August 2021

Our cover story is an interview with Eun Sun Kim, who takes up her new post as music director of San Francisco Opera this month. As well as looking into the future, we look back 100 years to 1921, when then death of one of the greatest tenors of all time — Enrico Caruso — coincided with the birth of two further great tenors destined to shape operatic history — Franco Corelli and Giuseppe Di Stefano.

Other features this month also range widely across time and place:

—Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, viewed as a pandemic parable

—The torturous journey of Voss, Patrick White’s most famous literary creation, from the page to the operatic stage

—Curating culture: why opera has a natural ally in the museum

We review live performances from around the world, both in theatres and online. Leading off the recording and book review section, our ‘Disc of the month’ is Mathias Vidal’s ‘Rameau Triomphant’ on the Versailles Spectacles label, and ‘For the record’ is with the soprano Danielle de Niese.