Browsing: Classical Music

A bad album by Joyce Didonato is such a rarity that it warrants serious attention. The release at hand is a live recording of a Wigmore Hall recital just before last Christmas – not so much a recital as a tissue of decorations around a half-hour monologue by Joyce’s favourite composer Jake Heggie, ll of them accompanied by string quartet.  The monologue is an evocation of the life of Camille Claudel, model and muse to the sculptor and painter Auguste Rodin. A sculptor herself, Claudel never gets the recognition she possibly deserves and winds up sadly in an asylum. It’s…

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Bach, Schumann, Debussy and Chopin: These are the familiar names on the program Marc-André Hamelin plays on Sept. 30 for the Ladies’ Morning Musical Club. While many associate him with names like Alkan and Sorabji, Hamelin is at ease both in the heart and at the outer limits of the repertoire. “These are all old friends and I am happy to present these works,” Hamelin said in a phone interview hours before he was to fly to the U.K. to perform at the Edinburgh International Festival. Hamelin says Bach is “probably the greatest composer that ever lived, the perfect combination…

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I first heard Philippe Sly at the 2012 Concours musical international de Montréal. He was only 23, but that didn’t prevent him from winning every prize: First overall, best Quebec artist, best Canadian, best interpretation of an imposed Canadian art song and the Radio-Canada People’s Choice Award. I met him more than six years later on a hot summer day at his place in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve quarter, which has also enjoyed a recent cultural awakening. Sly reminisces: “The first thing I remember about opera was actually going to an operetta when I was seven years old in Ottawa.  I was…

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REVIEW: of the Berkshire Opera Festival production of Giuseppe’s Verdi’s Rigoletto (August 25 at 1 p.m.; August 28 at 7:30 p.m. and August 31 at 7:30 p.m., at the Colonial Theatre, Pittsfield, Massachusetts). Sex, power, seduction, revenge, and a dazzling lightning storm. Verdi’s gutsy 1851 operatic melodrama, Rigoletto, gets a fascinating, stylish, and unflinchingly close study in the Berkshire Opera Festival’s new production, running through August 31 at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (viewed here at the August 25 opening). Under director Jonathon Loy (who is also the festival’s co-founder), Verdi’s tale of a deformed court jester who seeks…

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Toronto – When the curtain rises for the Canadian Opera Company’s world premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian on October 13, 2018 audience members will be the first to experience a sleek and provocative new work. The opera reunites the all-star creative team behind 2017’s Louis Riel, led by Canadian stage director Peter Hinton. With a libretto from Canadian playwright Daniel MacIvor, Hadrian explores the life and legacy of the Roman emperor, in the wake of his young lover’s death. The production draws from a number of contemporary influences to transpose Hadrian and Antinous’ story from the pages of history to…

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La Scena Musicale is pleased to announce that its annual Arts Resource Guide is finally here for the tenth year in a row. The resource guide, which is the only one of its kind in Quebec, is an excellent source of information for the province’s music lovers, and for arts students and their parents. This year, the guide will continue its user friendly digest format. A total of 25,000 copies will be distributed Quebec-wide. Readers will find essential information on music, dance, theatre, film and visual arts in this bilingual directory, which will include both regional and national listings. Special…

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PROFILE/REVIEW: of the 2018 Glimmerglass Festival Season: Silent Night by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell; West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim; Cunning Little Vixen by Leoš Janáček; and The Barber of Seville by Gioachino Rossini and Cesare Sterbini. “It’s remarkable how many important things happened in 1918,” observes Glimmerglass Festival artistic and managing director Francesca Zambello, speaking at a recent pre-show audience address in Cooperstown. “The end of World War I. The birth of Leonard Bernstein. And the premiere of this piece” – this last a reference to Igor Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, which was…

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Two problematic symphonies by a tortured composer are despatched by the Boston Symphony and its Latvian conductor with near-nonchalance.  The 4th, withheld by the composer for quarter of a century after Stalin’s attack on Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, is ultra-Mahlerian in its orchestration and ironies and utterly daring in its refusal to toe the party line of relentless positivism. The key to the composer’s intentions eludes many conductors. Andris Nelsons adopts a kind of Baltic neutrality in downplaying the score’s emotional extremes in the hope he won’t get mauled by the Russian bear. It’s a fine performance, lacking only the…

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The Ukrainian Art Song Project (UASP), now in it’s 14th year, wrapped up its 2018 Summer Intensive Program with a concert on August 19th. Temerty Theatre at the Glenn Gould School of Music was home to an afternoon of mixed Art Songs all by Ukrainian composers. The UASP, along with its recording label Musica Leopolis, is charged with sharing the surprising wealth of Ukrainian Art Song with a broader public and is just over one-third completed its goal of recording 1000 different songs. With founder British bass-baritone Pavlo Hunka, and his faculty which include Dr. Melanie Turgeon, Dr. Anna Ferenc,…

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Universally popular in the first half of the 20th century, the music of Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari has vanished into thin air. A Venetian of German ancestry and education, Wolf-Ferrari rejected modernism and allowed himself to become – along with Mascagni, Repighi, Malipiero and most Italian composers – a cultural poster-boy for the Mussolini regime. This affiliation accelerated his reputational decline after 1945; he died three years later. But there is nothing ideological about his music. Nor is it in any sense reactionary. On the contrary, Wolf-Ferrari wrote romantic music because that is all he was equipped to do and he did…

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