Last Thursday, Robert Thicknesse of The Guardian published a piece highly critical of opera and opera culture. Though he has long been an opera lover, he says, he’s been finding it difficult to keep the faith in the face of what he perceives as the elitist nature of the form. You hardly need me to [...]
In general, I’m not a fan of the bel canto repertoire. The musical language is heavily simplified (lots of oom-pah-pahing in the orchestra), the arias sometimes sound like copies of each other, and the plots can get bogged down by their own historical weight. So, I went into Maria Stuarda expecting to enjoy it, but [...]
Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Idomeneo, as an opera, is dramatically weak. It has the classic situation-not-plot problem: the situation is outlined at the beginning of the opera, every character spends a while explaining how they feel about the situation, and their occasional attempts to resolve the situation are entirely ineffectual. [...]
[Full Disclosure: Naxos has provided me with a promotional copy of this DVD] Since Opera Atelier will be producing Acis and Galatea this fall (see some rehearsal footage here), and since I’ve only listened to the music a few times without becoming familiar with it as a stage work, I was quite excited to see [...]
Opera season in Toronto is winding down, with only a few more performances left to go for Idomeneo and Maria Stuarda, both of which I will be attending this coming week. But do not despair! Here are three opera-related events at the Luminato festival in June to tide you over: The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of [...]
In opera, as in many things, there’s sometimes an obsession with the idea of “the best”. Is the best live opera to be found in North America or Europe? Was Maria Callas the best Tosca, and was Corelli the best Radames? Is Verdi’s early work his best, or his later? Is there any point in [...]
Last summer I attended a performance of the American Ballet Theater’s Romeo and Juliet, and wound up sitting next to someone active in the dance world. My ticket was for standing room, but she plucked me from purgatory and gave me a spare ticket to a much better seat next to hers (“you look like [...]
Only three weeks after seeing Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer at the Metropolitan Opera, I have just returned from the Canadian Opera Company’s take on the same. And I must say that even without A-lister Deborah Voigt, I much preferred the COC’s quirky, at times frustrating, modernist approach. Christopher Alden’s production, though “avant-garde”, dates from 1996 [...]
Tonight I had the good fortune to attend the Canadian premiere of When I Rise, screened here as part of Hot Docs, the documentary film festival held annually here in Toronto. It chronicles the ascent of African-American mezzo Barbara Smith Conrad after a particularly ugly racist incident at the very beginning of her career. The [...]
[Full Disclosure: Naxos has provided me with a promotional copy of this recording] First things first: I’d like to direct your attention to the cover art for this recording. That is a sea monster for the ages, the sea monster of my B-movie dreams. Right down to its strangely limp tentacled appendages and its dripping, [...]
