Opera the Way It Was Meant to Be

Madison Opera opens its 59th season with a spot-on La Traviata   Call me old-fashioned—or if you prefer, an old-school conservative—but when it comes to the way an opera should look, I generally want operas such as Carmen to look the way they did when the creative teams created them. Thus I came away from…

Madison Opera Goes Old School

Some great singing and a traditional approach revive “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci”   It has been more than 30 years since Madison Opera staged that once-ubiquitous double bill of one-act operas, “Cavalleria Rusticana” and “Pagliacci.” That’s nothing—I’ve been attending and listening to opera for a little over half a century, and I never managed to…

Madison Opera’s Must-See—MUST HEAR—“Florencia”

The final dress rehearsal of Catan’s mystical/lyrical work enchants and moves us   I have looked forward to seeing and hearing Daniel Catan’s Florencia en el Amazonas for a year now…and when I discovered that work and a prior commitment would prevent that this weekend, it was a real disappointment. It hadn’t occurred to me…

Madison Opera’s Carmen So Easy to Love

Baseball may be over, but the season-opener is a home run It isn’t just that Bizet’s incarnation of Carmen, the wanton gypsy girl who ruins lives almost as quickly as the composer strung together hit numbers in his opera, seduces Don Jose so easily—she is responsible for ensnaring many a first-time listener into the world…

Delayed But Not Drowned, “Opera in the Park” Celebrates Its 15th Event

Minus Maestro DeMain (and the rain), the winning formula delivers another “Grand Night for (and of) Singing”   It was perhaps inevitable that Saturday’s storms would mean that Sunday night’s 15th annual Madison Opera in the Park event would fail to draw the usual throng of 15,000 or so. But all that mattered to the…

Making a Spectacle of Themselves

Madison Opera presents The Tales of Hoffman illuminated by flashes of brilliance   In making a list of shortcomings (and it is a short list) of Madison Opera’s production of The Tales of Hoffman Friday night at the Overture Center, an inevitable conclusion is reached: the fault lies not in their stars, but inevitably, in…