News
SMCQ 2017-2018 Season – Long live today’s music!
Montréal, Septembre 20, 2017 – Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) begins its Homage Series with six concerts plus three “special” events focusing on José Evangelista, a composer on a remarkable path. Evangelista has marked the recent evolution of music...
She Falls from a Tower Shaped Like a Dagger
A splendid new co-production of Puccini’s Tosca by Opéra de Montréal and the Cincinatti Opera broods on the terrible power of art, eros, and the state. "Compassion is the yin to power’s yang. Compassion cannot enact the relative freedom and justice of the “good” state...
Letters: Sir Peter Hall obituary
Meirion Bowen writes: Peter Hall played a key role in rescuing the reputation as an opera composer of Sir Michael Tippett, dismissed and mocked in the 1950s as bafflingly over-complex and bizarrely eccentric. Hall’s direction of The Knot Garden in 1970 benefited above...
Mark Padmore on festivals, lieder and musical conversations
Regional music and arts festivals continue to proliferate, so I ask Padmore what it is that makes the four-day festival at Tetbury distinctive, and rewarding for a performer. He explains that he welcomes the opportunity to perform in a beautiful venue, the Georgian...
In order to stay relevant, opera in Australia needs to tackle its demons
Unveiling her final program for Opera Queensland, Lindy Hume reflects on the transformative power of the art form – and the problems that plague it. When I hand the Opera Queensland reins to Patrick Nolan in November, it will mark my last outing as an artistic...
Opéra de Montréal’s Tosca Emphasizes Realism and the Score
The Opéra of Montréal will open its 2017-18 season with an all-time classic: Tosca by Giacomo Puccini, a drama in three acts revolving around a love triangle. A painter (Mario Cavaradossi) and a singing diva (Tosca) are in love, but Scarpia, the chief of Roma’s Police...
Kiri Te Kanawa quits public performance after five-decade career
Soprano who retired from operatic roles in 2009 says her voice ‘is in the past’ and reveals final concert was a year ago Dame Kiri Te Kanawa has announced her retirement from public performance after a career that has spanned almost five decades. The world-renowned...
The silence of the lamb: giving Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price a voice
The meek heroine of Jane Austen’s third novel reveals little of herself. It was in those absences that Jonathan Dove found inspiration for his chamber opera When I first read Mansfield Park, I heard music. That doesn’t always happen when I read, and it certainly...
Greer Grimsley to join Lise Lindstrom in Concert for “One Amazing Night” replacing René Barbera
San Diego, CA – Bass-baritone Greer Grimsley will replace tenor René Barbera for San Diego Opera’s One Amazing Night concert on May 5, 2018 at the Balboa Theatre. Greer will join soprano Lise Lindstrom for an evening of operatic favorites with the San Diego Symphony....
‘Tell me what traditional means’ – director Richard Jones on La Bohème
He put Rhinemaidens in fat suits, breathed life into Turnage’s Anna Nicole – now he is directing Covent Garden’s first new production of La Bohème for four decades. Richard Jones gives a rare interview Pink floorboards, yellow chairs, green cupboards and five...
Yannick Nézet-Séguin honoured with 2017 Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance
Toronto, September 5, 2017 – Renowned conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin is the recipient of the 2017 Oskar Morawetz Award for Excellence in Music Performance. He will receive the award on Thursday, September 7 at 7:30 p.m., as he conducts the Orchestre Métropolitain’s...
A Prom of Transformation and Transcendence: Renée Fleming and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
‘We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child’, begins the lyrical prose-poem by James Agee from which Barber drew his text, and which the composer said, ‘reminded me so...