Don’t forget the popcorn when you head for the Santa Fe Opera’s latest show, a drop-dead reincarnation of every steamy film noir you’ve ever seen. Make that a SFO-commissioned opera noir: The Letter, a dark, massively entertaining confection craftily put together by composer Paul Moravec and librettist Terry Teachout.

If you sensed the flutter of phantom wings at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s concerts on July 19 and 20 in the St. Francis Auditorium, that would have been the pale shade of Marcel Proust. His summons? Libations of Gallic melody composed in the hyper-civilized manner of his own fiction.

There’s nothing mild about the Santa Fe Opera’s current production of Don Giovanni, a revival from the 2004 season. It’s still the unsubtle, in-your-face show it was five years ago. Familiarity does not breed affection. This time around, minus the marvelous Mariusz Kwiecien, it’s even more of a bluster-fest. The SFO delivers a loud performance, and that’s not just because of the gaudy set and costumes.

“It’s amazing—all these really, really good people coming here for such a short time. There’s nothing like it,” Marc Neikrug, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s longtime artistic director, says about the hyper-talented array of instrumentalists, singers, composers and conductors who find their way west to Santa Fe for a couple of months every summer.

Be warned, please: The Santa Fe Opera’s charming, warm-hearted new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love is liable to give you a bad case of those morning-after-the-opera, just-can’t-get-those-tunes-out-of-my-head hangovers. Alka-Seltzer won’t help, so let the inner melodies play.

If Natalie Dessay makes a spectacular theatrical debut as Violetta in the Santa Fe Opera’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, and she does, it’s no thanks to Director Laurent Pelly’s spectacularly inept staging of the work.

It’s hard times for the opera business these days. Schedules are being pruned and contracts renegotiated everywhere, from the Met on down. The Baltimore Opera Company filed for bankruptcy this s

Santa Fe New Music presents a youth opera based on a Russian folk tale.

Santa Fe's glimpse of the Revolutions International Theater Festival disolved the mystery behind the techniques and aesthetic of a grand Japanese form with humor,  and without degrading the elegance and traditionalism inherent in Kabuki.

Shelley Hirsch has a way with words. Actually, the writer, singer, musician and performer has her way with words. Hirsch manipulates the boundaries of language and sound to create stories that encompass both the immediate surroundings and the larger world.