Reviews
Teatro Nuovo Maometto Secondo “Vancouver native Simone McIntosh, lithe and lovely, whose crystalline high mezzo fully commanded Anna’s wide range”
Patience can be amply rewarded: Teatro Nuovo’s Maometto Secondo, thrice deferred, at last hit the New York stage (Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, on November 2) and proved the best thing Will Crutchfield’s period-practicing aggregation has done in the four and...
Edmonton Opera Tosca Slack, Pomeroy, and Barrett “were uniformly strong, both musically and dramatically”
Edmonton Opera opened its three-show season on October 22 with a compelling production of Puccini’s Tosca. It will be the only traditional take on a canonic work in Artistic Director Joel Ivany’s first crack at designing an Edmonton Opera season. Productions of Cosi...
Metropolitan Opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk Maestro Keri-Lynn Wilson “masterfully captured not just the score’s cornucopia of arresting sonorities but its vibrant pulse”
Some operas have grown on me over the years; some productions have, too. Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk is one of those operas, and Graham Vick’s Metropolitan Opera staging of it is one of those productions. I’d always respected Shostakovich’s trenchant troublemaker of 1934,...
Opera Atelier Dido and Aeneas “well sung and satisfying”
Opera Atelier’s production of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas which opened last night at the Elgin Theatre is essentially a remount of their 2016 production though shorn of the prologue created for that version. This cuts the piece to the normal 65 minutes or so and allows...
Vocalypse ProductionsEscape to Freedom A World Premiere In Halifax
This 90-minute performance of song was an intense interpretation of a real woman’s story. Mona Parsons, the only Canadian woman to be imprisoned by the German army in World War II, was a Nova Scotian who married a Dutch businessman and moved with him to Holland. The...
Canadian Opera Company Carmen A “fine ensemble cast”
In his 1888 polemic, The Case Against Wagner: A Musician’s Problem, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche cites Bizet’s Carmen as the perfect opera: “With it” he writes, “one bids farewell to the damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian ideal.” Beyond its...
Pacific Opera Victoria Carmen Mezzo Carolyn Sproule “a stand-out” in the title role
Pacific Opera Victoria’s Carmen finally opened on October 12, 2022, after multiple COVID-caused postponements. It was well worth the wait. First mention has to go to the chorus, which did such an extraordinary job they came close to eclipsing the rest of the...
The Metropolitan Opera Medea “Sondra Radvanovsky, giving one of the most fully immersive performances I’ve ever seen on an opera stage”
Is Luigi Cherubini’s Medea—or Médée, to cite the opéra-comique original of 1797—a prima-donna vehicle, reliant on the right fiery voice and temperament for ignition, or a masterwork with distinct merits of its own? Over the years I’ve leaned heavily toward the former...
Canadian Opera Company The Flying Dutchman A “gripping performance” to open the season
After almost three years in virtual drydock, the Canadian Opera Company launched its 2022/23 season October 7 with a gripping performance of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. This is the company’s third revival of the production it commissioned in 1996 from American...
Opéra Comique Lakmé “Sabine Devieilhe and Frédéric Antoun triumph”
Eight years after their débuts in Leo Delibes's Lakmé, Sabine Devieilhe and Frédéric Antoun triumph once again as the ill-fated lovers in this orientalist Romeo and Juliette story. Set in British India in the 19th century, Nilakantha, a Brahmin priest, is stoking...
ALBUM: Robert le Diable Palazetto Bru Zane “a milestone in the history of opera that should be heard by anyone with an interest in the development of the genre”
The latest release in the CD/book series from the Palazetto Bru Zane is Meyerbeer’s 1831 grand opera Robert le Diable.
San Francisco Opera Eugene Onegin “Few opera productions live as long and travel as widely as this one has”
When Tchaikovsky based his lushly Romantic, quite personal, opera on Alexander Pushkin's then already classic novel in verse, he bravely cut both against the grain of its iconic author's scintillating, ironic manner (inspired by the English poet Lord Byron) and...