Reviews
Canadian Opera Company’s Fantasma: a haunting return to live performance
The Canadian Opera Company returned to live performance Mar. 9 with the world premiere of Fantasma by composer Ian Cusson and librettist Colleen Murphy. The piece, written with young audiences in mind, was staged in the newly named Canadian Opera Company Theatre...
Tapestry Opera makes a welcome return to live performance with Songbook XI
Songbook XI on the evening of Mar. 11 marked Toronto-based Tapestry Opera’s first performance in front of a live audience since Jacqueline in January 2020. It was the usual Songbook format. Fifteen singers, rather remarkably including two countertenors, and three...
Pacific Opera’s The Garden of Alice: formidable cast in a brave new genre
Pacific Opera Victoria’s film version of Canadian composer/librettist Elizabeth Raum’s The Garden of Alice, seen on a big screen at the Royal Theatre Feb. 24, is an odd creature. Sophisticated in some ways, naive in others; like Alice, more than a little uncertain...
UBC Opera gets to the heart of Le nozze di Figaro
If the Monty Python crew described Le nozze di Figaro as “silly—very silly,” I could hardly disagree. It’s a situation-comedy romp if ever there was one, with the situations no more profound than your basic TV sitcom. But Lorenzo da Ponte’s ingeniously tangled plot,...
Calgary Opera’s THE MERRY WIDOW “high-quality evening of music-making”
Live opera has been hard to come by in Canada these past few months and where there have been performances, audiences have been forcibly limited in numbers. For its long-awaited return to the Jubilee auditorium, Calgary Opera was constrained to 50% audience capacity...
Marie-Nicole Lemieux debuts Charlotte in Montpellier Opera’s Werther
With its sumptuous melodies coupled to a tale of unrequited love culminating in a dramatic suicide on Christmas Eve, Massenet’s Werther has long been a precious jewel in the operatic repertoire. How à propos that OperaVision.eu began a six-month livestream of...
Florie Valiquette ‘is vibrant’ in Théâtre des Champs Elysées’ La Vie Parisienne
Offenbach's La Vie Parisienne is perfect holiday fare, bubbly, joyful, and whimsical, especially when designed and directed by French fashion designer Christian Lacroix. We know that the famous couturier is a magician of colours, a lover of shimmering fabrics, a...
Sondra Radvanovsky ‘blossoms’ in the Met’s Tosca
So much press hoopla has been lavished on the Met’s two new operas, Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones and Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice—Fire alone inspired four feature articles in The New York Times, not to mention an opinion column and an actual review—that...
Vancouver Opera returns with “imaginative” Orfeo ed Euridice
The Queen Elizabeth Theatre was packed on December 4 for Vancouver Opera’s first live staging since COVID-19 hit in early 2020. It was the first of only two performances of the company premiere of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice. An interesting...
Robert Carsen’s Osud at Janáček Brno Festival: “a progressive step”
Leoš Janáček is Canadian director Robert Carsen’s favourite composer. He admires him especially for his intensely dramatic operatic style. Where other composers become more expansive when they set words to music, Janáček uniquely becomes more concise. It was fitting,...
Sarah Marie Kramer is ‘luxuriant’ in Longborough Festival’s Die Walküre
Britain has an established tradition of “country house opera,” with almost a dozen companies offering summer festivals in or around more-or-less stately homes in rural settings. Glyndebourne is the model and the pre-eminent link in the network, but others, including...
Jordan de Souza makes Lyric Opera of Chicago debut with ‘neo-Romantic’ Florencia en el Amazonas
Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its first-ever Spanish-language mainstage opera on Nov. 13th with Florencia en el Amazonas by the late Mexican composer Daniel Catán and libretto by Marcela Fuentes-Berain. Inspired by the magical realism that suffuses Gabriel García...