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  The expectations we carry into a performance inevitably influence our response to that event. In 2011 I spent many wonderful evenings in concert halls and theaters, but sometimes the show felt perhaps not as special as I wanted, simply because I expected so much. However, I had a number of happy surprises, when I dragged into a concert or opera almost reluctantly and the evening turned out to be quite special. So instead of a Top 10, here in chronological order are ten "sleepers": performances that I attended with little

  The final Sunday performance (Nov. 27) of Siegfried at Oper Frankfurt was delayed by about 10 minutes because of "technical difficulties". Amid the politely agitated buzz that greeted the announcement I wondered whether the Met's machine ills (see previous post) were contagious. No worries--the show actually did begin within a few minutes and ran without noticeable mishap. The updated production plays with contemporary references while avoiding the gratuitously outrageous conceits.  

  Flames weren't meant to rage for the entire final scene of the Met's new Siegfried, but during the scenic transition from forest to mountain, as Siegfried was about to climb through the inferno to find his well rested Brunnhilde, Robert Lepage's infamous stage machine halted mid-rotation with a tremendous crash. And there it stayed, girders criss-crossed, serving as a screen for projected flames, like a giant Yule log video. Instead of being revealed asleep in a raised clearing, Deborah Voigt finally

Opera Atelier is a Toronto-based company that specializes in baroque and classical opera. Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which opened on Saturday, is about as “modern” as they get. Here’s my review, from The Globe and Mail of October 31. Opera Atelier’s co-artistic director Marshall Pynkoski stepped on stage just before the curtain rose on Saturday night. The opera was Don Giovanni – and Pynkoski, who served as stage director for the new production, had a few words to say. First, he wanted everyone to

    Opéra de Paris has done some clean-up over the summer. At the Palais Garnier a restaurant has opened in the back of the building, facing the Apple Store across the street. The controversial design features walls of undulating white marble, red upholstery, and vast expanses of glass that somehow met the approval of the historic monuments people. Food and service have pleased the critics somewhat less, though it seems to be crowded whenever I walk by. More pleasingly, the Chagall gracing the ceiling of the

  My intention for this season was to move away from straight reviews, but finally I've seen a production that inspires a few words. The revival of Robert Carsen's production of Tannhäuser currently playing at Opera de Paris is that rare beast: an updating which reveals new meaning without being ridiculous.   Tannhäuser is a painter, Venus is his inspiration, and his studo, Venusberg, overflows with the fruits of his creativity--the stage is empty but for a bed, which sees plenty of

The Manitoba Chamber Orchestra paid Toronto’s Glenn Gould Studio a visit last night, at the end of a mini-tour of Ontario, organized by the Numus concert society. And for the occasion, the MCO brought the music of just one composer. The program was billed as “The Film Music of Philip Glass” – and although it wasn’t quite all film music, it was certainly all Glass. The composer himself wasn’t present, but pianist and longtime Glass collaborator Michael Riesman was. He played in the Suite from Dracula

      During the Franz Welser-Möst regime – which looks to be a long one – the Cleveland Orchestra’s preferred recording medium has been the DVD over all audio formats.  So far, this policy has paid off with an excellent collection of Bruckner videos that may turn into a complete cycle if we’re lucky. Symphonies Nos. 5, 7 and 9 have been out for awhile; No. 5 is the pick of the lot with the added advantage of being performed in Bruckner’s own reverberant St. Florian Church

The typical summer festival has at least some programming that looks insane in retrospect, as in, "Whatever made us think we could do that?"     Sometimes it all works in spite of itself. Yet one must wonder what the Grant Park Music Festival programmers were dreaming when they decided to cram Shostakovich's monumental Symphony No. 10 and John Adams' "The Chairman Dances" as midweek filler in a huge choral-orchestral sandwich.    On the previous  weekend, the Grant Park

“A critic is someone who watches the battle from the sidelines and then, when the battle is over and the smoke has cleared, comes down onto the field to shoot the wounded.”  This joke was quoted by William Littler in a tribute to the late Ottawa critic Jacob Siskind in the souvenir program booklet of this year’s Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, or “Chamberfest”. (Siskind died last year at the age of 82.) I don’t think members of the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) shot

  http://www.concertonet.com/scripts/review.php?ID_review=7636  

Jan Liesecki is a tall, gaunt, 16-year-old with a mop of Bieber-esque blonde hair who’s poised to become a piano phenomenon. From Calgary, Alberta, he’s already made about 100 concerto appearances – and in the coming months will debut with the Orchestre de Paris, the BBC Symphony, the Cologne Philharmonic and Leipzig’s Gewandhaus Orchestra, among others. And last year he signed a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. He hasn’t yet played with the big American orchestras, but surely it’s just a

By John W. Barker

Cosima Liszt-Bülow-Wagner is inseparable from the saga of Richard Wagner (1813-83) and his artistic legacy. Controversial as Wagner's art was to be for generations, his stature was never in doubt. But our image of Cosima has been a curiously shifting one.

  This gloss on the charming 1994 film by Michael Radford about an imagined friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda exiled in Italy and the young postman who delivers his mail fit perfectly into the Châtelet's current trend toward lighter lyric programming, straddling as it does the bounderies between opera and musical theater. The third incarnation of the Los Angeles/Vienna/Châtelet production was a perfect summer interlude, chiefly as a chance to hear Placido Domingo in good voice (June 27).  

By Richard S. Ginell

One hundred and thirty-five years since its 1876 premiere, Richard Wagner's Ring remains the biggest operatic show on earth, and the composer's influence... has, ever since, been immense and amply documented. Yet what influence has this irresistible force had upon the popular and jazz fields? Not a hell of a lot, if the truth be told. Upon jazz, for the most part, Wagner's actual language has had little impact.

By Robert Markow

Can any city in North America besides New York boast such a long and distinguished history of performances of Wagner’s Ring as San Francisco? As far back as 1891, Emma Juch’s touring company performed Die Walküre there.

Buenos Aires, June 28, 2011 Venezuela’s Orquesta Sinfónica Símon Bolívar is the crown of the country’s more than 200 youth orchestras, the professional end product of the system of musical training for young people established by the economist José Antonio Abreu in 1975. The ensemble played a simply amazing performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 7 to a packed house at the Teatro Cólon on Sunday afternoon, June 26, under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel, its artistic

Alison Kozol contributed to this article. To celebrate its fortieth anniversary, the Oberlin Baroque Performance Institute is dedicating its two-week session this summer to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and as its centerpiece, artistic director Kenneth Slowik has chosen to perform the Leipzig cantor’s Passion according to St. Matthew in a controversial format. Unlike most modern performances, the Oberlin forces — mostly faculty performers with a few invited alumni instrumentalists —will perform

  The chicken didn't rate top billing--nor any program mention, for that matter. But it came close to upstaging the rest of the cast during the second act of Les Brigands, currently playing at Opéra Comique during the third of seventh performances (seen on June 26). This was no mean feat, considering the frenetic bustle of activity generated by one of the funniest ensemble casts I've seen in this theater.   Jacques Offenbach's final opéra bouffe (a satiric genre, distinct from the