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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etcEditor: Wah Keung ChanAssistant Editor: Andreanne VenneISSN: 1206-9973

Dorothea Röschmann as Emilia Marty in Staatsoper Berlin's The Makropulos Case at Janáček Brno Festival. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Review | Berlin Staatsoper’s fragmented The Makropulos Case at Janáček Brno Festival

By Gianmarco Segato on 19 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Leoš Janáček’s penultimate opera, The Makropulos Case returned to Brno, where it premiered in 1926, in Claus Guth’s 2022 production from Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. This was the company’s first appearance at the bi-annual Janáček Brno Festival where it presented two performances (seen Nov. 18) of the opera based on Karel Čapek’s 1922 “comedy” dealing with the complex emotional baggage associated with immortality. Guth, along with set designer Étienne Plus and costume designer Ursula Kudrna, have chosen a “period” 1920s Art Deco setting that includes a troupe of dancers/movement artists who cater to opera singer Emilia Marty. From the…

Hungarian State Opera's Falstaff. Photo: Valter Berecz/Hungarian State Opera

Review | Fabulous 50s Falstaff at Hungarian State Opera

By Gianmarco Segato on 19 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Verdi’s final opera, his comic masterpiece Falstaff, was revived by Hungarian State Opera on Nov. 16. in Swiss director Arnaud Bernard’s 2013 staging set in the fabulous 1950s. Opening and closing with a freeze frame set within a giant period TV screen, the update perfectly suits the work’s constant plot shifts and intricately-wrought musical ensembles. Despite a slightly misjudged directorial nod that we are watching a show within a show, this tightly-executed revival delivers all the self-mocking humanity of Verdi’s late comedy. The scene opens with Falstaff and his shady henchmen, Dr. Caius (Péter Balczó), Pistola (András Kiss) and Bardolfo…

Xavier Roberge as The Little Prince. Photo: Denis Roberge

Review | OM’s Staged Little Prince Produces Mixed Results

By Heather Weinreb on 19 November 2024 Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Montreal

The magic of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s classic children’s story, can be largely ascribed to the synesthetic nature of the work itself. The interrelationship of visual and narrative art is at the heart of this story; when a pilot stranded in the Sahara Desert encounters a tiny prince, the prince asks him to draw a sheep to eat the baobabs on his planet. On Nov. 17, Orchestre Métropolitain’s adaptation of The Little Prince for live actors and orchestra sought to add yet another artistic element to this synesthetic work: music. This was a very ambitious project. On the…

Lebrecht Weekly | Hanni Liang Plays Ethel Smyth With Blazed Conviction

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was ‘like being caught by a giant crab’. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944. Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up.…

Les Idées heureuses at Bourgie Hall, Nov. 12 Photo: Catherine St-Arnaud

Review | Medieval meets folk with Les Idées heureuses

By Heather Weinreb on 14 November 2024 Baroque and Early, Concert Reviews, Montreal

On Nov. 12, Les Idées heureuses presented their second concert of the season at Bourgie Hall. Jamais je ne t’oublierai : échos du Moyen Âge dans nos chants du terroir consisted of a program of French and French-Canadian folk music and Medieval works. As the title suggests, the program was conceived to illustrate the echoes of Medieval music in our local folk tradition. The concert was divided into five thematic sections—May, The Mother, Flowers, Cries, Goodbyes, and Dances—each featuring one folk song, arranged by Jean-François Daignault, and various Medieval works. What you missed: From its conception through to its execution,…

Scene from Hunagarian State Opera's Turandot. Photo: Valter Berecz / Hungarian State Opera

Review | Intriguingly ambiguous new Turandot at Hungarian State Opera

By Gianmarco Segato on 13 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, was famously left incomplete due to the composer’s untimely death. It premiered at Teatro alla Scala in 1926 using composer Franco Alfano’s ending based on fragments of vocal lines and indications for orchestration left by Puccini. Much controversy and critical dissatisfaction has always swirled around the Alfano ending prompting the commissioning of many alternate completions. The most famous of these is Italian composer Luciano Berio’s 2002 rendering which the Hungarian State Opera is currently using in their new production of Turandot, alternating in some performances with Alfano’s more familiar ending. Psychological Turandot As director Dóra Barta indicates…

Lebrecht Weekly | Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto with LSO Live

By Norman Lebrecht on 8 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos. The Violin Concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for…

2024: The Year in Records

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 8 November 2024 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

As 2024 comes to an end, let’s take a look (and a listen) to those releases we may have missed this year… The Sky Will Still Be There TomorrowCharles Lloyd, saxophone; Jason Moran, piano; Larry Grenadier, bass; Brian Blade, drumsBlue Note Records At 86, Charles Lloyd could claim the title of “Grand Old Man of the Tenor” but maybe he is too idiosyncratic for that… On his latest for Blue Note, he is reunited with pianist Jason Moran and bassist Larry Grenadier, but it’s the presence of Brian Blade (on his first recorded meeting with Lloyd) that makes this one…

Cecil Taylor in Warsaw in 1984 by Matthias Creutzinger

Cecil Taylor, Dark and Luminous

By Félix-Antoine Hamel on 8 November 2024 CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylorby Philip FreemanWolke Verlag, 2024, 344 p. Like his contemporaries and fellow avant-garde masters Bill Dixon and Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor (1929-2018) was not the easiest subject to approach for a music writer. Enigmatic, frequently baffling interviewers and critics who tried to approach him, he could be almost hostile at times—or at least a bit condescending. (This reviewer recalls an uncomfortable dialogue where Taylor tried to express to a French documentarist what it means to be born “on the wrong side of the tracks.”) At other moments, Taylor just enjoyed…

Artists of Alberta Ballet in Grimm. Photo: Paul McGrath

Review | Alberta Ballet’s perfectly nice Grimm

By Robin J Miller on 6 November 2024 Dance, La Scena Online, Scena Arts

Francesco Ventriglia became artistic director of Alberta Ballet in early 2024 with a vision: to blend tradition with innovation, to maintain the company’s roots in classical ballet while also exploring what it means to be a ballet company in the modern world. With his first production of the season, Ventriglia triumphed with one of the most traditional of all ballets, La Sylphide. His venture into innovation for his second production, Grimm (seen in Edmonton on October 25 and 26), proved to be far less exciting — but not because of the always excellent dancers. Choreographed for the company by Stefania…

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