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Tenor Ismael Jordi Highlights OdM’s Romeo et Juliette

By Adrian Rodriguez on 20 May 2018 Concert Reviews, Opera, Romantic

Last night, Opéra de Montréal presented Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, the last opera of their 2017-18 season to a full house. A production with beautiful set designs by Claude Girard, the production bets on the quality and appeal of young Canadian singers; Andalucían tenor making his company debut was the only foreign singer. Almost all the supporting roles where performed by the members of the company’s training program. What you missed All the singers did an agreeable job, including the chorus. However, Jordi was the true revelation of the show. He exhibited a charming light lyric tenor voice and…

J S Bach: Goldberg Variations/Sonatas and Partitas (Delphian/Navona)

By Norman Lebrecht on 18 May 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly

In times of stress I reach for Bach in the raw, one instrument, one pair of hands. I’m choosy who I listen to when the nerves are frayed. The immortal interpretations – Gould in the Goldbergs, Milstein in the Sonatas and Partitas – are too profound, too perfect, to afford prompt and gentle relief. Two new releases are just what the soul doctor ordered. Peter Hill is an English pianist, a Messaien expert who studied with Nadia Boulander and taught at the University of Sheffield. I have come across him on record and radio, never in the concert hall. His…

Queen Elisabeth Competition, the winner of the voice edition 2018 is Samuel Hasselhorn

By Newswire on 14 May 2018 Contemporary, Newswire

Samuel Hasselhorn has won the 2018 voice competition! The International Queen Elisabeth Grand Prize – Queen Mathilde Prize receives 25,000€ and numerous concerts in Belgium and abroad. The prizewinners First Prize : Samuel Hasselhorn (27, baritone) Germany Second Prize : Eva Zaïcik (30, mezzo-soprano) France Third Prize : Ao Li (30, basso) China Fourth Prize : Rocío Pérez (27, soprano) Spain Fifth Prize : Héloïse Mas (30, mezzo-soprano) France Sixth Prize : Marianne Croux (27, soprano) Belgium – France The six unranked laureates, in alphabetical order : Germán Enrique Alcántara (30, baritone) Argentina Alex DeSocio (30, baritone) USA Yuriy Hadzetskyy (26, baritone) Ukraine Sooyeon Lee (29, soprano) Korea …

Federico Colli Plays Scarlatti with Rare Conviction

By Norman Lebrecht on 11 May 2018 Baroque and Early, Lebrecht Weekly, Piano

Domenico Scarlatti: Sonatas, volume 1 (Chandos) It feels dangerously transgressive, and thus all the more enjoyable, to listen to Scarlatti’s keyboard pieces on a full-throated Steinway D piano set up in an English country barn. Why musicians submit so readily to the tyranny of political correctness – composers to the imposition of serialism, performers to the doctrines of period practice – is a mystery to me. So to find a young pianist at the start of his path who is prepared to defy the professorial rule makers and play a Bach contemporary on a modern big banger of a concert…

Unveiling of the 2018 CIOC Festival Program October 7 to 30, 2018 in Montréal

By Newswire on 10 May 2018 Newswire, Piano

Montréal, May 9, 2018 – The Canadian International Organ Competition (CIOC) presents the program of its annual Festival, from October 7 to 30, 2018, with a flurry of activities involving the king of instruments, around the theme “History and Modernity.” “The organ is one of the oldest instruments with more than 2,000 years of history, but it is also an instrument of the future,” states Jean-Willy Kunz, Artistic Director of the CIOC. Some 15 events will make up the CIOC program, including a musical for fans of history, music, and photography (Organ Trip, October 20, 10 am), a concert featuring…

NFM Wroclaw Philharmonic and Kaljuste’s Arvo Pärt Symphonies Labours of Love

By Norman Lebrecht on 4 May 2018 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral

Arvo Pärt: The Symphonies (ECM New Series) Worth buying for the booklet alone. A symphonic cycle from most composers marks a stately progress from imitative beginnings to a predictive summit. Think Brahms with all that Beethoven clutter in the first symphony and those weighty Mahler anticipations in the fourth. Well, Arvo Pärt is not quite like that. His first two symphonies, written in the mid-1960s, are set in Schoenbergian twelve-tone with a polyphonic overlay, an intentional affront to Soviet rule in Estonia. The third, dated 1971, marks his conversion to Russian Orthodoxy with voices from heaven, Bach chorales and other…

(l-r) Sondra Radvanovsky as Anna Bolena and Keri Alkema as Giovanna Seymour in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Anna Bolena, 2018. Photo: Michael Cooper

COC’s Anna Bolena High on Music, Staging Confusing

By Adrian Rodriguez on 2 May 2018 Baroque and Early, Concert Reviews, Opera

On April 28 COC premiered to a full house the last production of their 2017-18 season with Gaetano Donizetti’s Anna Bolena. Directed by British Stephen Lawless, in a set design inspired by Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, this production was originally built by Dallas Opera. Lawless also directed the previous productions of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda in 2010 and Roberto Devreux in 2014 at COC. With Anna Bolena, the COC completes the Donizetti Tudor trilogy, all portraying Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. Soprano Sondra Radvanosky embodies the vocally demanding role of Anna Bolena whilst being supported by an equally renowned cast. All three Americans,…

The Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur Offers Unique Programming

By Newswire on 2 May 2018 Classical Music, Dance

MONTRÉAL, May 2, 2018 /CNW/ – Today the Honourable Mélanie Joly, Minister of Canadian Heritage, announced the renewal of the Government of Canada’s support for the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur for the next three years. The Department of Canadian Heritage has allocated $65,000each year to the Festival through the Canada Arts Presentation Fund. This year, the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur will take place from August 2 to 12. This major cultural event offers a highly diverse lineup, and showcases musicians and dancers from around the world. Quotes “For over 25 years, the Festival des Arts de Saint-Sauveur has…

A New Canadian-Croatian Opera by Young Composer Julijana Hajdinjak

By Newswire on 1 May 2018 Contemporary, Newswire, Opera

Vera Causa Opera has announced they will be performing Julijana Hajdinjak’s first opera, titled Padajuća Zvijezda in Waterloo and Cambridge on June 22nd, 2018 and June 23rd, 2018. Set in a celestial kingdom, Padajuća Zvijezda is a tale of two lovers in a world where love has become outlawed. Love, in the kingdom is punishable by banishment to Earth — a dishonourable world lacking the beauty of the galaxy. A story of passion, justice and optimism, Padajuća Zvijezda explores the power of human emotion and how it can change the world. The new Canadian-Croatian opera is based on the…

Andris Nelsons Plus Bruckner Equals Sleep

By Norman Lebrecht on 27 April 2018 Lebrecht Weekly, Orchestral, Romantic

Bruckner: 4th symphony/7th symphony (DG) Andris Nelsons prefaces two Anton Bruckner symphonies with small bites of Wagner – the prelude to Lohengrin and Siegfried’s funeral march. This makes sense inasmuch as Bruckner worshipped the ground that Wagner trod, but the effect is vaguely disorienting, as if one were to precede Schoenberg’s orchestral variations with Mahler’s Adagietto. The Leizpig Gewandhaus Orchestra can play this stuff in their sleep and sometimes it sounds as if that’s just what they are doing. There is a lack of momentum in the fourth symphony that is close to soporific and, though the seventh comes to life with…

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