People will say, “Oh, so this is a feminist opera, then,” and having provided a neat label feel they’ve settled the matter. Or, again, “Oh, so this is an anti-war opera,” and provided yet another label that explains nothing. If Adriana Mater is about anything, and it is, it’s about birth.

Radamisto, Handel’s first opera seria for London and now on view at the Santa Fe Opera in an eye-filling, neo-baroque staging, was meant to astound audiences. It still does.

The Santa Fe Opera's gleaming new production of Billy Budd justifies Britten’s arduous, hugely rewarding effort on nearly every level. First, there’s Teddy Tahu Rhodes, whose performance in the title role quite simply ranks among the most memorable SFO debuts ever. I’m thinking von Stade, te Kanawa, Terfel, for starters...

It became mighty clear in my annual pre-festival chat-up with artistic director Marc Neikrug that surprise and contrast play a major role in the way he’s planned many of this season’s Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival concerts.

Call it some kind of iridescence if you like, the odd phenomenon that Gerard Manley Hopkins called a “shining from shook foil.” Mozart’s greatest operas have it in spades. You’ll never hear or see Le Nozze di Figaro twice. Not even Mozart did, in a literal, workmanlike sense of the word...

Improve on Shakespeare? Heresy! You gotta be kidding! Well, maybe not quite. Passages of non-Shakespearean doggerel regularly get chopped from stagings of Macbeth. It’s a rare production of Haml

One of Richard Gaddes’ major projects since assuming the directorship of the Santa Fe Opera in 2000 has been to transform the worn-out image of opera as an exclusive play-pretty for the monied s