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Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking is credited as being the most performed 21st-century opera, and with good reason.

"She commands the stage, she commands the notes, she commands the tension": Christine Goerke's portrayal of Elektra haunts The Met. 

A performance of John Adams' The Gospel According to the Other Mary good enough to convert even the most conservative listener to the Church of New Music.

Francesca Zambello stages a new production of Robert Ward's opera The Crucible at the Glimmerglass Festival in upstate New York. 

The production is a disconcerting combination of cold metallic future and Neanderthal aesthetics – a startling pairing of humanity’s beginning and its end. 

American composer Jake Heggie makes his Los Angeles Opera debut in this powerful performance of his 2010 opera, Moby-Dick.

There was a nod to John Adams in the score, but also a kind of edgy Americana, complete with powerful writing for male chorus, and an attempt to communicate the flavor of rural North Carolina, not far from where Higdon grew up.

A pleasing performance from WNO of The Flying Dutchman, with Eric Owens brooding magnificently over the whole. 

If an evocative and provocative crowd-pleaser is your preferred summertime fare, then catch the new production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at Glimmerglass Festival.Dutchman was Wagner’s first unabashed hit, deservedly so. It is a classic tale of redemption through love, masterfully scored, inspired by a stormy voyage the composer himself made and Heinrich Heine’s retelling of the legend.

The word Götterdämmerung contextually translated becomes “twilight of the gods”, and Thursday night’s story at the Met was indeed full of endings: the conclusion of the saga of the ring and the end of several lives, human and god alike.

All things considered, this Met Siegfried was a mixed affair. There was much to enjoy and much to marvel at; there were times where the performance felt as if it might achieve real lift-off, but it never quite achieved the sustained momentum of Friday's Walküre.

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.

Read our review of Robert Lepage's production of Wagner's Götterdämmerung in its 2012 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.

Read our review of  Robert Lepage's production of Wagner­'s Siegfried in its 2011 broadcast from the Met Opera in New York.