In this week’s Opera Cheat Sheet, Houston Public Media’s St.John Flynn and Eric Skelly give a quick overview of Arrigo Boito’s operatic treatment of the Faust story. Taking the entirety of Goethe’s ...

Mefistofele is an opera in a prologue, four acts and an epilogue, the only completed opera with music by the Italian composer-librettist Arrigo Boito (there are several completed operas for which he ...

From time to time, people come along whose stories are so unique and vivid that their names actually become entries in the dictionary. One prime example is Faust, who made a disastrous deal with the ...

Dec. 25—Opera Southwest is bringing "Mefistofele" to New Year's Eve. Composer Arrigo Boito's 1868 opera will be the concert centerpiece of the Sunday, Dec. 31, performance at the National Hispanic ...

Recorded live in October 2013, Russian bass Ildar Abdrazakov, whose "voice is massive...his singing...piping hot, precise and stinging" (San Jose Mercury News) is Mefistofele. In his staged role debut ...

He turns Boito’s sequence of episodes from Goethe’s “Faust” into a louche, lively cross-chronological carnival: part Italian street theater, part bordello, part Baroque theater, part Catholic Mass. If ...

In the first scene of the opera "Mefistofele," 138 singers, dancers, children and extras cram the stage, in matching white robes and matching masks. The spectacle lasts 25 minutes, and on opening ...

NEW YORK — The best that can be said for some recent Metropolitan Opera productions — “Samson et Dalila” and “Tosca,” I’m looking at you — is that they don’t actively hinder the works being performed.