“The result is a viscerally overwhelming performance of an intimate work, written for eight singers and a 13-piece orchestra. That these college-age singers throw themselves into it with such uninhibited emotion and physicality makes this spare, modern-dress production unsettlingly immediate.”
“Mary Birnbaum's thoughtful direction was rich with imaginative touches.”
– George Loomis in Opera Magazine
Press for Hänsel und Gretel:
#2 of Houston's “Best Operas of the Year” List in Houstonia Magazine
“Perfect for the kids and immensely satisfying for any grownup operaphile, Hänsel und Gretel is a stunner, perhaps OH's most perfect realization. OH has found a director of real quality in Mary Birnbaum, whose eye for the telling gesture, the perfect comic effect, or visual snap brings the fairy tale into our laps.”
“It's not the sort of material that lends itself easily to the stage. Yet Friday's superb performance in Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley –– the headline event in a long weekend's worth of music that constituted the Ojai North festival –– was a dazzling display of inventiveness and broad comical delight.”
“The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts) is an opera for real. Friday at the Ojai North Music Festival, it also proved to be an unexpectedly witty, illuminating and all-around delightful 70 minutes of entertainment. The Classical Style is gorgeous to hear, and filled with laughs. And the opera is deep.”
“...the result of their work, The Classical Style: An Opera (of Sorts), in seven scenes and 75 minutes, definitely flies, and its first audience in Libbey Bowl certainly enjoyed it. It’s a comedy, of course, of the inside baseball variety, tongue firmly in cheek; the more you knew about its subject matter the funnier it was, but the farcical proceedings are lively enough that even the uninitiated are allowed in [...] The end even manages to touch, as Rosen and Robert Schumann contemplate the miracle of the style and the mysteries of its birth, life and death...Director Mary Birnbaum made it all work with a minimum of props and costumes.”
