Always enterprising in its efforts to offer new and varied productions, the Florentine Opera, having won Grammy awards for its world premiere recording of Rio de Sangre and its brilliant CD of Elmer Gantry, offers another departure from standard operatic fare with Benjamin Britten’s

For many years, the Florentine Opera, one of Milwaukee's longest-running cultural institutions...

Last weekend Florentine Opera presented Elmer Gantry, a new opera based on the Sinclair Lewis novel premiered in Nashville in 2007. This venture into Americana is more related to mid-20th-century American opera (Susannah, The Ballad of Baby Doe, Regina) than...

Many contemporary composers fail to realize that opera is not a play with music or a score for a film, but a hybrid drama using the full potential of the human voice to ignite emotions within the musical score that would otherwise remain unrealized. On the other hand, a libretto unsubstantiated by a distinctive score, which ignores or minimizes its interdependence with the vocal line, is one of the many pitfalls...