Reviews

The Santa Fe Opera revived Rossini’s most popular opera, “The Barber of Seville”, after its 17-year absence from the company, in a brilliant new production by Australian-born British director Stephen Barlow. First performed in 2016 at Britain’s Grange Festival in Hampshire (near Winchester), the production mixes 18th century fashions with abundant references to studiously anachronisitic … Read more

Simon O’Neill’s Tristan and Tamara Wilson’s Isolde In the first 64 years of its 65-year history, the Santa Fe Opera had never presented any of the three-act operas of German composer Richard Wagner. (These three-act operas comprise eight of the ten Wagner operas in opera’s standard repertory, excepting only “The Flying Dutchman”, last performed 34 … Read more

A highlight of the Santa Fe Opera’s 2022 season is Sir David McVicar’s extraordinary production of Verdi’s final masterpiece, “Falstaff”, starring Hawaiian baritone Quinn Kelsey in the title role. Quinn Kelsey’s Sir John Falstaff Falstaff is a role that encompasses a range of emotions, acting skills and comic timing. In a bravura performance, Quinn Kelsey showed mastery … Read more

I am reporting on the second of five scheduled performances in the world premiere run of composer Huang Ruo’s and librettist David Henry Hwang’s opera “M. Butterfly”, based on Hwang’s 1988 Tony-award winning play of the same name. Both play and opera were inspired by the notoriety surroundng the sexual relationship of a man working … Read more

The Santa Fe Opera’s first August performance of the new Mariame Clément production of Bizet’s “Carmen”, which opened the 2022 season a month prior, introduced a cast change as Don Jose. Joining a cast that included Isabel Leonard as Carmen, Sylvia d’Eramo as Micaela and Michael Sumuel as Escamillo, New Jersey tenor Michael Fabiano took … Read more