Reviews
CMIM Aria Semi-finals: Canadian singers D’Angelo and Haji stand out
Last night at Montreal’s Maison symphonique, six of the singers who advanced through the first round of the 2018 Concours Musical International de Montréal’s (CMIM) Aria competition each presented a selection of arias. They were accompanied by British conductor Graeme...
2018 CMIM Art Song Finals: Touching the heart & technical wizardry
Today at 3 p.m. in Montreal’s Bourgie Hall, the four singers and pianists who advanced through the first two rounds of the 2018 Concours Musical International de Montréal’s (CMIM) Art Song competition each presented a mini recital for the section’s finale. Having beat...
Review: Vancouver Opera’s Eugene Onegin—the audience went wild
Vancouver Opera’s production of Eugene Onegin, the mainstay of the 2018 Vancouver Opera Festival, is nothing if not a surfeit of vocal riches. Three of the four lead singers are Russian and making their VO debuts. All are perfectly cast—consummate actors and...
Review: Canadian Opera Company’s Anna Bolena struggles to ignite dramatic sparks
There are operas whose musical and dramatic brilliance does not show signs of ever running out, hundreds of years into their production history. Then there are operas which make you wonder if the art form is deader than a museum piece.
Review: Toronto Operetta Theatre’s season-ending Beautiful Helen a rip-roaring Grecian romp
Toronto Operetta Theatre ends its 17/18 season with the popular French operetta, La belle Hélène (The Beautiful Helen) by Jacques Offenbach. Now in its 33rd season, TOT shows are typically drawn from the standard repertoire, but with a surprise or two thrown in every...
Review: Pacific Opera Victoria’s Rinaldo the original operatic mashup!
The creators of recent mashups of history and science fiction or literature and fantasy, such as the regrettable film, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, may think they invented a genre. But Handel beat them to it by more than 300 years. Rinaldo, the composer’s first...
Review: Edmonton Opera’s “theatrically ambitious and uncompromising” Don Giovanni
It took a while to understand why the Edmonton Opera season-ending production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni was set at a grim, derelict industrial address, where menace might certainly be imagined. However, Director Oriol Tomas's concept was the macho world of the...
Review: Canadian Opera Company’s Nightingale “Parable on the supremacy of nature over artifice? Not so fast.”
Canadian Opera Company’s nine-year-old production of Stravinsky’s shorts, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables directed by Robert Lepage has aged well—as family entertainment. It sells well, it brings children and rookies to the opera house, and this time around it...
Review: Canadian divas Jane Archibald & Adrianne Pieczonka conquer Carnegie Hall
It must have been a simple coincidence that the English Concert’s semi-staged Rinaldo happened on Palm Sunday (Mar. 25), juxtaposing Christianity’s celebration of Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the First Crusaders’ “liberation” of that holy city,...
Review: Opéra de Montréal’s Svadba “provokes maximum aesthetic pleasure”
Svadba continues until March 31st at Montréal's Espace Go In my early 20s, a boyfriend introduced me to the work of Dmitri Pokrovsky. Pokrovsky was a Soviet ethnomusicologist; much like Bartók had done in Romania, he spent years puttering around rural and remote areas...
Review: Life Imitates Art in Scintillating Die Fledermaus, Glenn Gould School, Toronto
For winter-weary Toronto opera lovers in need of a feel-good show, the Royal Conservatory of Music-Glenn Gould School’s Die Fledermaus is just what the doctor ordered. I, for one, never leave after a decent performance of this Viennese bon-bon without a smile on my...
Review: Mercury Opera’s La traviata takes over Chez Pierre Strip Club, Edmonton
Edmonton’s Mercury Opera has both a conventional and an audacious bent. The little company that stages traditional operas on no particularly predictable schedule has presented Madama Butterfly, Cavalleria rusticana, Il tabarro, La traviata— its inaugural 2000...