Performer: Renée Rapier

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

Seattle Opera's visually poetic and refined Madama Butterfly peeks back at Puccini's own first version of the opera, which was arguably more openly critical of the devastation wrought by imperialism. 

Calixto Bieito’s production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen isn't without controversy. San Francisco Opera gave us raw sexuality unvarnished by any degree of social refinement.

The thrills of Tudor (pseudo-)history and bel canto expressivity combine in the second of Donizetti's “Three Queens” operas, Maria Stuarda, making its company debut at Seattle Opera.

Opera Parallèle combines Kurt Weill's Mahagonny Songspiel and Francis Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias in a riotous opera-within-an-opera production.

It may have taken Verdi’s bicentennial to bring Falstaff back to the San Francisco Opera, but at last the knight has returned to the company’s stage for the first time in over a decade...