| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 16-Feb-2013 The Music Center at Strathmore | An all-Wagner program from Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony |
 It’s Richard Wagner’s bicentennial year, and everyone is getting in on the act. 22 different productions, by one count, of the complete Ring cycle will be seen worldwide, not to mention countless other celebratory evenings put on by sundry ensembles. Among the latter was last Saturday’s concert at the Music Center at Strathmore, with Marin Alsop leading the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra – a conductor and an ensemble not known for their Wagnerian chops.
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| 20-Oct-2012 War Memorial Opera House | Lohengrin returns to San Francisco in effective new production |
 Wagner’s Lohengrin was the last work the master completed before settling into a mid-career six-year slump. During this compositional hiatus, he wrote the poems for his Ring operas and ruminated in print on various topics, musical and otherwise, but work on the music dramas essentially ceased.Read full review... | |
| 11-Dec-2011 Civic Opera House | Lyric Opera of Chicago presents a taut, effective Ariadne auf Naxos |
 The gist of Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’ opera-within-an-opera, is this: a demanding patron insists on having his entertainment for a given evening – a burlesque act and an opera – combined into one work, greatly upsetting the archetypal “serious artist” composer of the opera. Already Strauss’ depiction onstage of a classical composer asks certain questions of the integrity of art, its place in society, and so forth.Read full review... | |
| 15-Oct-2011 National Theatre | A Traditional but Warm-blooded Carmen |
 Wilfried Hösl IMG_2755.jpg) Carmen is one of the most frequently performed operas in the world, and with such a variety of interpretations out there it is always difficult to come up with a new one which is simultaneously inventive and effective. Perhaps this is why Bayerische Staatsoper’s current production, alongside the production at the Royal Opera House in London, opts for such traditional staging, but does so which such quality that whatever lack of originality there might be is immaterial.
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