Reviews
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...
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...