After a career that ranged from manufacturing flavours for potato chips to developing strategies to allow IT to support best practice in cancer care, John Gilks is spending his retirement writing about classical music, opera and theatre. Based in Toronto, he has a taste for the new, the unusual and the obscure whether that means opera drawn from 1950s horror films or mainly forgotten French masterpieces from the long 19th century. Once a rugby player and referee, he now expends his physical energy on playing with a cat appropriately named for Richard Strauss’ Elektra.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould Colm Feore (Glenn Gould); François Girard (director and screenplay), Niv Fichman (producer), Don McKellar (screenplay) The Criterion Collection,…
Purcell: Dido and Aeneas Joyce DiDonato (Dido), Michael Spyres (Aeneas), Fatma Said (Belinda), Beth Taylor (Sorceress), Laurence Kilsby (First Sailor); Il Pomo d’Oro, Maxim Emelyanychev,…
The Laws of Nature Andrew Staniland, composer and performer Leaf Music, 2025 Perhaps it’s a trend but twice this month I’ve found myself reviewing works…
Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea, which premiered in Venice in 1643, is truly revolutionary. Opera was new. It had only just evolved from being a court…