Longborough Festival Opera | Il barbière di Siviglia and Pelléas et Mélisande | Opera Canada
Natasha Gauthier
Longborough Festival Opera
Canadians triumph in the UK
It was a banner month of June for Canadian singers in the UK. First, mezzo Simone McIntosh proudly represented the Maple Leaf at the 2023 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. She delivered a stellar aria round in the competition’s opening heat on June 11–a...
Ottawa Chamberfest Mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb’s shows off her “versatile artistry”
Canadian mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb showed off a different side of her artistry at Ottawa Chamberfest, delighting audiences with more subtle, sensitive vocal qualities of shading and luminosity.
Chamberfest goes live with Jonelle Sills & Isaiah Bell
Ottawa’s Chamberfest, back after cancelling its 2020 edition, has been offering Ottawa audiences their first consistent dose of live, in-person concerts since Covid. Although leaner than in past seasons, this year’s Chamberfest—with new artistic director Carissa...
L’orangeraie interpretation takes racist turn at Chants Libres
I can't believe that it's 2021, one week after the U.S. swore in its first woman and first person of colour Vice-President, and yet here I am reviewing an opera where a white director sees no problem with putting an all-white cast of singers in brownface makeup and...
Lucia di Lammermoor loses itself to literalism at Opéra de Montréal
The soprano may be the star of Lucia di Lammermoor, but it was the gentlemen who took the night at the Nov. 9th premiere of Opéra de Montréal’s latest take on Donizetti's classic. I’ve never been in favour of casting light lyric coloratura sopranos in meaty bel canto...
Review: L’Opéra de Montréal’s Champion offers redemption…in black and blue
What makes a man? His wins? His losses? His mistakes and regrets? His memories? Is it in how he sees himself, or in how others see him? These are some of the questions the audience is left with at the end of Champion, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s 2013...
Review: L’Opéra de Montréal’s Das Rheingold offers a Steampunk Gothic aesthetic and a “formidable” Alberich in Nathan Berg
As the most compact of the Ring operas —clocking in at a trifling two-and-a-half hours— Das Rheingold can let smaller companies dip a toe into Wagner’s Nibelungen universe without committing to the scale and expense of the other works in the cycle. A case in point is...
Review: Opéra de Montréal’s “ultra-conventional” approach to Rigoletto feels out of place in #MeToo era
Is there a more problematic opera for the #MeToo era than Rigoletto? As yet another wealthy, powerful, privileged man sits in Washington accused of sexual assault, Verdi’s portrayal of predatory male entitlement and unpunished crime seems more distasteful and vexing...
Review: Opéra de Montréal’s Svadba “provokes maximum aesthetic pleasure”
Svadba continues until March 31st at Montréal's Espace Go In my early 20s, a boyfriend introduced me to the work of Dmitri Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky was a Soviet ethnomusicologist; much like Bartók had done in Romania, he spent years puttering around rural and remote areas...
Review: La Cenerentola, Opéra de Montréal, Nov. 11, 2017
Nowadays, it seems even stagings of comic operas are enamored with minimalism, skewing toward a neutral palette of black, white, and grey. So how refreshing it was to revisit Catalonian director Joan Font and his maximalist Cenerentola, which explodes with all the...