Reviews
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...
The Mozartists at the Wigmore Hall
For their opening concert, at the Wigmore Hall, they were joined by one of Classical Opera’s Associate Artists, soprano Louise Alder. Six months ago, one might have described Alder as a ‘rising star’ but recent accolades - including ‘Young Singer of the Year’ at the...
Pagliacci, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges review – Opera North’s ‘Little Greats’ series looks to be well named
Grand Theatre, Leeds The company’s season of short operas is less adventurous than its previous iteration, but there is little to fault in the execution For its autumn season, Opera North is reverting to a format first used in 2004 with a programme of “Little Greats”...
Mansfield Park at The Grange
I’m not sure how many of the audience at The Grange for the first of two performances of Jonathan Dove’s opera were Austen aficionados but the foot-stamping reception that the full house gave the composer’s newly orchestrated opera suggested that they thought he’d...
Figaro Getting Hitched on the Big Screen at Opera Philadelphia’s “Festival O 17”
Opera Philadelphia’s “Festival O 17” (September 14 to 25) – including a free reprise of the company’s recent production of The Marriage of Figaro, to be shown in HD on Freedom Mall Jumbo Screens, September 23, 2017. Opera Philadelphia is going out on the town this...
Turandot in San Francisco
The hype surrounding the Hockney retrospective just now in Paris, last year in London and soon to arrive at New York’s Met (November 27), and certainly the 2013 Hockney exhibition at SF’s De Young have kept this now 80 year-old icon of canvas painting at the center of...