Reviews
Glenn Gould School’s Svadba: ‘energetic’ return to live
Ana Sokolović’s Svadba was premiered by (now defunct) Queen of Puddings Music Theatre in Toronto in 2011. It then toured various European and US cities and has been revived subsequently in cities as far apart as Montreal and Perm, Russia. It might just be the most...
Maritime Concert Opera returns with ‘dynamic’ Cavalleria rusticana & Oxner tribute
Attending a live in-concert opera for the first time in almost two years was thrilling. The first post-pandemic production of opera in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, was made even more memorable by the fact that it was performed at the Lunenburg Opera House, built in 1908...
Oper Frankfurt’s Salome is a watershed for Ambur Braid in the title role
Both the music and text of Richard Strauss's Salome, which uses Oscar Wilde's play of the same name translated from French to German by radical poet Hedwig Lachmann, can still shock: the music with its grotesque, intricate, clashing harmonies, and the text with its...
Gianni Schicchi at the COC: A felicitous if, ‘virtual’, re-start
It has been the longest silence in COC history. To opera-starved audience members like yours truly, it felt interminable. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the last time the COC put opera on their mainstage was with Barber of Seville and Hansel & Gretel, way back in...
Convaincant & touchant: l’Opéra de Québec reprend avec L’elisir d’amore
Après avoir résisté vaillamment à la pandémie avec deux galas en mode virtuel, une mise en espace du Barbier de Séville et un Festival ingénieux malgré ses ressources limitées, l’Opéra de Québec reprend enfin pleinement possession du Grand Théâtre, avec costumes,...
Joyce El-Khoury “magnificent” in WNO’s Madama Butterfly
Welsh National Opera’s previous production of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, by Joachim Herz, stayed in their repertoire for 40 years. The company’s brand-new production, unveiled this season, faces not only the challenge of comparison with a much-loved predecessor, but...
Gordon Bintner unleashes comedic skills in Oper Frankfurt’s L’italiana in Londra
Domenico Cimarosa. Heard of him? Try humming your favourite aria of his. Drawing a blank, right? The composer has barely stayed afloat in the wake of the masters who surround him. Working in the latter third of the 18th century, he sounds enough like Mozart to be...
La Monnaie’s “topical” The Time of Our Singing
Topical, trendy, thought-provoking. In a nutshell, that’s Belgian avant-garde jazz pianist and composer Kris Defoort’s opera, The Time of Our Singing, which was given its world premiere with eight performances before live, masked audiences at La Monnaie this September...
Soundstreams’ “cleverly constructed”Garden of Vanished Pleasures
Director Tim Albery has a track record of staging shows built around song. One thinks of Last Days staged at Toronto’s Hart House in 2014 or, more recently, Hell’s Fury with Russell Braun as Hans Eisler. His latest in the genre is Garden of Vanished Pleasures which...
Sondra Radvanovsky debuts her Lady in Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Macbeth
Everyone present wanted Lyric Opera of Chicago to have a triumph with its season opener—the first opera performance in the newly re-furnished Ardis Krainik Theatre after being dark for 18 months; the inaugural performance of Enrique Mazzola as the company’s new music...
MUO returns live with Berlioz, Bartók & Sokolović
There’s irony in the fact that one of the last public sightings of Manitoba Underground Opera (MUO) in the pre-pandemic, “Before Times” proved to be its concert recital, Lost Voices, included with its August 2019 summer festival titled Reflections of Ourselves. Those...
HOS’s The Leporello Diaries delivers musical magic
What do you get when you combine a beer tent, a former gravel pit, and hell? If it’s Highlands Opera Studio’s production of The Leporello Diaries: an Unsolved Mystery you are referring to, then the answer is musical magic. Never one to be stopped by challenging...