Opera Review

Simon McBurney’s production of “The Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera is an unusually nuanced yet still playful rendition of the fairy tale.

The director makes his Metropolitan Opera debut with a bleak, powerful production of the 18th-century classic.

Directed by Tomer Zvulun, the company’s production of Wagner’s epic lacked a strong overarching concept; in New York, British tenor Allan Clayton delivered a stirring recital at the Park Avenue Armory.

Heartbeat Opera gives ‘Macbeth’ a spare, putatively feminist reinterpretation and stages ‘Tosca’ as a production put on in a fundamentalist theocracy.

The composer’s second opera at the New York institution is a visceral, jazz-influenced work about the closeted bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, who killed his opponent in a 1962 fight.

A performance comprising three works by artists including Anna Deavere Smith and John Luther Adams received a technically spectacular production at Lyric Opera of Chicago; at Chicago Opera Theater, an opera about the brilliant British mathematician proved a labored telling of a tragic story.

At the Seattle Opera, filmmaker Roya Sadat directs a timely but trite adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel, with music by Sheila Silver and a libretto by Stephen Kitsakos.

In director François Girard’s production of the operatic fairy tale, powerful turns from Piotr Beczała and Christine Goerke compete with a series of questionable design choices.

Composer and librettist Kate Soper’s inventive, uneven adaptation of a 13th-century French poem at Long Beach Opera explores the messiness of romantic love.

This year’s edition of the adventurous showcase includes an intimate double bill by Irish composer Emma O’Halloran and a dazzling, uncategorizable work by Gelsey Bell that spans geologic time.

Umberto Giordano’s 1898 verismo work has a creaky plot but an engaging score, beautifully delivered by soprano Sonya Yoncheva in a handsome new production at the Metropolitan Opera.

Renée Fleming, Kelli O’Hara and Joyce DiDonato star in composer Kevin Puts’s opera about three women in different eras related through “Mrs. Dalloway.”

A magical world premiere at San Diego Opera imagines Frida Kahlo reuniting with her husband, Diego Rivera, from beyond the grave; composer Ethel Smyth’s 1906 work, in a fusty revival at Houston Grand Opera, depicts English villagers who plunder shipwrecks and kill the survivors.

The opera, which premiered at Penn State, depicts the fierce conflict between urban planner Robert Moses and journalist Jane Jacobs.

Davóne Tines collaborates with Jennifer Koh at BAM in a performance that delves into both artists’ life stories, and with Tyshawn Sorey at the Park Avenue Armory commemorating the 50th anniversary of Morton Feldman’s tribute to Rothko Chapel.

This season brings genre-pushing variety, from the premiere of David T. Little’s ‘Black Lodge’ to Rossini’s rarely seen ‘Otello.’

The Metropolitan Opera is mounting this diva vehicle (in Italian) for the first time in a new David McVicar starring Sondra Radvanovsky.

Lyric Opera of Chicago presents the U.S. premiere of a new staging of the classic Jerry Bock/Sheldon Harnick/Joseph Stein musical, as well as a traditional production of Verdi’s tale of three high-born men in the 16th century competing to marry one woman.

In San Francisco, the celebrated minimalist’s newest opera attempts to balance political drama with romantic tragedy but is held back by its reliance on traditional tropes.

In her final season as artistic director, she presents a comedic Rossini pastiche, ‘The Sound of Music,’ ‘Carmen’ and a thematically linked double bill of ‘Taking Up Serpents’ and world premiere ‘Holy Ground.’