The Reverberate Hills; or The Apotheosis of the Narwhal

Yesterday was my first visit to the San Francisco Opera this season, midway through the run of Rigoletto , a magnificent production of this...

I was at the opera house last night for the second-to-the-last performance of the San Francisco Opera 's season opener, Verdi's Un B...

Once the opening concert was out of the way (I did not attend; I never go to such things) the San Francisco Opera  launched its 101st season...

Tuesday night I was at the opening of Attila at the San Francisco Opera . This early Verdi opera, despite its relative rarity, has kind of ...

I was at last night's magnificent and thrilling San Francisco Symphony performance of the Verdi Requiem, the mightiest of all requiem m...

Last Tuesday was my first visit to the San Francisco Opera this season, for a mostly wonderful Il Trovatore, though I think I love that oper...

My truncated-by-choice season at San Francisco Opera got off to a good start last Tuesday with Simon Boccanegra, but then I figured any chan...

Festival Opera in Walnut Creek offered me tickets to last night's opening of Il Trovatore, an opera I love. For years I happily sailed a...

Back to David Poutney’s Macbeth, and I’ll start off by saying something nice. I really liked the sickly radioactive-green slime in place of ...

I have more to say about David Pountney’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth, but I felt that the much ballyhooed typewriter, as the true star of...

With the exceptions of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Verdi’s Falstaff, I find most Shakespeare-based operas disappointing, though al...

I’ve always thought there are two types of food, the ones that need chocolate and the ones that need garlic. Yesterday, under the influence ...

One advantage of talking about performances several months after they happen is that you can see what has stuck with you and what has slippe...

Cal Ripken was voted into the Hall of Fame with 98.5 percent of the vote, which raises the question in my mind: huh? If you don’t vote for C...