Opera

A noted opera director reflects on collaborating with San Francisco Opera on a new work based on the 9/11 attacks.

Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts receives a colorful, if often inscrutable, remounting at Yerba Buena Center.

And this Sunday Dolora Zajick sings for free as part of the San Francisco Opera's performance at Stern Grove. That's right: $100 a ticket to see her in the opera house, free at Stern Grove. And then there's this: even if you arrive late – heck, even if you picnic in the parking lot – you'll still hear her loud and clear.

The stage director/choreographer strives to get his singers to embody their roles, so the audience can sense that their story is alive and present onstage.

Philip Glass’ Orphée earns high marks as a 20th-century alternative to Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. It just deserves a better production than the blunt, charmless staging mounted by the Ensemble Parallèle at Herbst Theatre over the weekend.

Works of fiction that become operas often suffer some degree of degradation in the translation. Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, for example, is generally acknowledged a masterpiece: Dostoyevsky called it “flawless as a work of art.” Yet David Carlson’s opera Anna Karenina seems destined to go down in operatic history as a valiant attempt, at best.

Festival Opera of Walnut Creek is continuing its summer season with Gaetano Donizetti’s masterpiece, Lucia di Lammermoor. The production opens Aug. 7, and the four performances will feature almost entirely Bay Area artists.

The upcoming San Francisco Opera production of Puccini’s La fanciulla del West, aka Girl of the Golden West, aka “Puccini's American opera,” returning here after an absence of 31 years, is the epitome of ”Italian-American.”

For those of us who love opera, the Merola Grand Finale is like a decisive first date. Some singers who parade their stuff before us may have the looks, the glamour, the ease, and the savoir faire for an enjoyable outing.