Performer: Robert Orth

American composer Jake Heggie's early opera performed by Washington National Opera was one of those rare experiences of an opera full of raw power and wrenching emotion with superb performers that one is not likely to forget soon.

Opera Parallele's production of Terence Blanchard's Champion: An Opera in Jazz features great performances but an uneven score and spotty blocking.

After Life, a new opera by Tom Cipullo and David Mason that was commissioned by Seattle-based Music of Remembrance, imagines a posthumous confrontation between Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso and poses meaningful and moving questions about the power of art.

Though reports of the work’s importance and dramatic power have attended it since its 2010 premiere in Dallas, I doubt many in the audience of the War Memorial Opera House on Wednesday night were prepared for the impact of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick.

Every opera should have at least one of those “wow” moments that lift you out of your seat and have you singing them in your head on the way home.