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Jordan de Souza

La Rentrée Musicale: Vocal & Opera

By Kiersten van Vliet on 1 September 2016 Art Song, Choral, La Scena Spotlight, Opera

Opera Montreal’s opera season begins with the Opéra de Montréal’s Aida on September 17. Running until the 24, the show features Kamen Chanev (Radames), Olesya Petrova (Amneris), Gregory Dahl (Amonasro), Phillipe Ens (Ramfis), Anatoli Sivko (The King of Egypt), with Russian soprano Anna Markarova in the title role. Paul Nadler conducts. The November production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni features the return of Canadian bass-baritone Gordon Bintner to the Opéra de Montréal stage as the philandering anti-hero. Includes an all-Canadian cast of Daniel Okulitch (Leporello), Emily Dorn (Donna Anna), Jean-Michel Richer (Don Ottavio), Layla Claire (Donna Elvira), as well as up-and-coming…

Review – Franz Schubert: String Quintet – Lieder (Erato)

By Kiersten van Vliet on 1 September 2016 Art Song, CD and Book Reviews, Chamber Music, Romantic

His final work for strings, Schubert’s Quintet in C Major (1828) is unusual for its doubling of the cello voice rather than the viola, Mozart’s quintet model. With unmatched lyricism and finesse, Quatuor Ebène tackles this behemoth of Romantic chamber repertoire, which was only completed two months before the composer’s untimely death. Gautier Capuçon makes a fine fifth wheel, adding a dark intensity without disrupting the balance of the upper strings. This is perhaps the most evident in the exquisite second movement, Adagio, a nocturne that is so unusually slow for Schubert, and given a keenly sensitive treatment by Quatuor…

Filumena, Banff Centre, Photo: Don Lee

New Opera Productions in Canada

By Kiersten van Vliet on 1 September 2016 Canadian Music, Classical, Contemporary, La Scena Spotlight, Opera, Romantic

The 2017–18 season is shaping up to be a milestone for new opera productions by Canadian companies. In celebration of the country’s 150th birthday, several works with Canadian themes will get their world premieres in Calgary, Montreal, and Toronto. Furthermore, Vancouver Opera has a watershed season with the inaugural year of the Vancouver Opera Festival. If you missed its triumphant opening run in Montreal last spring, Opéra de Montreal’s production of Les Feluettes (Lilies) travels to Pacific Opera Victoria this April. The Lost Operas of Mozart City Opera of Vancouver, 27 to 29 October, 2016 It’s a little-known fact that…

Inna Los as Cio-Cio-San and James Slayden as U.S. Navy Lieutenant B.F. Pinkerton, Photo: Ken Howard

Butterfly Emerges Strong in Berkshire Opera Festival Debut

By Charles Geyer on 31 August 2016 Concert Reviews, Opera, Romantic

OPERA REVIEW: Madama Butterfly, inaugural production of the new Berkshire Opera Festival INTERVIEW: Jonathon Loy, BOF General Director Opera is back in the Berkshires! The new Berkshire Opera Festival took its first bow on August 27 with its fascinating and beautiful new production of Puccini’s perennially popular Madama Butterfly at the Colonial Theatre in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. If first impressions are everything, a better introduction could not have been imagined. Of course we know Butterfly well, don’t we? For 112 years she has tantalized and beguiled operagoers (and shamed Western sensibilities) with her tale of innocent, exotic victimhood – the geisha…

Mary Beth Nelson as Betty Parris, Ariana Wehr as Abigail Williams, Emma Grimsley as Ruth Putnam and Molly Jane Hill as Susanna Walcott, Photo: Karli Cade

Witches! Thieves! Cutthroats! At Glimmerglass!

By Charles Geyer on 26 August 2016 Concert Reviews, Interviews, Musical Theatre, Opera

OPERA REVIEWS: The Crucible (August 20); The Thieving Magpie (August 20); Sweeney Todd (August 21); La bohème (August 22, matinee) INTERVIEW: Francesca Zambello Salem Village is stalked by the devil. A servant girl in France faces the gallows for the theft of some tableware. Vengeance is decimating London’s Fleet Street district (while a concomitant new gastronomic craze takes disturbing hold). Oh, and might one mention? – Paris isn’t paying its artists enough! Jealousies, grudges (and strange gravies) simmer. Accusations (and human-sized birds) fly. Cue the orchestra! It’s all the stuff of a glorious and bracing three-days’ visit to the Glimmerglass…

Aleksey Bogdanov (Baron Scarpia), Tosca, Opera North, Photo: Lisa Morrison

Review: Putting Puccini in His Place

By Charles Geyer on 19 August 2016 Art Song, Choral, Concert Reviews, Contemporary, Opera, Orchestral, Romantic

CONCERTS: Puccini “Beyond Verismo” at Bard SummerScape 2016 OPERA: Tosca at Opera North Puccini qua, Puccini là! Arguably the most popular and successful opera composer in history has been enjoying his typical ubiquity this summer, as a single weekend’s sampling around the Northeast United States will demonstrate. Friday, August 12 saw the closing performance of the maestro’s Tosca as rendered by Opera North (Lebanon, New Hampshire) in a taut, handsome production. And at Bard College’s final weekend of SummerScape 2016 (Dutchess County, New York), three full days of programming (August 12 through 14) were dedicated to winding up an exploration of…

Lebrecht Weekly – Martinu: Ariane (Supraphon)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 August 2016 Contemporary, Lebrecht Weekly, Opera, Orchestral

I am beginning to wonder if posterity will ever place Bohuslav Martinů where he justly belongs, as the last in a quartet of Czech geniuses, after Smetana, Dvořák, and Janáček. With each passing year, Martinů (1890–1959) seems to recede further into the mists, his 16 operas unstaged, his six symphonies unperformed. Czechs find him too cosmopolitan – he lived most of his life in France and the US – while others are daunted by his mountainous output. There are more than 400 recorded works by Martinů, all of high proficiency. When the innocent ear catches Martinů for the first time, it recognises a …

Lebrecht Weekly – Schubert Lieder: Der Wanderer (Delphian)

By Norman Lebrecht on 12 August 2016 Art Song, Lebrecht Weekly, Romantic

It’s always a good sign when a pianist is named as the editorial force behind a lieder recital, giving the enterprise both objective distance and intellectual rigour. Graham Johnson’s Schubert cycle on Hyperion is a benchmark of this rule, each singer chosen to reflect the character of the group of songs performed. Now the vastly knowledgeable Iain Burnside has begun a similar odyssey on the exquisite Scottish label, Delphian. I must have somehow missed the first volume with soprano Ailish Tynan, but the second is a cracker. The Welsh baritone Roderick Williams, winner of this year’s Royal Philharmonic Society award,…

Matthew Boehler (bass) and Talise Trevigne (soprano), Iris, Bard SummerScape, Photo: Cory Weaver

SummerScape 2016 Pitches a Big Tent at Bard

By Charles Geyer on 6 August 2016 Concert Reviews, Musical Theatre, Opera

OPERA: Mascagni’s IRIS – a dark, neglected opus by Puccini’s friend and rival; plus CABARET: Music, Mischief, and Oddball Chic at the House of Whimsy From the freakish, the fractious and the “fabulous,” to the tragic, transcendent and sublime – a single summer weekend’s visit to the Bard College campus in Dutchess County, New York for the 27th annual SummerScape Festival yielded a riot of indelible impressions. In the category Freakish, et seq., count the “House of Whimsy” – an edgy evening of pan-gender provocation and cultural protest, replete with bearded cross-dressers (some performing, some in the audience) and even…

Franz Liszt

Daily News Roundup: 29 July 2016

By Kiersten van Vliet on 29 July 2016 Contemporary, Daily News Roundup, Opera, Romantic

+ This is one the world has been waiting for: Norman Lebrecht reviews the Minnesota Orchestra’s final disc of their Sibelius cycle. + Shanghai Opera brings Thunderstorm to London. Read a review by the Financial Times here. + A recent biography about Liszt by Oliver Hilmes might simply be unnecessary. Read a review of the book here. “The weight of biographical commentary on Liszt is simply colossal. People have been writing full-length accounts of him since he was in his early 20s, and touring 1830s Europe. The first biographies written with the declared aim of stripping away accumulated myths appeared…

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