The fall 2001 seasons of the opera companies in San Francisco and Las Angeles opened their productions.

The Wall Street Journal wrote:"There are many opera fans for whom beautiful singing is enough;I prefer good singers who can act, I enjoed the fine voices of Placido Domingo, Galina Gorchakova,Vladimir Chernov, Sergey Leiferkus in "The Queen of Spades" by Tchaikovsky but as I might have at a concert performance. My pleasure would have been greater if they had been better able to get inside Pushkin/Tchaikovsky's fascinating characters and persuaded me that they cared about one another. Sergey Larin and--especially--Olga Borodina (where would opera in America be today without the Russians?) sang the roles of Samson and Dalila handsomely indeed... Baritone Timothy Noble, as the Philistine High Prist, and chorus sang with greater emotional conviction than anyone on stage. Tchaikovsky's aging Countess and Wagner's evil Ortrud are frequently taken on by sopranos past their prime. The parts are so juicy they hard to destroy. Even with broad wobbles, ugly sounds and off-target notes singers Elena Obraztsova and Eva Marton managed to incarnate these two monstres sacrees with genuene questo. At the other extreme, I found almost nothing to fault musically in the Los Angeles "Lohengrin". Kent Nagano (conducting his first on stage Wagner) and orchestra were sublime, the chorus all one could hope for. Gosta Winbergh was the finest Wagnerian tenor I've heard in 20 years."

by David Littlejohn

"The Wall Street Journal"

October 9, 2001