Reviews
Chamberfest goes live with Jonelle Sills & Isaiah Bell
Ottawa’s Chamberfest, back after cancelling its 2020 edition, has been offering Ottawa audiences their first consistent dose of live, in-person concerts since Covid. Although leaner than in past seasons, this year’s Chamberfest—with new artistic director Carissa...
Review: ARIAS: Canadian Voices of Opera—documentary reflects today’s opera truth
V. Tony Hauser's new documentary, ARIAS: Canadian Voices of Opera, created with director Celine Chiturai, producer Cierra Wieja, and cinematographer/editor Nicolas Lehmann, is something we didn't know we needed. Hauser, known as...
ATG’s Sāvitri: A feast for the eyes and ears
A love story that not even death could thwart: providing opera fans a feast of music and colour, Against the Grain Theatre’s production of Gustav Holst’s Sāvitri beautifully conveys the love and devotion that this ancient story is known for. Filmed in Consecan...
A strange luxury: Ambur Braid stars in Oper Frankfurt’s intimate, in-concert Ariadne
Taped-off alternating seats and rows combined with strict vaccination and testing requirements so limit Oper Frankfurt's capacity that its nearly 1,400 seat hall morphs into an enormous living room where the audience becomes a character in the company's semi-staged...
VOICEBOX: OIC’s Adriana Lecouvreur: a convincingly intimate take
Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur has an implausible and convoluted plot and a performance history as a vehicle for superstar sopranos and tenors. As such, it might seem an odd choice for a company such as VOICEBOX: Opera in Concert (OIC) but their recently released (June...
Review: Die Fledermaus makes grand return to Rennes, France
After an absence of over 20 years, Johann Strauss Jr.’s La Chauve-Souris (Die Fledermaus) made a grand return to Rennes, France this May in a delightful co-production between Opéra de Rennes, Angers Nantes Opéra, Opéra de Toulon, and Opéra Grand Avignon. A performance...
Review: Megan Latham finesses the shifts in POV’s Bon Appetit! & The Italian Lesson
Oh the agony: to see a practically perfect chocolate cake made right in front of you but not be able to taste it! If only Pacific Opera Victoria had thought to offer viewers of their filmed version of Lee Hoiby’s Bon Appetit! the option of DoorDash delivery … but no....
Rossini at play: an “ingenious staging” of Barber of Seville out of Opéra de Québec
Due to the pandemic, the last opera to be performed in Québec City was La traviata in October 2019. Having started his role as Opéra de Québec's artistic director soon thereafter, Jean-François Lapointe had to rethink the entire 2020-2021 season. Turning to webcasts,...
Opera Atelier’s The Resurrection is resplendent art in the face of adversity
George Frideric Handel’s The Resurrection is really an oratorio in name only. Discounting its liturgical basis, the piece has all the hallmarks of a baroque opera seria: dramatic characters, a clear—albeit skimpy—plot and a theatricality in the libretto that demands...
Emily D’Angelo earns ovation in ROH Clemenza
Mozart's La clemenza di Tito is currently undergoing a process of reappraisal by reinterpretation, the most radical in a flurry of recent productions being Peter Sellars' for the 2017 Salzburg Festival. That turned librettist Metastasio's "traitors" into "terrorists"...
Canadians create “highlight” of SFO’s The Adlers: Live at the Drive-In
San Francisco Opera (SFO), like so many musical organizations, has countered the pandemic closure by showering its audience with online recitals, concerts, lectures and celebrations. But SFO has done much more: large-scaled live performances. This spring on a...
Boris Godunov hybridized at Staatsoper Stuttgart
People just can’t keep their hands off Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. The parade of revisers starts with the composer himself who left us two distinct versions, the 1869 original and an 1872 revision. A vocal score with further changes was published in 1874. Next in line...