By Paul Horsley The highest compliment you can pay an operatic production is that you went out of the theater thinking not about stagecraft, acting skills, catchy tunes or vocal prowess but about the ideas in the piece, the “meaning” even. The Lyric Opera’s Carmen that opened April 23rd is just such a production: It […]

By Paul Horsley The message of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is that God touches only a few with genius, and rest of us don’t matter. Or is it, really? Those familiar with earlier versions of this Tony Award-winning 1979 play (and its 1982 film version) might remember the theme thus: Antonio Salieri is resentful toward God […]

By Paul Horsley If you think too hard about the underlying messages of Bizet’s Carmen, you might begin to find the opera a bit unsettling. For when the ostensibly virtuous Don José ventures outside of his safe bourgeois existence to fall in with the wild gypsy Carmen, he enjoys a brief moment of love and […]

By Paul Horsley For more than four centuries the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare have been enshrined as the pinnacle of English-language poetry. Why, then, do we need to put them to music? It’s a question that Charles Bruffy, the Grammy Award-winning director of the Kansas City and Phoenix Chorales, has given a bit of […]

By Paul Horsley What makes a performing-arts series great? For starters, you need the confidence of concert-goers, who have learned over the years you’ll do everything in your power to bring the world’s best (both among established artists and rising talent). In addition, you need the faith of the artists themselves, who know from experience […]

By Paul Horsley The Lyric Opera’s production of Donizetti’s frothy The Elixir of Love, which runs through March 20th at the Kauffman Center, has several things going for it. First, it offers richly detailed set designs by Allen Moyer, including a downstage curtain-drop painted in playful hues: a rural landscape in the style of Grant […]

By Paul Horsley When David Ludwig began falling in love with the violin virtuoso Bella Hristova, he knew two things right away. One, that he wanted to write a concerto for her some day. And two, that it would begin with a loud crash. Not to suggest that the relationship was filled with turmoil, David […]

By Paul Horsley Imagine the tale: A city slicker blows into a small town hoping to sell dubious goods to gullible farmers. Some are fooled, but not the bookish heroine, who is the cleverest and, it turns out, the most interesting woman in town. Sound familiar? If the plot of The Elixir of Love resembles […]

By Paul Horsley It’s true that dancing the lead in Swan Lake is the dream of many young ballerinas, but not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. Quite simply, the dual role of Odette/Odile contains such an array of artistic, technical and psychological complexities that for more than a century it has remained an […]