Fresh from a visit to Palermo, the city whose turbulent history inspired Verdi’s The Sicilian Vespers (I vespri siciliani), I approached the opera with a renewed sense of place. First staged in Paris ...

Jacque Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffmann” is a something of a puzzle — a big, multi-dimensional puzzle. First, there’s the opera: Offenbach died in 1880 before he completed it, and musicians have ...