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By Rebecca Schmid, Berlin: War looms largely in the background of Lohengrin, yet one wouldn’t expect to find tombstones and blood-stained uniforms. The director Kaspar Holten, in his German debut at the Deutsche Oper, takes a morbid, socially-critical approach to Wagner’s blend of fairy-tale and historic drama. As the Danish native states in the program notes, the victory column to the German-Danish war of the late nineteenth century is only a few kilometers from the opera house, something which he

As a non-driver, I don’t often venture into suburban realms beyond the northern border of Toronto. But I was up that way on March 28, to hear the Juilliard Quartet at the Markham Theatre play works by Hadyn, Martino and Beethoven. This hall is a nice size for chamber music, but the acoustic is dry. In this unforgiving  environment all is laid bare, and it’s possible to hear everything that’s going on inside a string quartet. But first let’s take a look at the quartet itself. The Juilliard Quartet

By Barbara Jepson

Syracuse, NY: Writing music traditionally has been a solitary undertaking. A composer struggles to bring aesthetic ideas to life, whether aided by quill pen and manuscript paper or the latest computer software program. But in recent decades, some composers have explored more collaborative approaches. Members of new music collectives like Bang On a Can have jointly created major works. And Douglas Quin's "Polar Suite," which received its world premiere during

Here's a review I wrote for Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper. There’s a new trend catching on and bringing change to the tradition-bound classical music world. Orchestras and other classical performers have started to realize that audiences are increasingly drawn to a mix of artistic experiences. While there may be nothing wrong with a standard-format concert, it’s a bonus if there’s something to look at as well. Three years ago, Toronto’s Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra staged The Galileo Project,

THis is a test entry

  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

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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).