student), and the terrifying reunion of father and daughter in a scene of murder – is not the most breathtaking, after all, the fact that the opera begins with a convincing display of the debauched status of romance but then confronts us, for the remainder of Act I, with all the innocence and conviction of Gilda’s first love?Read full review... | |
| 22-Oct-2011 Civic Opera House | A Dark and Stormy Night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago |
 "It was a dark and stormy night …." Chuckling whenever I hear these lines, I can see Charles Schultz’s beloved Snoopy staring intensely at his typewriter, vigorously typing away what he would consider his magnum opus novel. Not surprisingly, in countless titanic masterworks of literature and music, the foreboding stormy night setting serves as a metaphor and eloquent dropback for a stormy situation within the drama of the story. Such is the case with Gaetano Donzietti’s epic magnum opus, Lucia di Lammermoor.Read full review... | |
| 2-Oct-2010 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Met's 'Hoffmann' is Satisfying Fare |
 Those who like their opera off-kilter will revel in the Metropolitan Opera’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann, an opera in three acts (with prologue and epilogue) by Jacques Offenbach. The Met production was heavily operetta à la Offenbach—risqué, and at times, erotic.
Read full review... | |
