Reviews
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...
Review: Emerging artists shine in Wilfrid Laurier University’s The Tender Land
Aaron Copland’s 1954 opera The Tender Land was given a strong and stylistically-astute presentation in this spring’s production by Wilfrid Laurier University’s Faculty of Music Opera Program. This far-too-rarely performed work is a simple ‘coming-of-age story,’ set in...
Review: Fresh voices, whimsical staging, deft conducting brighten Opera York’s Le nozze di Figaro
Now in its 21st season, Opera York continues its tradition of bringing opera to the York Region, which is roughly the area immediately north of Toronto and Highway 7. Two operas are presented each season. I’ve heard many fine young voices in the dozen or so years I’ve...
Review: The Abduction from the Seraglio reinvented at Canadian Opera Company, Feb. 7, 2018
Wajdi Mouawad’s much anticipated production of Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio made its Toronto debut last night, having first premiered at Opéra de Lyon in 2016. In his program notes, the Lebanese-Canadian writer and director makes it clear his vision would...
Review: Jazzified HMS Pinafore at Edmonton Opera, Feb. 3, 2018
There’s a faction of Edmonton Opera supporters who would love to see an operetta every time they come to the Jubilee Auditorium—if not something by Gilbert and Sullivan, at least a production of The Merry Widow or Die Fledermaus. And those folks got their wish on Feb....
Review: Heggie’s Moby-Dick with Roger Honeywell, Utah Opera, Jan. 20, 2018
In composer Jake Heggie’s operatic treatment of Moby-Dick, there are significant obstacles when taking on the role of Captain Ahab. The entire part has to be sung on one leg, the other resting uncomfortably on a peg replacing the limb that the irascible captain lost...