I’ll be the woman. I’ll be all the women.
The Dutch National Opera’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Pique dame by Stefan Herheim proves that the right director can turn a meh opera into a great work of art. Musically a conventional...
View ArticleHot Docs 2017 – films of interest
The reliably good Hot Docs is back for another edition this year. Here’s what I can single out on first perusal of printed programs: Music Chavela: on the legendary Mexican lezzer singer-songwriter who...
View ArticleA fine Austrian-Balkan romance
Hello, and good weekend, my dear blog readers. Head over the Globe to read my article on Tim Albery’s COC-Santa Fe-Minnesota produced Arabella which will open at the COC next week. I look at the...
View ArticleArabella reviewed
[I liked it but didn’t love it, is how I’d sum it up in one sentence. Here’s the review that was just published in the Globe online. What I’d like to add as there wasn’t much space to analyze smaller...
View ArticlePodcast Episode the First
So I went and created a podcast. It’s called Alto, it’ll cover music and literature and occasionally other stuff too and it’ll drop last Thursday of every month. The first episode is right here and on...
View ArticleNightingale, oh Nightingale
The COC’s nine-year-old production of Stravinsky’s shorts, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables directed by Robert Lepage has aged well — as family entertainment. It sells well, it brings children...
View ArticleL’Histoire de la soldate
By casting a woman in the title role in Stravinsky’s kind-of staged L’Histoire du soldat performed last night at Koerner Hall in the Toronto Summer Music Festival, Alaina Viau effectively rescued this...
View ArticleOnegin!
So the Carsen Onegin is twenty years young and just opened the COC’s 18/19 season. My review is up on Opera Canada. I’ve been going through some recordings in preparation and in the process discovered...
View ArticleThe latest by Hemon
I realize that some of the blog subscribers may be interested in my non-opera-related writing as well. Here’s my latest essay for the Literary Review of Canada, on Aleksandar Hemon’s new book.
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Interview: Celia Hawkesworth
To visit Celia Hawkesworth, I took a Chiltern Lines train from London’s Marylebone Station to a village next to hers known, it turned out, for its outdoors shopping mall in the guise of ye olde main...
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