News
A murdered composer, a lost libretto…could this be Canada’s greatest opera?
Against the Grain Theatre is making the case that Claude Vivier's 'Kopernikus' is a masterwork. Against the Grain Theatre is an innovative and nontraditional opera company. The company sings in pubs, invades mansions and does radical things with music, staging and...
Noa Wildschut, Mozart: Violin Concerto, Sonata (Warner)
Noa Wildschut, Mozart Yoram Ish-Hurwitz, Gordan Nikolić, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra Warner I’m about to break an iron rule and review a kid playing the violin. And, no, I haven’t given in to peer pressure, though there has been plenty of it from the London agency...
Opéra de Montréal’s Another Brick in the Wall heads to Cincinnati Opera
Cincinnati Opera’s U.S. premiere production of Another Brick in the Wall has begun presales of single tickets. These tickets are only available through October 31, and are limited to three dates in the five performance run. The opera opens July 20th at Springer...
The Life to Come: a new opera by Louis Mander and Stephen Fry
It began ‘with a purely obscene fancy of a Missionary in difficulties’. So E.M. Forster wrote to Siegfried Sassoon in August 1923, of his short story ‘The Life to Come’ - the title story of a collection that was not published until 1972, two years after Forster’s...
‘Never was such advertisement for a film!’: Thomas Kemp and the OAE present a film of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Oxford Lieder Festival
The film was half the length of the opera but included some additional scenes such as a huge outdoor battle scene - the FeldMarschall, absent from the opera, is seen doing his patriotic duty on the battlefield when he learns of his wife’s dalliances at home - an...
New opera Missing tells the story of missing and murdered Indigenous women
The world premiere of Missing, a new opera based on the tragedy of over 1,200 missing and murdered First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and girls in Canada, is fast approaching. The opera, produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria will open November...
Opera: Passion, Power and Politics review – a game-changing spectacular show
Victoria & Albert Museum, London Costumes by Dalí, singing by Callas – and a life-size baroque stage: this plunge into 400 years of opera is an exhilarating, mind-expanding experience This vast and exhilarating exhibition explores and celebrates opera’s often...
Against the Grain Theatre #GoForBaroque in 2017/2018 season
A Handel mash-up and an international co-production comprise AtG’s most expansive season to date TORONTO – Against the Grain Theatre (AtG) returns in its eighth season with BOUND, a pastiche workshop of new interpretations of Handel’s music, and a groundbreaking new...
Cerise Jacobs is Full of Revelations in Her New Opera, REV. 23
PREVIEW: of the world premiere production of the Cerise Jacobs/Julian Wachner opera REV. 23, at Boston’s John Hancock Hall, on September 29 at 7:30 p.m.; September 30 at 7:30 p.m.; and October 1 at 3 p.m. Boston-based librettist and myth-maker Cerise Jacobs has an...
The Judas Passion: Sally Beamish and David Harsent offer new perspectives
Librettist David Harsent notes that there is no doubt that Judas’s betrayal led to Christ’s death, but begs us to ask, what did Judas believe was his ‘purpose’? After all, if he had not ‘fulfilled’ this role, chosen or predetermined, mankind would not have been saved....
A night at the opera with Armando Iannucci: the agony, the ecstasy – the giant rotating antlers
The V&A is about to launch its giant show Opera: Passion, Power and Politics. In this exclusive extract from his new book Hear Me Out, Armando Iannucci revels in the artform’s weird rituals, from Wagnerians in cowboy hats to the sublime music soaring out over your...
Vancouver Opera sings a different tune
Vancouver Opera presents dramatic works onstage, but there has been some drama offstage as the company shifts from a traditional season to festival model – and back again, sort of. Two years ago, as it struggled with the same issue many opera companies deal with –...