Productions since the beginning of his tenure have included Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte, and La clemenza di Tito, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Blitzstein’s Regina, Rossini’s L’occasione fa il ladro, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites. In the 2014-2015 season, Craig Kier became the Director of the Maryland Opera Studio at The University of Maryland School of Music.

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Soprano Leah Crocetto’s Elisabeth was sung with style and technique, and she conveyed the queen’s youth and vulnerability. As Carlo, Russell Thomas put all the drama into his voice - an appealing tenor with focus, solid support and a taut sense of urgency - but couldn’t quite find the mercurial Hamlet lurking in his character’s aristocratic brattiness.

Eric Owens, who sang a fine Flying Dutchman with the WNO in 2015, struggled to adapt a Wagnerian voice to the leaner, more plastic lines of Verdi, but he gave a moving account of the king’s anguished monologue and chilling cat-and-mouse with the Grand Inquisitor (sung by bass Andrea Silvestrelli with a cadaverous edge to his tone). Rodrigo is the moral core of the work, both in Verdi’s opera and the Friedrich Schiller play on which it is based, and his volcanic confrontation with the king - “When future ages hear your name, let them not say, ‘He was Nero’ ” - didn’t disappoint. Baritone Quinn Kelsey sang with a long-lined legato and pleasing timbre (though sometimes cloudy in the lower range) as Rodrigo, Carlo’s friend and protector.

Maryland lyric opera don carlo