Reviews
Die Zauberflöte at the ROH: radiant and eternal
As we journey from the dungeon-esque darkness of the Queen’s nocturnal demesne towards the gleaming sun-disc which bathes the final chorus in the luminosity of enlightenment, a Dantesque night is truly turned into day. However, in 2013, I found the performance, while...
Senza Sangue/Bluebeard’s Castle; The Damnation of Faust/Stravinsky ballet music – review
Hackney Empire, London/Barbican A gun-toting woman craves revenge in a gloriously tense European double-header in Hackney. Meanwhile Simon Rattle’s on a roll… Secrets to hide. Secrets to discover. The two characters in Péter Eötvös’s one-act opera Senza Sangue have as...
Opera at Home: A Review of Layla Claire’s Songbird
Lyric soprano Layla Claire, who hails from Penticton, B.C., was a graduate of the Metropolitan Opera's Lindemann Young Artist program and made her debut on that storied stage as Tebaldo in Don Carlos in 2010. Since then, her career has advanced quickly,with...
A Mysterious Lucia at Forest Lawn
Conductor Isaac Selya and his orchestra of twenty-seven played the overture with its emotion-inducing harp music as the red sun slipped behind the mountains, leaving orange clouds and purple shadows to introduce the mysteries of night. Director and Designer Josh Shaw...
This is Rattle: Blazing Berlioz at the Barbican Hall
If Simon Rattle can achieve such excellence in the cramped confines of the Barbican Hall, imagine how Britain's cultural life would be transformed if a world class concert hall with state of the art facilities were built. The arts are central to the nation's economy...
Review: La Bohème, Burlington Performing Arts Centre, SOLO, Sept. 16, 2017
On September 16, artistic director and conductor Sabatino Vacca launched Southern Ontario Lyric Opera’s (SOLO) 2017-2018 season with Puccini’s La Bohème. The popular crowd-pleaser is so well known that it can be a mundane experience—however, this is not the case with...
Glimmerglass 2017 – The Afterglow
Who says you can’t go home again? The theme of this past summer’s Glimmerglass Festival 2017 was “home and homeland,” and it proved a fertile organizing notion, with love of home, defense of home, loss of and longing for home all woven richly into the fabric of the...
Moved Takes on Philadelphia Headlines
That is marketing shorthand for Philadelphia Opera Festival 2017, and in longhand, this is a nonpareil, landmark event. Never was this more evident than at the world premiere of We Shall Not Be Moved, a musically compelling and deeply moving new piece of lyric theatre...
Philly Flute’s Fast and Furious Frills
The O17 festival has appropriated Barry Koskie’s acclaimed eye-popping production and cast it from strength with some of the finest young singers to be found on today’s opera stages. Mr. Koskie has co-directed with Suzanne Andrade and the pair has collaborated closely...
Review: Bandits in the Valley, Todmorden Mills, Toronto, Sept. 16, 2017
A new opera is taking audiences back in time at Todmorden Mills. Each weekend in September, Tapestry Opera’s production of Bandits in the Valley is performed in the historic buildings and forests of the Mills. It’s about an hour long with no intermission, and the fast...
At War With Philadelphia
At the renowned Philadelphia Museum of Art they presented War Stories, a double bill of Monteverdi’s brief madrigal Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda paired with the contemporary I Have No Stories To Tell You by composer Lembit Beecher and librettist Hannah...
Review: Acis and Galatea, Annex Theatre, Vancouver, Sept. 16, 2017
A new take on an old story Handel’s take on the Greek myth of Acis and Galatea received a refreshingly twenty-first century approach by re:Naissance Opera and Sound the Alarm: Music/Theatre at the Annex Theatre in downtown Vancouver on September 16. Collaborating...