Every opera I have ever seen staged by the director/designer team of Renaud Doucet and André Barbe has been visually memorable and Vancouver Opera’s new La Bohème (seen Feb. 16th) is no exception. Interestingly, their production (originally for Scottish Opera and...
It’s Valentine’s Day and what better thing to do than watch poor, consumptive Violetta Valéry take a risky leap into love with young Alfredo Germont, only to be forced to leave him by his hidebound father, then tenderly reconcile with her beloved mere minutes before...
The 19/20 Vancouver Opera season has recently been announced, and here's what you can look forward to! Kicking off their season in October is Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata. This will be the fourth stop for a production inspired by the decadent music hall scene of 1920s...
An operatic twist on a classic tale is making its way to the stage and it comes with a bite. The fickle fanged creature that is Dracula is set for its world premiere on Feb. 15th in Cambridge, ON before heading to Waterloo and Guelph. Composer and Artistic Director of...
The final Mozart-Da Ponte collaboration, 1790’s Cosí fan tutte, o sia La Scuola degli Amanti (Women Are Like That, or A School for Lovers) is hard to stage effectively. Atom Egoyan’s 2014 production, revived on Feb. 6th at the Canadian Opera Company, doesn’t quite get...
Through a series of events beginning Feb. 11, 2019, Toronto will be celebrating the life, art and work of Jessye Norman. The legendary American opera star is the winner of the twelfth Glenn Gould Prize. The prize is awarded to an individual who has made a unique and...
Big news for Edmonton Opera—on Feb. 2nd they announced their 2019/20 season at opening night of their recent, new production of Hansel and Gretel. To kick off their 2019/20 season, Rigoletto comes to the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium on October 19, 22 and 25,...
Experiencing two concert presentations of Wagner’s Die Walküre within a week on two different continents presents a unique set of challenges. Along with the exhaustion of travel, how does one adjust to the diverse artistries of soloists, orchestras, and conductors?...
The first thing to know about the 2019-2020 Canadian Opera Company season is this: Parsifal is coming to Toronto, but not quite yet. The lauded Metropolitan Opera/Opéra National de Lyon/COC co-production, which premiered in Lyon in 2012 and New York in 2013, has been...
There was a time when ‘opera’ implied a notion of music that unabashedly included the expectation of actual melodies, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 treatment of the macabre and ultimately triumphant fairy tale Hansel and Gretel is a marvel in that tradition....
The Canadian Opera Company announced their 19/20 season at a special, ‘season reveal’ event at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts on Feb. 4th. To kick off the season, the COC presents Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot in late September. Conductor Carlo...
To see or not to see: that’s the question posed by Metropolitan Opera’s intriguing pairing of Iolanta and Bluebeard’s Castle. The eponymous princess of Tchaikovsky’s opera, blind from birth, has been zealously shielded from the harder truths of her condition by her...