Table of contents for Vol. LVIII, No. 3 in Opera Canada

Lara Ciekiewicz is waxing poetic in the wake of her recent role debut this past fall as Leoš Janáček’s Jenůfa at Pacific Opera Victoria, co-produced with Opéra de Montréal and directed by Canadian film icon Atom Egoyan (see review p. 45). “There are often these post-show blues, but this time when I got home, I felt very serene,” reveals the Winnipeg-based artist. “I just felt gloriously humbled by what we all accomplished together, and realized that this production will always have a little piece of my heart.” Ciekiewicz, who self-describes her soaring, three-octave plus lyric soprano voice as “steel wrapped in velvet,” is becoming one of Canada’s most highly sought after singing-actresses. This season, she makes two significant role debuts, including Janáček’s portrait of an ill-fated village girl who is…

When the Canadian Opera Company presented Harry Somers’ 1967 opera Louis Riel in spring 2017, they made concerted efforts to include Indigenous voices at every step, from production to presentation. At the time, the show’s director Peter Hinton commented in a press release that “the most considerable challenge in staging this opera is the Eurocentric tradition of opera as a form and its collision with the voice, culture and representation of Indigeneity in this history. It is a delicate balance of renewing the original spirit of the opera with contemporary perspectives in order to revise the opera’s colonial biases and bring forward its inherent strengths and powers.” The production included what was called the ‘Land Assembly’, a symbolically-placed group of Indigenous men and women who were present onstage throughout the…

Pristinely and picturesquely situated on the outer arc of Europe’s cultural capitals, and smack in the centre of Scandinavia, lies the ‘Venice of the North’: Stockholm. Stereotypes of seafaring Vikings and their Sagas from millennia past may sell the city to tourists, but for opera cognoscenti, Stockholm and Swedens’ contributions are more associated with operatic history. Sweden has given birth to the likes of opera legends like Jenny Lind, Birgit Nilsson, Anne Sofie von Otter, Elisabeth Söderström, Astrid Varnay, Jussi Björling and Nicolai Gedda. In choral music, conductor Eric Ericsson is a giant. And if Sweden had not given us the iconic song writing team of Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus (ABBA); composer Max Martin (whose songs brought Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys fame and fortune) and Marie Fredriksson (of…

Berlin is a fantastic city for music lovers, and one of the very best times to visit is during the annual Musikfest, held for three weeks from late August to mid-September. Organized by the Berliner Festspiele in cooperation with the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation, the 2017 edition hosted roughly 44,000 visitors who enjoyed over 30 concerts, from early music choral presentations to premieres by contemporary composers. An abundance of music was on offer, from the traditional to the quirky; and a number of renowned organizations took part, including the Staatskapelle Berlin (who opened Musikfest), the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam, and Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin among them. The Philharmonie Berlin was home to many Musikfest concerts, giving audiences ample opportunities to experience its…

In the summer of 2015, I was in the audience for the premiere of Marco Tutino’s Two Women at San Francisco Opera. The work is based on the 1950s Italian novel La ciociara, which also inspired a film starring Sophia Lorèn. Within a few minutes of the curtain going up, I watched the main character, Cesira, endure a graphic rape with her attacker, pants down around his ankles, thrusting his hips to Tutino’s turgid score. The opera ends with another rape, an attack on Cesira and her daughter Rosetta by a large group of soldiers. Opera is built on stories of assault, especially against women. From Don Giovanni to the Duke of Mantua; Scarpia to the Drum Major in Wozzeck, libretti are full of alpha male characters intent on ‘having…

Danika Lorèn hasn’t always called Toronto home. Originally from Saskatchewan, she wasn’t raised in a busy city—it was quite the opposite, actually. “I grew up on a farm, and one of the few things we could do was take piano lessons in a nearby town. So I started with piano and then my teacher said to my mom—when she realized I was not very good at piano—that I should probably try singing,” she smiled. “So I went to the Saskatchewan Children’s Choir and was with them for about ten years, and it sort of snowballed from there.” Lorèn’s transition to opera had never been a guarantee—until one specific production convinced her to follow through and make a career of it. After graduating from high school, she spent two years in…

A VAST EXHIBITION, “Opera: Passion, Power and Politics,” the first in the new Sainsbury Gallery of London’s Victoria and Albert museum, retraces 400 years of opera history in the context of European culture and politics. Mounted in collaboration with the Royal Opera House it examines seven operas in the cities where they were first performed. The only exception is Tannhäuser (premiere, Dresden, 1845), here included in the Paris section given that its 1861 version was produced for the French capital. A final room wraps up the show with landmark operas written after 1945 such as Robert Wilson and Steve Reich’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) and George Benjamin’s Written on Skin (2012). It’s a challenging topic for a museum exhibition—how is it possible to bring to life the art of…

CANADA CALGARY Calgary Opera opened its 17/18 season with a superbly comic, well-sung production of Rossini’s perennial favourite—The Barber of Seville. Although the words and the music may be Italian, this new production was all French in style and tone. Directed by Montreal-based stage director Alain Gauthier, the opera was updated to the early 20th century, with an all-in-one set redolent of Dalí and 1930s Paris-chic. In its treatment of comedy, the production resembled a Feydeau farce, with its precise timing, rapid throw-away gags, and an exquisite sense of balance and proportion— a clock-like mechanism, as the director commented in his notes. A strong point of the production was Russell Braun in the title role of Figaro. Now at the peak of his career, Braun has just the right voice…