There’s nothing mild about the Santa Fe Opera’s current production of Don Giovanni, a revival from the 2004 season. It’s still the unsubtle, in-your-face show it was five years ago. Familiarity does not breed affection. This time around, minus the marvelous Mariusz Kwiecien, it’s even more of a bluster-fest. The SFO delivers a loud performance, and that’s not just because of the gaudy set and costumes.

“It’s amazing—all these really, really good people coming here for such a short time. There’s nothing like it,” Marc Neikrug, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s longtime artistic director, says about the hyper-talented array of instrumentalists, singers, composers and conductors who find their way west to Santa Fe for a couple of months every summer.

Be warned, please: The Santa Fe Opera’s charming, warm-hearted new production of Gaetano Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love is liable to give you a bad case of those morning-after-the-opera, just-can’t-get-those-tunes-out-of-my-head hangovers. Alka-Seltzer won’t help, so let the inner melodies play.

If Natalie Dessay makes a spectacular theatrical debut as Violetta in the Santa Fe Opera’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata, and she does, it’s no thanks to Director Laurent Pelly’s spectacularly inept staging of the work.

It’s hard times for the opera business these days. Schedules are being pruned and contracts renegotiated everywhere, from the Met on down. The Baltimore Opera Company filed for bankruptcy this s

Santa Fe New Music presents a youth opera based on a Russian folk tale.

Gaddes will be remembered warmly as the man who respected the SFO’s traditions, extended its reach and expanded its artistic horizons.

The season winds down.

The next time you’re waiting for things to happen in St. Francis Auditorium, courtesy of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, glance up at those three microphone lines elegantly looped and dangled above the stage. The refined, fine-drawn grace of the Calderesque lines characterizes the work of young Israeli pianist Benjamin Hochman.

Noon-time chamber music concerts are a very good thing. They’re relatively informal, they’re untroubled by intermissions, and they set the audience free in plenty of time for a lovely lunch. The music can be pretty good too.