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Bravo to Opera Phila for presenting a startlingly beautiful contemporary operatic work by Osvaldo Golijov, one that's vital in the evolving landscape of 21st century opera.

The latest production of Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia gave the audience lots to marvel at musically – beautiful composition and gorgeous voices.

What is it about Mozart’s Così fan tutte that inspires the zaniest interpretations? While the music is lovely, replete with all those lush trios, quartets, and quintets that operagoers live for, the storyline is silly if not downright insipid.

During Verdi’s bicentenary month and year, it’s fitting that Opera Philadelphia kicked off its 2013/14 season with the work that Verdi himself considers as having launched his own career – Nabucco. Written at a time when Italy longed to be free of foreign rule, Verdi’s name and the expression “Viva Verdi” became synonymous with Italian nationalism and unification.

The third production to launch this year at Glimmerglass Festival is a pairing of two one-act operas spanning four centuries, entitled Passions for expediency’s sake. Presented in one bill, the works couldn’t be more different in style, presentation, and audience appeal, but they ultimately combine to make a unique and important artistic statement about suffering and love.

What does any theatergoer want from a stage musical? For starters, beautiful singing, solid acting, striking costumes, clever direction, and characters to love and to loathe. A melodic score with a few toe-tappers and a smart book and lyrics. The new production of Camelot presented at the Glimmerglass Festival is that theatergoer’s dream – a crowning glory, a royal treat.

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.

Take four very talented performers. Throw in a score that pushes them to their vocal limits. Add an accordion and a fishing reel to the orchestra. Mix with a healthy dose of wry humor. Dot with ostrich features in Mary Kay pink. Simmer with sexual innuendo for two hours and eleven minutes.

“For some operas,” famed conductor Carlo Maria Giulini once said, “you can accept a voice of not absolute beauty – if it is well used and he is an artist and interpreter, it will work. But for Verdi you need all this plus the essential sound.

Not a new production, the Metropolitan Opera’s staging of Dialogues des Carmélites, originally directed by John Dexter in 1977, was nonetheless fresh and compelling in its approach and not at all tired, despite its age.

As the legend goes, a noble cavalier loses his battle with giant windmills. But the Academy of Vocal Arts wins big with their latest production, Jules Massenet’s melodic Don Quichotte.

A work crucial to the development and appreciation of opera as a relevant modern art form premièred on the East Coast to well-deserved acclaim at a legendary Philadelphia venue. From the first note out of the pit orchestra to the final strains of the last act, Silent Night, presented by Opera Philadelphia at the Academy of Music, was a tour de force – from conception to execution.

The plight of women trapped in plural marriage—one husband with multiple wives—glowed like a firebrand on the Perelman Theater stage on Sunday. Opera Company of Philadelphia’s Dark Sisters, in co-production with Gotham Chamber Opera and the Music-Theatre Group, is OCP’s final offering of the 2011-12 season.

For the first time in twenty-five years, the Opera Company of Philadelphia has mounted a production of Puccini’s first great opera, Manon Lescaut. The result was an inspired testament to thoughtful direction by Michael Cavanagh, gorgeous sets and costumes by John Pascoe, and several winning performances.

Never has the expression “A good time was had by all” been more accurate than at Tuesday night’s performance Il Barbiere di Siviglia at Centennial Hall in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

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.

Want to know what small-town America looks and feels like in the thick of summertime, circa 1940? The Glimmerglass Festival’s purest musical theater offering, The Music Man, is festive, frolicsome Americana, brimming with spectacular sets, clever staging, and a sensational ensemble showcasing Olympic-sized talent.

The seldom-seen opera musical Lost in the Stars found prominence Friday night, enrapturing a full house at Glimmerglass Festival in New York, moving some of the actors themselves to tears, and stirring the audience to its feet for curtain call.

Most Americans are ashamed of the legacy of the Ku Klux Klan in this country and their lawless persecution of non-whites. Racism in America is not a pretty subject, and it doesn’t make for pretty opera. It does, however, make for a thought-provoking and even disturbing piece in the hands of Philadelphia’s Center City Opera Theater (CCOT).

Though most of Gaetano Donizetti’s operas are not well known, Donizetti wrote dozens of them – many of the silly variety. L’Elisir d’Amore is one frothy work that not only survived, but continues to be performed around the world – frequently. L’Elisir d’Amore has a formulaic storyline: it’s war time (pick a war, any war). A lonely boy falls for a very pretty girl.

It was a glass-smashing, balloon-popping, bearskin-wearing, strip-out-of-your-swimsuit-onstage kind of afternoon at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater for the opening of New York City Opera’s second production of the 2012 season, Mozart’s Così fan tutte.Even for people who’ve seen this opera before, I’ll bet they’ve never seen a Così like this one.

In his program notes for Pelléas et Mélisande, director K. James McDowell refers to the only opera Claude Debussy ever completed as "a towering masterpiece in the operatic repertoire.

Combine a pleasing production, in a stunning venue (The Academy of Music), located on one of the most picturesque streets in Philadelphia – the Avenue of the Arts – with the marvelous music of Mozart, and you have the makings of a lovely winter afternoon.As I stepped into the street, I remember wishing more February days could have been like this one.

The Howard Gilman Opera House was filled from the orchestra to the balcony. Every seat sold for New York City Opera’s season opener La Traviata, on the occasion of their reinvention from an opera company in the city to an opera company going out into the city. La Traviata was their first production since their controversial move out of their time-honored Lincoln Center home.

The Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA) in Philadelphia presented a concert version of a rarely performed Verdi opera, Oberto, at the Haverford School's Centennial Hall. This is, in fact, the celebrated Italian composer’s first opera, and a work that took him four years to write. The evening proved a showcase for the AVA’s talented resident artists and the many musicians supporting them.

Tucked away on Spruce Street, Philadelphia, many blocks off the glittering Avenue of the Arts is a stellar training academy with the mission of preparing world-class opera singers. It’s called the Academy of Vocal Arts (AVA), and it offers resident artists from throughout the United States and all over the world a chance to study and perform in its four-year program.

Some operagoers contend that Carmen, the fatalistic gypsy doomed to die, is unlikable. She antagonizes other women at the cigarette factory. She seduces men with abandon. She makes an inexperienced corporal of the guard fall for her, manipulates him into abandoning his military career for a life of smuggling, and then heartlessly turns him out like a pesky stray.

The opera is way too dark. It runs far too long. It’s requires a soprano with vocal cords of amalgamated steel to sing the title role. No wonder Cherubini’s Medea is rarely performed. According to OPERA America records, the opera hasn’t been performed in the United States in nearly 20 years.

Sultry and brassy, calculating and cruel, the character Carmen is, well, hard to like. By contrast, Bizet’s opéra comique of the same name playing in repertory at Glimmerglass Festival this summer is resoundingly popular, bringing audiences to standing ovations.The shining virtue of this Glimmerglass production is the music—especially the singing.

One great advantage of premiering an opera in the United States is that audiences can’t compare productions and casts of past performances and find you lacking. One major disadvantage is that the audience has little or no fluency with the work and may struggle to comprehend its meaning and significance. With the U.S.

Tumblers and fire jugglers in rainbow colors. Singing nymphs soaring for stories into the air. Arias deeply dramatic and broadly comic. The Metropolitan Opera’s interpretation of Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss is a magical mashup of modern and classic, seria and buffa, technique and technology that pleases but falls short of terrific for this reviewer.

Goosebumps, gasps of horror, sobs and tears. That's what operagoers will experience at the East Coast premiere of Séance on a Wet Afternoon presented by New York City Opera. It is an eerie, emotional roller coaster of a show that grips you with the force of demon possession and doesn’t let go.

When Franz Liszt conducted Le Comte Ory in Weimar, he said it “bubbled like champagne,” according to the Metropolitan Opera’s program note. It also noted that Liszt arranged for the audience to be served champagne in Act II.

When attending professional opera, patrons can and should expect to see a solid production, strong singing, and elevated production values—a well-rounded show that leaves them more satisfied than not. At the professional level, opera is a commercial transaction around an artistic product.

While recordings of Arabella abound, operagoers could conceivably go years without actually seeing the piece performed. Compared to the frequency with which companies present Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and Salome, Richard Strauss’s Arabella is an infrequently seen gem.

Opera Company of Philadelphia (OCP) reached into the Philadelphia community with its remake of Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet, the second of five shows in the 2010-11 season. In his OCP debut, Italian director Manfred Schweigkofler gave the company a chance to recast a Renaissance-era tale of two Italian families bearing ancient and deadly grudges as warring fashion houses in 21st century Verona.

If the painstaking recreation of Rome during the Napoleonic Wars is stripped away from the setting of Tosca. If choral numbers, sparing to begin with, are muted as distant drumbeats. If the title character is reinterpreted as a country girl with little artifice rather than a grand diva whose sheer confidence and sexuality prove irresistible to men.

Some in the audience stormed to their feet at curtain call with exuberant bravos for the cast and conductor. Others walked out at the first intermission. “A monumental success,” one claimed. “The worst opera I’ve ever seen,” another said leaving the theater.

Those who like their opera off-kilter will revel in the Metropolitan Opera’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann, an opera in three acts (with prologue and epilogue) by Jacques Offenbach. The Met production was heavily operetta à la Offenbach—risqué, and at times, erotic.

When an ensemble of strong voices extends and nearly expends themselves, pouring out their artistry in tribute to Mozart’s genius, operagoers will stand during bows—eagerly. That is precisely what occurred during Opera New Jersey's July 11 performance of Don Giovanni. The cast received a standing ovation from a packed house, deservedly so.