Press Kit

Renée Fleming returned to Festival Napa Valley on July 11 with an inspired performance of Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene at Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena. The immersive multimedia concert, inspired by her 2023 Grammy Award-winning album of the same name, was conducted by Alexander Shelley.

The 20th century is littered with the corpses of high-minded comic operas. Satire is what closes on Saturday night, said George S. Kaufman, whose witticism has passed into theater folklore. Fearlessly, composer Jake Heggie and his long-time librettist Gene Scheer took up the challenge with The Judgment of Paris — it was the exclamation point of Festival Napa Valley’s 20th anniversary season.

Festival Napa Valley celebrated its 20th year with the world premiere of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s “Judgment of Paris” opera at Charles Krug winery in St. Helena, CA on July 18, 2026. Most operas are written to be repertory items, performed in one theater this year and somewhere else the next. But “The Judgment of Paris,” the ebullient and delightful new comic one-act by San Francisco composer Jake Heggie and librettist Gene Scheer, is so resolutely site-specific that its world premiere on Saturday, July 18, at the Charles Krug Winery in St. Helena practically counts as an art installation.