Vocal - my/maSCENA

COC’s 2018/2019 season features world premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s Hadrian

By Newswire on 17 January 2018 Contemporary, Newswire, Opera, Vocal

Hadrian Anchors a Star-Studded Season that Explores the Many Facets of Love Toronto – The Canadian Opera Company’s 2018/2019 season presents the world premiere of Hadrian, a new opera from composer Rufus Wainwright and librettist Daniel MacIvor, which features the highly anticipated COC debuts of international opera stars Thomas Hampson and Karita Mattila. The COC’s 68th season offers multi-faceted perspectives on love as a contested ground of the human condition. Being presented along with Hadrian in the 18/19 season is a new COC production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin; returning COC productions of Richard Strauss’ Elektra, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and…

Chandos’s Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel Notable

By Norman Lebrecht on 29 December 2017 Art Song, Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel (Chandos) James Gilchrist, tenor; Anna Tilbrook, piano; Philip Dukes, viola At the turn of the 20th century, the world was wide open to young men of means. Ships were getting faster, trains more frequent and motor cars were appearing on the roads. Faced with these exciting possibilities, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams decided to stay home, collecting the remains of a musical civilisation that was being trampled by the march of technology. Together with his pal Gustav Holst, Vaughan Williams recorded people singing in pubs and fields. Then he wrote Songs of Travel. The…

Remembering Twelve Days of Giving: Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O17

By Charles Geyer on 22 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Opera

A RETROSPECTIVE: of Opera Philadelphia’s inaugural Festival O17, September 14 through 25, 2017. As the calendar rolls into those Twelve Days famed for lovers’ gift-giving extravagance (pipers piping, lords a-leaping, and those five golden rings), let us pause to glance back in appreciation at twelve days of equally notable largesse that came earlier in the year, courtesy of Opera Philadelphia. Opera Philadelphia’s “Festival O17” – the first installment of a splashy new tradition that will inaugurate each new Opera Philadelphia season going forward – ran from September 14 through 25. with an explosion of operatic activity throughout the City of…

Last Supper: Thomas Adès Serves Up After-Dinner Mayhem in The Exterminating Angel

By Charles Geyer on 17 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Opera

REVIEW: of Thomas Adès’s new opera The Exterminating Angel, viewed in live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera, November 18, 2017. Guess who’s coming dinner – and never leaving? In the case of composer Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, the answer is: everyone. Based on the 1962 film El ángel exterminador by cinematic provocateur Luis Bunuel, Adès’s opera ruthlessly tracks the exigent plight (and deteriorating sanities) of a group of bourgeois Spanish socialites gathered for a posh post-opera soirée only to find that, for reasons beyond anyone’s ken, they can’t bring themselves to go home. Think Noel Coward…

REVIEW: Berlin Staatsoper Hänsel und Gretel is an All-dressed Affair

By Arthur Kaptainis on 9 December 2017 Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera

BERLIN – Sending Achim Freyer after Hänsel und Gretel was both a mortifying and an intriguing concept. The German director is one of the stars of Regietheater and rarely lets an operatic story tell itself. While the opening on Dec. 8 of Engelbert Humperdinck’s seasonal charmer at the renovated Staatsoper Unter den Linden was generally family-friendly, it was also overwrought, self-consciously surreal and cussedly hard to get involved in at any basic emotional level. All of which criticisms this 83-year-old Brecht protégé might well take as compliments. Credited with direction, design and costuming, Fryer applied himself most extravagantly to the…

Press Review: Hamburg’s Take on Orchestre Métropolitain

By Gerd Helssen on 5 December 2017 Art Song, Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Orchestral, Strings

Montreal’s second orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, got positive press for their concert at the Elbe Philharmonic Hall (Elbphilharmonie) last Friday (December 1, 2017). Joachim Mischke, Hamburg’s leading and most knowledgeable music critic, wrote a comprehensive and inspiring review about the event (Hamburg Abendblatt, December 4). Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin was described as a bundle of energy who got the ball rolling in Pierre Mercure’s Kaléidoscope, demonstrating in detail the orchestra’s collective articulation accuracy. “Berlioz’s orchestral songs cycle Les nuits d’été became the finest moment, as the orchestra conjured nuances and played enchantingly discreet. But above all, contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux savored…

Great Canadian Basses & Baritones

By Pierre Chénier on 4 December 2017 Art Song, Classical Music, Opera, Vocal

I will begin this short article on basses and baritones with eighty-eight-year-old Joseph Rouleau, our elder born in Matane, Quebec, in 1929. Joseph Rouleau left his mark on vocal arts through his great talent and artistic personality, as well as his dedication to classical music education, especially by training youth. This was evident in his 25 years at the helm of the Jeunesses Musicales Canada. Rouleau has had a distinguished international career. Of his accomplishments overseas, he was the leading bass at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden for more than twenty years. In addition, he toured the…

Éva Gauthier (1885-1958): Pioneer of 20th Century Music (Part 2)

By Nadia Turbide on 4 December 2017 Art Song, Canadian Music, Classical Music, Quebec Music, Vocal

Eva Gauthier spent the summers of 1922 and 1923 in Europe, studying voice with Anna Schoen-René in Berlin, renewing her acquaintance with composers and colleagues in Paris and London, and replenishing her library with new scores. When she prepared her annual New York recital for the fall of 1923, she chose an eclectic program which not only ran the gamut of styles from Purcell and Bellini to Schoenberg and Milhaud (with several first performances included), but also featured the first appearance of popular American songs in a recital program. To accompany her in this last group she engaged the 25-year-old…

Review: The Exterminating Angel

By Charles Geyer on 4 December 2017 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Guess who’s coming dinner — and never leaving? In the case of composer Thomas Adès’s new opera, The Exterminating Angel, the answer is: everyone. The show opened last year in Salzburg and is currently enjoying its American premiere at the Met. Based on the 1962 film El ángel exterminador by cinematic provocateur Luis Buñuel, Adès’s opera ruthlessly tracks the exigent plight (and deteriorating sanities) of a group of bourgeois Spanish socialites gathered for a posh post-opera soirée only to find that, for reasons beyond anyone’s ken, they can’t bring themselves to go home. Think Noel Coward meets Rod Sterling, with…

Frédéric Antoun on The Exterminating Angel

By Adrian Rodriguez on 4 December 2017 Classical Music, Opera, Vocal

Canadian tenor Frédéric Antoun is one of the voices in most demand in the world of opera today. In the last five years, he has become the singer of choice for the most prestigious opera houses around the globe. He has performed Ferrando in Cosi FanTutte at the Paris Opera and the Opéra de Marseille, Tonio in The Girl of the Regiment at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, Nadir in The Pearl Fishers at Opernhaus Zurich, as Amadeus Daberlohn in Charlotte Salomon and Raúl in the world premiere of The Exterminating Angel at the Salzburg Festival. He is…

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