After almost three years in virtual drydock, the Canadian Opera Company launched its 2022/23 season October 7 with a gripping performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. This is the company’s third revival of the production it commissioned in 1996 from American...
Wayne Gooding
ALBUM: La Zingarella Through Romany Songland Bayrakdarian’s “musicality shines through”
Bayrakdarian handles the 27 numbers with great aplomb. Her musicality shines through all the material, and her voice has retained the silvery tone and flexibility that were hallmarks at the outset of her career…
Toronto Operetta Theatre A Waltz Dream: “hugely entertaining staging”
Toronto Operetta Theatre (TOT) billed its season-closing production of Oscar Straus’s A Waltz Dream as a Canadian premiere, though that needs a little qualification. The book, lyrics and music in TOT General Director Guillermo Silva-Marin’s hugely entertaining staging...
Canadian Opera Company The Queen in Me “timely, provocatively entertaining addition to the genre”
Nikkei-Canadian Teiya Kasahara developed The Queen in Me over about five years, bringing the latest iteration with orchestra to a sold-out, three-show run at the Canadian Opera Company Theatre June 2-4. Co-produced by the COC, Nightwood Theatre, Amplified Opera (of...
Canadian Opera CompanyAnnounces 2022/23 season
The Canadian Opera Company has announced its first full mainstage lineup after three seasons of COVID-forced closures. The 2022/2023 season is a solidly 19th-century affair, with the two temporal outliers being Mozart’s 1786 Le nozze di Figaro and Richard Strauss’s...
Canadian Opera Company returns with an affecting La traviata
The Canadian Opera Company enjoyed a successful return to the mainstage of the Four Seasons Centre Apr. 23 with a splendidly sung, effectively staged performance of Verdi’s La traviata. The revival is in the hands of the production’s original director, American Arin...
Canadian Opera Company’s Fantasma: a haunting return to live performance
The Canadian Opera Company returned to live performance Mar. 9 with the world premiere of Fantasma by composer Ian Cusson and librettist Colleen Murphy. The piece, written with young audiences in mind, was staged in the newly named Canadian Opera Company Theatre...
Opera Atelier returns to live with All is Love: A ‘celebration of love’, in all its splendor
Toronto’s Opera Atelier returns to live performance Feb. 19/20 with All is Love, a 75-minute program that promises an intriguing musical and dramatic journey from Henry Purcell, George Frideric Handel and Jean-Philippe Rameau to Reynaldo Hahn and Claude Debussy. With...
Robert Carsen’s Osud at Janáček Brno Festival: “a progressive step”
Leoš Janáček is Canadian director Robert Carsen’s favourite composer. He admires him especially for his intensely dramatic operatic style. Where other composers become more expansive when they set words to music, Janáček uniquely becomes more concise. It was fitting,...
Sarah Marie Kramer is ‘luxuriant’ in Longborough Festival’s Die Walküre
Britain has an established tradition of “country house opera,” with almost a dozen companies offering summer festivals in or around more-or-less stately homes in rural settings. Glyndebourne is the model and the pre-eminent link in the network, but others, including...
Sonja Frisell, Rubies 2021: “I lived with the characters in opera for years…”
The Opera Canada Awards—‘The Rubies’ makes a return to ‘live’ on November 15, 2021. Click here for more details to secure your ticket to this wonderful celebration of Canadian opera talent. Note our venue change to the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, 145...











