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...
City Opera Vancouver opens its 2018 season this week with a new production of the classic '90s Canadian opera, Nigredo Hotel. An intriguing blend of genres, the one-act chamber opera is a “bizzare, comic and macabre” psychological thriller, simultaneously “sarcastic...
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...
Musique 3 Femmes has announced the winners of a new prize honouring emerging Canadian women composers and librettists. The $25,000 Mécénat Musica Prix 3 Femmes Award recognizes all-female creative teams who demonstrate “extraordinary promise in the field of opera...
Manitoba Underground Opera surfaced once again on the cusp of Winnipeg's regular arts season with four new productions performed repertory style and now billed as an opera festival. This year’s lineup presented Aug. 16-24 at a variety of venues highlighted strong...
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...
From the stony ruins of a historic cathedral to the stately grandeur of Manitoba’s Legislative Building, Manitoba Underground Opera (MUO) brings the musical form to spaces out of the ordinary each summer. Founded in 2008 by Winnipeg-raised conductor Brendan McKeen,...
Can something be called ‘new’ 170 years after it was written? In the case of Franz Liszt’s unfinished opera Sardanapalo, the answer is an emphatic yes. The first act of the work was given its world premiere this past weekend in Weimar, Germany thanks to David...
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...
Opera Kelowna is bringing the “unbridled heat and dangerous passions” of Bizet’s beloved opera to the stage this week with a new main-stage production of Carmen at the Kelowna Community Theatre from August 16-19. Shunning the traditional red dress and 19th-century...
When the late John Crosby created an opera house in the middle of the New Mexican desert, just north of Santa Fe, one of the operas in its inaugural season (1957) was Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. As much as possible, Crosby featured a Strauss opera every...