The Baton Rouge Opera and the LSU Opera Theatre present Antigone by Dinos Constantinides

"I consider [Antigone] to be one of the truly great and distinctive operatic works of our era.

"Remarkable in this work is not only the wide variety of musical styles that Constantinides employs in this opera according to the dictates of the text, but his use of differing means of expression. There are beautifully flowing arias, dissonant and passionate outbursts, passages sung in a declamatory style, and other portions of the text that are simply spoken, albeit always in superb theatrical fashion. These disparate styles are skillfully melded into a convincing whole, with music that is always appropriate to the action of the moment."

—David DeBoor Canfield, Fanfare 40:4 (Mar/Apr 2017)

"What impresses most is Constantinides’s coherence of musical language. The entire piece has a feeling of tragic inevitability, not just because of the dark scoring but because the composer has harmonically structured the work so it creates its own, entirely convincing world. The intensity of both the writing and indeed of the present performance results in a tremendously impressive theatrical achievement."

—Colin Clarke, Fanfare 40:4 (May/Apr 2017)

"Using the classic translations to English of Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald for his libretto, the composer creates a score that uses stark, dissonant modern music combined withSprechgesangand plain spoken text. The overall effect works well to create the darkly dramatic universe of the Greek tragedy and to create the kind of heightened performance reality that many believe to have been associated with performances in antiquity.​"

—Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold​, Fanfare 40:5 (May/June 2017)