Adriana Mater Roundup

A number of reviewers and bloggers have weighed in on Kaija Saariaho and Amin Maalouf's Adriana Mater:

• My SFCV review; I thought it an absorbing and beautiful masterpiece.


• Brian at Out West Arts felt the same way about it that I did, and says it eloquently and with fewer words.


• Anthony Tommasini agrees with us in the Times.


• Steve Smith has a long and loving aside about Adriana in a blog posting otherwise occupied with New Albion Records.


• Sarah Bryan Miller, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is unimpressed. (She's wrong about the reason the singers were amplified; the opera was never so loud that they couldn't have been heard over it. It's never as loud as, say, Elektra or Salome. The singers were amplified so some electronic processing could be done, and it was Saariaho's decision to do so.)


• Anne Midgette has praise with some qualifications in the WashPost.


• Steve Robert Allen was mostly positive.


• Lawrence A. Johnson terms the libretto stiff and talky, but finds the music majestic.




• Alan Riding's 2006 Times review of the Paris premiere


• Alex Ross's New Yorker review of the Paris premiere