(Photo credit Raftermen Photography) The Atlanta Opera (TAO) closed their 2024-25 mainstage season with Georg Frideric Handel’s 1744 semi-oratorio, or quasi-opera, “Semele.” General Director Tomer Zvulun structured the season around art’s transnational commonplace, the Hero’s Journey. But interestingly, all four works selected also play with genre and they address the nearly unanswerable question, ‘what is opera, anyway?’ They began with {…}

(Photo credit Raftermen Photography) Your reviewer spent childhood in the hills about fifty miles west of Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta then and Atlanta now constitute two different places. In the before-time that preceded the internet, Georgia’s small-town folk with their gaze fixed towards the rest of the world viewed Atlanta as the portal to everything else, not least by way of {…}