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...
The availability of live-streamed and on-demand opera has exploded in the last five years. Major companies like Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Opéra national de Paris, Grand Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona) and Vienna State Opera have cinema distribution deals...
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...
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...
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,...