2008-09 Austin Critic’s Table Award Winner for “Best Opera”; Nominee for “Best Director”

What is striking about the production from the start is the economy of its design and direction…Credit Eric Einhorn, a rising star in the opera world, for leading the artists with unique and creative stage direction…A tremendous experience I won’t forget for a long time.

-Austin Chronicle, April 24, 2009

The new Austin Lyric Opera production of Dialogues of the Carmelites makes a powerful case for including this opera in the repertoire…In this production, Austin Lyric Opera stage director Eric Einhorn and scenic designers Harry Frehner and Scott Reid bring Poulenc’s opera to life with a minimalist imaginative touch that exquisitely complements this music.

-La Scena Musicale, April 26, 2009

In order to connect authentically with the audience, Dialogues demands an extraordinary depth of understanding from the entire creative team, in addition to a shipload of powerful singing. And that is what it got in Austin. At the center was the unflinching, astutely observed naturalistic stage direction of Eric Einhorn. He consistently found appropriate action to connect scenes across the orchestral interludes, and his crowds were frightfully convincing…In the final scene, Einhorn’s signal contribution was the reaction of the crowd. Laughter and bloodlust gradually give way to horror and disgust as the nuns are beheaded one by one. In many productions, the crowd is marginalized or absent from the final scene, so that the audiences attention is entirely on the nuns. But Einhorn gets it right: It is the reaction of the crowd, its revulsion against its own handiwork, that gives meaning to the nuns martyrdom.

-Incident Light.com, April 20, 2009