The annual visit of the Mariinsky Theater’s traveling opera troupe from St. Petersburg came a little early this year. The themes that unite the Kennedy Center double-bill of Verdi’s Otello and Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades are self-destructive obsessions and tenor heroes who become villains. Who better to perform The Queen of Spades than the Mariinsky Theater, which hosted the world premiere of The Queen of Spades on December 19, 1890? The opera is thoroughly Russian,…

Verdi’s Macbeth is the least worthy of the composer’s three settings of Shakespeare plays, but it is hardly fair to compare this homely little opera to the composer’s final masterpieces, Otello and Falstaff. Macbeth, the earliest of the three, has some beautiful melodies, some dramatic scenes, effective choral writing, and glimmers of what Verdi would eventually accomplish — the elimination of tired bel canto conventions or, short of that, the ingenious incorporation of those…

On Saturday night, the Washington National Opera opened its best production of the season, with David Alden’s modernized staging of Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa. Washington is the last of the three cities co-producing this version to see it on the stage, after a well-received 2004 premiere at Houston Grand Opera and an overwhelming critical success last fall at English National Opera, where it won the Laurence Olivier Award for best new opera production. Janáček adapted the…

After the success of the second part of its American Ring Cycle, with all performances long since sold out, Washington National Opera opened its second spring production on Saturday evening, Gaetano Donizetti’s La Fille du Régiment. There is no reason to revive this rather silly comic opera, last mounted by WNO in 1993, unless you have a truly remarkable cast and perhaps a new and interesting production. That seemed to be the case with this…

This year Opera Lafayette has devoted most of its season to the Armide Project, a plan to perform two famous operatic realizations of the same libretto, Armide by Philippe Quinault. First on the schedule was the original version, premiered by Jean-Baptiste Lully in 1686, in a concert performance at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Saturday afternoon. The version made by Gluck in the 18th century will follow, in a staged production with Maryland…

Five pseudo-historical, pseudo-literary feminist icons from widely different eras are brought together by a modern-day executive for a dinner party. This arguably contrived premise is the initial basis for Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, now being staged by the Fountainhead Theater. The show’s conceit feels rather forced, and continues to puzzle during the second act, when all the main figures are dropped and the action shifts to a present-day story of that same executive and her…