Pacific Opera Victoria’s season-opening production of Beethoven’s Fidelio is musically magnificent. From minor roles to major, the voices are superb, and the Pacific Opera Chorus—mostly young, all volunteer—is impressive. The Victoria Symphony, too, played with verve...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“Lord's vibrant, dark-hued soprano, with its lively vibrato, is capable of ample dramatic urgency.” —Joseph So[/vc_column_text][vc_btn title="Purchase here" style="3d" color="sky" align="center"...
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]“As Pinocchio (Le pantin), soprano Chloé Beuron is charming and utterly convincing as the self-centred little hooligan who needs multiple lessons in the school of hard knocks. And Canadian soprano Marie-Eve Munger scales the heights...
At Canadian Opera Company on Oct. 13th, Daniel MacIvor and Rufus Wainwrights’ first collaboration, Hadrian, came to life as a fairly accomplished opera. It could have been a greater experience had it not been tied to an unimaginative production that appears to have...
Soprano and vocal pedagogue Dominique Labelle feels honoured to receive one of this year’s Opera Canada Awards (a ‘Ruby’). “It is humbling but heart-warming to be recognised by your country and your peers.” Dominique Labelle adds with a wistful grin, “in addition the...
Less is not always more, especially in opera staging and design, but director Robert Carsen and his creative team have achieved a pared down Eugene Onegin that is at the same time distilled and intensified. Besides Carsen, the contributions of set and costume designer...
Opera Canada Awards 2018 honouree, Alexander Neef, is in a thoughtful mood as he looks back on his time with the Canadian Opera Company. “It was a pretty unique situation,” he says, recalling his arrival in Toronto in 2008, “of a company that had just built one of the...
Jani Lauzon’s I Call myself Princess (seen Sept. 13th) skilfully weaves together two stories. The first is the historical story of Charles Wakefield Cadman, an ‘Indianist’ composer of the early 20th century. Together with his professional partner, the Cherokee...
The trouble with Paul Bunyan is that the music is too good. If Benjamin Britten hadn’t been bursting with creativity and bristling with technical accomplishment in 1941—and had he not revised the score and passed it for publication just before his death—W.H. Auden’s...
It was with a certain degree of ambivalence that I attended the summer 2018 production of La Bohème at Highlands Opera Studio. I was disappointed when I heard that the choruses in Acts II and III were cut, and I wasn’t particularly looking forward to sitting through...
When he began working on The Bassarids in 1963, the 37-year-old Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012) had been writing operas for more than a decade, starting with his first full-length work for the stage, Boulevard Solitude (Hanover, 1952), a jazzy version of L’Abbey...
The Emerging Arts Critics programme (EAC) is an initiative aimed at supporting and fostering the next generation of arts critics and writers, helping them develop the tools needed to authoritatively write about and review ballet, music and opera performances. This...