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Glimmerglass Opera Festival’s production of Candide leans heavily on a dry comedic sensibility, which most of the cast execute admirably.

Soprano Alexandra Shiner displays extraordinary vocal promise and stage presence across a host of Wagner's great female roles.

Rising mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis offers a gorgeously sung and grippingly acted portrait of Verdi's gypsy. 

Set in New Orleans during the Jazz Age, this riff on Offenbach's La Périchole captures the festive spirit of the summer, despite some tired jokes.

Fireworks, party boats, Violetta swooping from a giant chandelier: soprano Stacey Alleaume triumphs in this magnificent restaging of Francesca Zambello's spectacular waterfront La traviata.  

Francesca Zambello sets the whole opera as a flashback, showing, during the prelude, the heroine surrounded by doctors and nurses in a sanatorium for patients dying from tuberculosis.

For the first time, a musical comes to the outdoor stage of the annual Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour. 

A strong new Traviata from Washington National Opera with the welcome house debut of Venera Gimadieva as a fabulous Violetta.

Zambello's politically re-'woke' West Side Story comes to Kansas.

Seattle Opera's memorable Porgy and Bess excels with an exceptional cast who performed with utmost sympathy for their roles.

The world is gloriously redeemed in the gripping final installment of San Francisco Opera's Ring cycle.

Both the technical effects and the singing impress in San Francisco Opera's dark Siegfried.

San Francisco Opera's Die Walküre overcame a disappointing first act, winning the audience over with excellent singing and playing and impressive stage effects.

At San Francisco Opera, conductor Donald Runnicles and a top-notch cast deliver a delicious Rheingold in Francesca Zambello's colorful production.

Francesca Zambello's hip-hop graffiti staging of Aida comes to Seattle. 

Whether it’s half an opera, three quarters an operetta, or a musical and a half, Francesca Zambello’s team put together a production that was easy to fall in love with. 

Francesca Zambello’s engaging Aida opened the season at Washington National Opera, eventually getting into its stride. 

The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, New York always does themed seasons. This year the season was about the idea of home. As such, the production directed by Francesca Zambello was updated from the Middle Ages to a modern-day refugee camp.

Glimmerglass’ Porgy and Bess proves one more time that Gershwin’s opus remains America’s most important 20th-century opera.

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.

San Francisco Opera's Aida features exciting role debuts from Leah Crocetto and Brian Jagde and a visually striking production, but a lack of good direction keeps it from being great music drama.

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

A revival of Francesca Zambello's production of Prokofiev's Love for Three Oranges at the Sydney Opera House is a joy, thanks to the antics of Kanen Breen at the head of a strong cast.

Tonight’s Götterdämmerung brought the cycle to a fitting – and wholly American – conclusion. 

Zambello's Ring for the WNO continues to engage and impress. 

Zambello's Die Walküre engages and excites in this promising Ring cycle. 

Das Rheingold stages flawed American Ambitions in the first Ring Cycle in Washington DC. 

For anyone seeing Carmen for the first time, this Royal Opera revival will have been a more than satisfactory evening. Old hands hoping to see something extra will find it in Hymel's Don José and Car's Micaëla, but not elsewhere.

An exciting cast starring Michael Fabiano and Leah Crocetto makes up for a slow and static production at San Francisco Opera's opening night.

Marco Tutino's Two Women at San Francisco Opera feels lacking in musical originality and its out-of-date accompanying taste of re-heated Italian verismo comes a little over-cooked.

A safe performance of Poulenc's extraordinary opera in Washington, lacking in pity and terror.

The marriage between performers and score here is perfect, because Gershwin’s text-setting is near-miraculous, somehow every word is clear and seems to be naturally inflected by the curvature of the musical line.

The Dallas Opera adds a light touch to a Richard Strauss' decidedly unfunny opera Salome, featuring soprano Deborah Voigt in the title role. 

The Glimmerglass Festival's updated Ariadne in Naxos contains comedy, character and great singing.

Francesca Zambello's huge, ambitious production returns once again to the Royal Albert Hall, with lavish costumes, excellent choreography and riotous crowd scenes which will charm children in particular. 

Dmytro Popov and Nancy Fabiola Herrera star in a traditional production of Carmen at the Sydney Opera House.

The ROH's revival of Carmen doesn't bring anything new to the opera, but a stellar cast and stylishly traditional production make it a very enjoyable evening.

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 arrival of Show Boat at the Washington National Opera this month, after stops in Chicago and Houston, has provoked a certain amount of consternation in operatic circles.

It’s very difficult to write about Berlioz’s Les Troyens without mentioning its length. Tonight’s cinema screening of Fransesca Zambello’s lush production was billed at 341 minutes – that’s 5.6 hours. But beamed live from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, those 5.6 hours entailed spectacular operatic entertainment.

You won’t see plumed horses, a procession of camels, or a hundred supernumeraries as standard bearers parading across the Glimmerglass stage. In fact, you have to step outside the Alice Busch Opera Theater to see any elephants at all, the animal most commonly associated with Aida, Verdi’s greatest grand opera.

I could not have asked for a more magical setting in which to watch Verdi's La Traviata. In front of me was the floating stage, surrounded by gently rippling water glistening in the evening moonlight. On the left rose the buildings of Sydney's central business district, while on my right was the beautiful harbour bridge and opera house.

Otello is usually considered to be Verdi’s most mature opera. It was one of the last ones he wrote, the result of a plot by his publisher Riccordi and the conductor Franco Faccio to draw him out of early retirement. The result is a work which combines all the aspects of Verdi’s earlier operatic style with Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk.

It's the most spectacular entrance in opera: the giant stone statue bursts in to join Don Giovanni at the dinner table; a pair of sweeping downward octave swoops in D minor fills the audience (and the hapless Leporello) with terror at the rake's imminent descent into hell.OK, that was a spoiler, but then we all know the story: a production of Don Giovanni is all about how you tell it.

In an opera of such popularity as Carmen by Georges Bizet, it wouldn’t be easy to please an audience likely to be inured to a variety of performances of arias such as Habanera and The Toreador’s Song. Yet Opera Australia made a thoughtfully constructed and well vindicated attempt.

Pour la production de ce Candide, le Capitole recevait un plateau et une équipe presque entièrement issus des milieux américains, faisant souffler dans l’enceinte du théâtre un vent de fraîcheur et de nouveauté.