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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

Colin Jacobsen. Photo : Joanna Chattman

Lebrecht Weekly | The Kreutzer Project (Avie)

By Norman Lebrecht on 16 September 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata was longer and more complex than any concerto of its time. It inspired a novella by Leo Tolstoy and a string quartet by Leos Janacek, both of them pillars of western culture and windows into human psychology. So the idea of replacing the pianist in the violin-piano sonata with a chamber orchestra and playing the 40-minute like a full-blown concerto is not irreverent, irrelevant, nor technically impossible. On paper, it ought to work. Colin Jacobsen’s attempt with The Knights, a New York soloists’ orchestra, strikes me as honourable in its intention and by no means unmusical. It…

Photo: Vivien Gaumand

Review | Il Trovatore: top-class singers and no stage set

By Justin Bernard on 12 September 2022 Concert Reviews, Opera

On September 10, the Opéra de Montréal launched its season with Verdi’s Il Trovatore, another classic of the operatic repertoire. For the occasion, the company had attracted one of the most prestigious casts we have ever seen on the Wilfrid-Pelletier stage: Australian soprano Nicole Car (Leonora), and Canadians Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Azucena), Etienne Dupuis (Count di Luna), and tenor Luc Robert (Manrico). All experienced and with many career successes. In the lead role, Nicole Car was the Verdian heroine that everyone dreams of hearing. Her voice had the depth take on the difficult score of Leonora and the…

Photo: Eric Richmond

Lebrecht Weekly | Franz Schubert: String quintet/Quartettsatz (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 9 September 2022 Lebrecht Weekly

I had planned to review something quite different this week, but the death of The Queen had me reaching for Schubert, who knew as much as any composer about end-of-life emotion. The quintet in C major – a Haydn foursome with extra cello – is Schubert’s last piece of chamber music, written in the year of his death, 1828, and submitted to a publisher a few weeks beforehand. The publisher sent a rejection slip, asking for more piano music. Quarter of a century passed before this astonishing creation finally appeared in performable form. Despite its terminal status in the Schubert…

Highlights | Isabel Bader and Lise Beauchamp Deceased, Tricia Baldwin Leaves Post, Arcade Fire Singer Accused of Sexual Misconduct

By Zenith Wolfe on 2 September 2022 Classical Music, Highlights

Welcome back to La Scena Musicale’s Highlights, a curated, weekly list of arts-related news stories from across the world! Music Industry Whig Standard | Isabel director Baldwin leaving for post in Yukon Tricia Baldwin will be forfeiting her role as the director of the Isabel Bader Centre to become the executive director of the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre in September. She first became interested in supporting Indigenous artists in 2017 during a 2017 human rights festival led by the Isabel Bader Centre, and her interviews with the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre solidified that interest. Ludwig Van | Musicians Refuse To Let…

Lebrecht Weekly | Jean Sibelius: Orchestral songs (LAWO)

By Norman Lebrecht on 2 September 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Sibelius, like Mahler, stuck to what he knew. He wrote no opera and hardly any chamber music, just symphonies and songs. His concentration of means and expression is as intense in a two-minute song as it is in a forty-minute symphony. Unlike Mahler, Sibelius is sparing with his orchestration, sometimes leaving it to solo clarinet and lower strings. He uses Swedish texts, only rarely reverting to his national language, Finnish, which he spoke imperfectly. The Sibelius songs are seldom heard below the Baltic, which is a pity since they tell us more about him than yet another season-opening Finlandia. In…

James Ehnes (image from the James Ehnes website)

Lebrecht Weekly | Alban Berg: Violin concerto &c. (Chandos)

By Norman Lebrecht on 26 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly, Violin

This is Alban Berg as you’ve never heard him before. The English conductor Sir Andrew Davis has spent lockdown time orchestrating two works that Berg never intended for orchestra. The piano sonata of 1907-08 was Berg’s first published work, written under the admonitory thumb of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg who was in the throes of embracing atonality. The Passacaglia of 1913 is another Berg stepping stone towards maturity. In Davis’s orchestration, the sonata score sounds like a missing suite from his second opera, Lulu, while the Passacaglia is steeped in its predecessor, Wozzeck. If I’d heard it in a blind…

Sandra Caldwell as Mama Morton in Stratford Festival 2022's production of Chicago (Credit: David Hou)

Review | Chicago is a Razzle Dazzle Production. But Has the Stratford Festival Lost its Way?

By Paul E. Robinson on 22 August 2022 Classical Music, Concert Reviews

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of driving through Amish country in southwestern Ohio, and attending performances by the Ohio Light Opera (OLO) in Wooster. Among the highlights was a first-class performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. The OLO is a unique cooperative venture with the College of Wooster and it has been going since 1979. Talented young singers from all over the United States are featured in these performances and four or five operettas and musicals are presented every summer in an 8-week season. Seeing this fine production of Pirates I was reminded that…

Alexandre Da Costa (left) and a Notre Dame de Paris performer (right)

Highlights | Young Musician Saves a Windsor Music School, Kaboom Festival Cancelled, New MMFA Inuit Music Exhibit

By Zenith Wolfe on 19 August 2022 Classical Music, Highlights

Welcome back to La Scena Musicale’s Highlights, a curated, weekly list of arts-related news stories from across the world! Music Industry CTV | ‘I needed to keep the music in Amherstburg’: 21-year-old musician turns into entrepreneurUpon hearing that the the music school she worked at, Musicland, was shutting down, Bethany D’Alimonte decided to take over the business to keep it open. Ludwig Van | TD Music Connected Play The Parks Concert Series Expands To 13 CitiesPlay The Parks is a diverse series of free shows and concerts hosted in cities across Canada, from Victoria, BC to St. John’s, NL. Their concerts…

Lebrecht Weekly | Prokofiev, Tcherepnin: The Bark of Yearning (Avi-music)

By Norman Lebrecht on 19 August 2022 Classical Music, Lebrecht Weekly

Western orchestras take a binary view of the Russian 20th century. Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich are good for business, the rest are box-office death. Like most iron rules, these categorisations are pointless and misleading. Prokofiev can be bad for audiences, very bad, when you leave him alone in a room with a piano. His Five Sarcasms, dated 1912-14, come as close to atonality as Schoenberg in a fish-shop tantrum, while Visions Fugitives of 1915-17 are way off the scale of anything you’d allow a Ukrainian refugee play on your prize Bechstein. Prokofiev can be the most annoying composer you never…

Credit: Courtoisie

Review | Notre Dame de Paris: A Successful Return

By Adrian Rodriguez on 15 August 2022 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Vocal

On Sunday August 13, a jam-packed Wilfrid Pelletier Hall received with ovations singer Bruno Pelletier in his return to the emblematic musical creation of Plamondon and Cocciante duo: Notre Dame de Paris. The production breaks a 22-year spell since the revered Quebecois singer first incarnated the role of “Gringoire”. Pelletier was joined by a solid cast of performers, including another member from the original 90’s production; Canadian singer/songwriter Daniel Lavoie. What you missed: Bruno Pelletier is at the peak of his power. He showcased a powerful belt canto and great stage presence. He has found the elixir for vocal youth.…

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