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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973

Lebrecht Weekly | Kurt Weill: Love Life (Capriccio)

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 October 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

A failed Broadway musical by Kurt Weill arrests my attention. Reading that Weill deemed it ‘pregnant with possibilities for the non-realistic theatre’, I cancel all calls. Weill and librettist Alan Jay Lerner had an idea of charting American marriage and working life from 1791 to 1948, a plan far too ambitious for Broadway. The show closed after just seven months and was not seen again for seven decades until a German revival in 2017 and the present concert staging in Leeds earlier this year. Love Life had a lot stacked against it – a first-act show-stopper called ‘Economics’, an English madrigal…

Nikan Ingabire Kanate at COC's Ensemble Studio Competition (2025). Photo: Michael Cooper

Review | Soprano Nikan Ingabire Kanate wins COC Ensemble Studio Competition

By Denise Lai on 24 October 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Opera, Toronto, Vocal

Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio Competition is one of the most anticipated events in Canada’s opera world. Now in its 12th year, the competition is more fierce, and with higher monetary prizes at stake. The biggest incentive, however, is a coveted invitation to join the COC Ensemble Studio, Canada’s leading career development program for emerging opera artists. This year, the seven finalists were selected from 117 applicants and 60 live auditions throughout the country. For the first time in recent memory, the finalists represented every voice type—two sopranos, one mezzo-soprano, two tenors, one baritone and a bass. Each finalist sang…

Schreker, Korngold and Krenek

Lebrecht Weekly | Three Phenomenal Composers Banned by the Nazis

By Norman Lebrecht on 24 October 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

Pick ‘n’ mix albums hardly ever work, and for the same reason that it’s unwise to get into a hotel lift with three composers. None of them will make way and the last one in will invariably come out first. What we have here is three phenomenal composers whose common denominator is that they wrote hugely successful modern operas that were banned by the Nazis. Franz Schreker dragged operatic sleaze one brothel and decibel beyond Richard Strauss in Salome. The overture to Schreker’s 1915 opera Die Gezeichneten (the branded) is an attention-seeking sonic synopsis, sweetly (and not too noisily) played here…

Bruce Liu with the TSO conducted by Franz Welser-Möst at Roy Thomson Hall. Photo: Allan Cabral

Review | Young Pianist Outclasses Seasoned Conductor at TSO

By Michelle Assay on 21 October 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Piano, Toronto

Here was a ghost of Christmas Future for the finalists of the International Chopin Competition currently battling it out in Warsaw. Since his victory at the 2021 Competition, the Paris-born Canadian Bruce Liu has been conquering some of the most prestigious stages of the world—including a BBC Proms appearance this summer. And for 2025-26 he adds the feather of TSO Spotlight Artist to his cap. For his first concert of the new season, Liu chose a Mozart concerto rather than a virtuoso blockbuster. That comes as little surprise. Chopin’s well-known love of Mozart is one connection. Also, since his Chopin…

Matthias Goerne & Daniil Trifonov. Photos: Caroline de Bon; Dario Acosta

Review | An Overwhelming Winterreise from Matthias Goerne & Daniil Trifonov at Koerner Hall

By David Fanning on 20 October 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Piano, Toronto, Vocal

The first verse in Schubert’s Winterreise is in the past tense: “I came here as a stranger, and as a stranger I leave again.” But on Oct. 16 at Koerner Hall, baritone Matthias Goerne performed it in the present, if not the future: restlessly shifting his gaze, then his whole body, to left and right, he compelled his audience into the moment, as if to project not so much resignation to Fate as an anxious search to escape it. And it is that anxiety that became the fixation of the 23 remaining poems. For a while it seemed that Goerne’s…

Meghan Lindsay (Pamina) & Rainelle Krause (Queen of the Night) in Opera Atelier's The Magic Flute. Photo: Bruce Zinger

Review | A Magic Flute For the People at Opera Atelier

By Gianmarco Segato on 17 October 2025 Baroque and Early, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Opera, Région, Toronto, Vocal

Opera Atelier opened its season on Oct. 15 with a revival of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, an opera which has played a key role in the company’s history starting with its first production in 1991. As founding co-artistic director Marshall Pynkoski mentioned in his pre-show speech, back then it was Canada’s first historically-informed, period staging of the perennial classic. In this, the company’s 40th-anniversary season, the period elements are still at the fore, but the strength of this revival lies in how strongly it connects with the audience both textually and visually. This effect is largely due to an artistic…

Mikis Theodorakis. Photo: Diane Hocker

Lebrecht Weekly | Mikis Theodorakis: 1st symphony (TYXart.de)

By Norman Lebrecht on 17 October 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

The great Greek composer is known for unforgettable film scores – Zorba, for instance – and overwhelming song cycles – Ballad of Mauthausen – each of them amounting to a cultural history of his country in the 20th century. Theodorakis, who died in 2021, was politically active to the last. His concert music was overshadowed by his status as national icon and prisoner of conscience. Theodorakis was twice held in concentration camps, during the civil war of the late 1940s and under the colonel’s regime two decades later. The manuscript of his first symphony was mislaid in his 1949 incarceration,…

Karoline Podolak at Women's Musical Club of Toronto

Review | Karoline Podolak: coloratura fireworks, and Polish song for WMCT

By John Gilks on 10 October 2025 Art Song, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Région, Toronto, Vocal

Soprano Karoline Podolak and pianist Rachael Kerr gave a recital on Oct. 9th at University of Toronto’s Walter Hall for the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto. The program appeared to be chosen to give us a combination of well known and not so well known Slavic songs and pieces that showed off Podolak’s impressive coloratura. It was straight into the deep end with “Ah! Où va la jeune indoue” from Délibes’ Lakmé which opens with a crazy unaccompanied vocalise and continues with a plethora of coloratura imitating the notes of a bell; hence its soubriquet “The Bell Song.” It was…

Scene from Canadian Opera Cpmpany's Orfeo ed Euridice. Photo: Michael Cooper

Review | COC’s Orfeo ed Euridice Radiates Simple Beauty with Perfectly-Matched Vocals

By Denise Lai on 10 October 2025 Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Opera, Vocal

How do you make a 90-minute opera with only three characters, staged against a black, white and grey backdrop interesting? That is a challenge the Canadian Opera Company is completely up to with its current revival of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (seen Oct. 9). Orfeo ed Euridice is the first of Gluck’s reform operas, characterized by the “noble simplicity” of its story and music. It acts as a bridge between the baroque and classical worlds and went on to inspire composers like Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner who echoed its themes and dramatic innovations in their own operas. Based…

Lebrecht Weekly | Walton, Britten, Tippett: Works for piano and orchestra (BIS)

By Norman Lebrecht on 10 October 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

If ever you need proof that the best is the enemy of the merely good, listen no further than pianist Clare Hammond’s new release of quasi-concertos by three of Britain’s most celebrated composers. William Walton won renown in 1923 with Façade, a poetry-with-chamber music ‘entertainment’ and enjoyed a long life of mixed achievement. His viola and violin concertos were outstanding, as was his first symphony. His music for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V was epic; the rest of his output less so. Sinfonia Concertante, for piano and orchestra, was acclaimed in 1929 as ‘unmistakably original’ by the august Wagnerian critic Ernest…

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