Find articles | Stanley Fefferman

The Canadian Opera Company’s update of A Masked Ball to the 1960s, Kennedy-era Boston, while problematic, is actually based on Verdi’s experience of staging his first production a hundred years earlier. Verdi’s score flows right into the heart, and Adrianne Pieczonka is irresistible.

Faust and Melnikov's concert of Beethoven sonatas at Koerner Hall in Toronto swelled with passion tempered by gentleness.

Canadian Opera Company Toronto première of Così hit the trifecta, with strong performances from cast, conductor Johannes Debus, and director Atom Egoyan.

Who could ask for anything more – Ignat Solzhenitsyn joined the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for a concert of Mozart, featuring the 39th Symphony and the 18th Piano Concerto, which Solzhenitsyn conducted from the keyboard.

If there were a Nobel Prize for violin, I would nominate James Ehnes. His playing of Britten’s Violin Concerto with the Toronto Symphony was drenched with emotions – pathos, irony, lamentation, sarcasm, tenderness and bliss – displayed and at the same time bounded by the discipline of his virtuosity, that like a diamond, radiated brilliance without attracting attention to itself.

James Gaffigan advised the audience about to hear him conduct Witold Lutosławki’s Piano Concerto to back off like you would from an Impressionist painting, in order to get an impression of the whole. When you do so, it’s a very romantic work. Otherwise, the score resembles ‘a science experiment’ because parts of it are notated without bars and cannot be conducted.

Peter Oundjian chose to open his tenth season as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony with a work he characterized as “ebullient”, and, truth be told, under Maestro Oundjian’s baton, it bubbled like a glass of champagne.Britten’s Variations and Fugue on a theme by Purcell (1946), a.k.a.

The Toronto Symphony’s 92nd season’s gala featured three works connected to operas, and who better to bring out the singing quality and dramatic storytelling of a piano score than pianist Lang Lang.

A key performance unlocks every note of familiar pieces so they can be enjoyed as if for the first time. Tiberghien began by paying homage to the “amazing” acoustics of Koerner Hall, then proved it by opening the minuet of Schubert’s Six moments musicaux softly as a breeze coloured lightly with birdsong.

Twentysomething Philippe Sly wields an impressive voice. Like the mythical John Henry’s hammer, it rings like silver in the upper register, the middle shines like gold, and his bass is firm as iron. From the second line of Henri Duparc’s “Chanson Triste” Sly interested with his way of rolling out phrases, englobing lines in cavernous spaces.

The Toronto Summer Music Festival’s opening concert made the audience very happy with a program of piano trios heavily weighted towards lamentation. Gabriel Fauré composed his Op. 120 trio in retirement while oppressed by old age, total deafness and bouts of bronchial pneumonia, but he makes his misery sing.

As Handel made music of John Milton’s poems L’Allegro and il Penseroso , Mark Morris made Handel’s music dance. The 32 scenes of Morris’ ballet breathe with inspiration of figures and designs from watercolours William Blake did for an edition of Milton’s poems.

The chamber-opera Feng Yi Ting is a high-grade hybrid. The composer/librettist is Chinese, the director is Armenian-Canadian, and both are outstanding in their fields. Guo Wenjing belongs to the elite 200 students admitted to Beijing’s Central Conservatory in 1978 when it reopened after the Cultural Revolution.

The Giacomo Variations takes its time really getting down to business – the business Giacomo Casanova was in – the business of love.It begins with a lot of theatre business. The set, designed by Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser, consists of three gigantic Marie-Antoinette skirts. Lift one and there’s a bed for romping.

“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted”, says the scripture, and it was so last night as Peter Oundjian conducted the mournful music of Brahms and Lieberson. Wave after wave of the rich textures of grieving arose and subsided in song, leaving in their wake the energy of reconciliation.The grieving of Peter Lieberson is deep.

Francis Poulenc’s 1957 opera Dialogues des Carmélites has the virtues of necessity. Director Robert Carsten’s production puts these virtues before us in simple black and white. The virtues begin with the story: Blanche, an aristocrat afraid of the French Revolution who hopes to find refuge in a nunnery, becomes a refugee of religious persecution, and chooses to die a martyr with her sisters.

The Danilo Pérez Trio tribute to Dizzy Gillespie was many things, including an invitation to relax. It was also a showcase and world première for Camino de Cruces, Pérez’s contribution to the 500th anniversary celebration of the founding of Panama.

Atom Egoyan’s production of Richard Strauss’ Salome is styled for extreme contrasts. You could think of it as Springtime for Herod in Judea. While patrons spilling out of limos, taxis and Wheel-Trans were gathering on this magnolia blossom-filled May Day evening in the plaza outside the opera house’s glass façade, a parade hedged by bicycle cops was filing by.

Thomas Dausgaard conducts with his body. A shift in his posture, without engaging hands or arms, is enough indication for his Swedish Chamber Orchestra to execute subtly graduated dynamic shifts.

Beethoven started it, the piano’s duologue with the cello, in 1801, with his Seven Variations on “Bei Männern, welche Liebe fühlen” from Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Beethoven himself, and many composers from Brahms (1862) through Lera Auerbach (2002) continued to ornament this form. In 1968, Jacqueline du Pré and Daniel Barenboim, with their recording of Brahms’ Cello Sonata no.

Everything about the opening scene of this production set me on edge: centre-stage a hybrid bed on wheels, part crib part hospital, and propped up on it, peering through the bars, a young female, presumably Lucia. The set is a high-walled room, dingy white, plaster stained, paper peeling, with  a short door and elongated windows suggesting a surreal Alice-in-Wonderland distortion.

More than 40 years ago, violist Kazuhide Isomura got together with three other Japanese students at the Juilliard School of Music in Manhattan and formed the Tokyo String Quartet. After touring the globe for upward of 4,000 performances, more than 40 for Music Toronto, with 40 albums and nearly 40 years of teaching at Yale, last night, Mr Isomura played his final Music Toronto concert.

This concert by England’s Tippett Quartet, their debut in Canada, was about time. The Quartet came together in 1998, the year of the passing of their namesake, Sir Michael Tippett. Their first musical offering of the afternoon was Tippett’s Fifth and final String Quartet (1991), with Anna Smith filling in for Jeremy Isaac on second violin.

There are musical moments that lift you up into a jet stream you ride till your feet are on the pavement again. Last evening in Koerner Hall was a flow of such moments as the Amici Chamber Ensemble celebrated their first set of twenty-five musical years.

If you know what people have been saying about Jan Lisiecki, you might enter the recital hall echoing some extremely high praise for this 17-year-old pianist. Of course, in Toronto, where Lisiecki has been studying at the Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory, CBC Magazine is asking: “Is he the next Glenn Gould?” But after hearing his recital today of Chopin’s Études Opp.

It was an evening of go big or go home. Koerner Hall is a world-class “acousticorium”. It has been praised for razor-sharp rendering of the sounds of soloists like guitarist John Williams, divas like Anne Sofie von Otter and Dee Dee Bridgewater, quartets like the Kronos and Takács, chamber orchestras such as the 28 strings of Gergiev’s Stradivarius Ensemble.

Three of the composers on the program of this 115th season of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto are linked in a significant pattern of numbers. Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809, the year Joseph Haydn died. Paul Schoenfield was born in 1947, one hundred years after Mendelssohn died. Haydn’s Piano Trio no.

Peter Sellars successfully updated the ancient magic in Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Wagner had already modernised the medieval tale by focusing on the middle of the story, where the passion of the doomed lovers catches fire. Wagner treats the mythic origins of the romance as back-story recollected while passions are flaring.

The Imagist poet William Carlos Williams wrote “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow”. Modern music composed in Canada “so much depends upon” John Weinzweig, who first brought modern compositional techniques to Canada in the 1940s and taught them to virtually everybody until his passing in 2006.

People want to be in love and to live forever. That is not how things work out. Haydn explores this contradiction in his string quartets. What makes each quartet different is how Haydn resolves musically the way things do work out.

The virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin played a program of works by Bach, Fauré, Ravel and Rachmaninov, bracketed by his own Variations on a theme by Paganini. Last March in Toronto, when Hamelin snuck this piece into the program as an encore, I wrote that it was “ten minutes of the most fun you’ll ever have crowding around a piano at the end of party.

Bartók used folk music to find his own voice as a composer of classical music. He roamed the Balkans, north Africa and the Middle East to rediscover models of what was really music to his ears, much in the same spirit as Picasso and others searched out models of primitive representations to refresh what we see.

His build is blocky like the hockey defense-man he once was, but Denis Matsuev’s fingers can touch piano keys lightly as butterflies landing on begonias. The mood of his solo recital opened blissfully, like the January night by the fireplace described in Puskin’s poem “By the Hearth” which inspired the first of the twelve monthly miniatures Tchaikovsky published as The Seasons, Op. 37b.

Piotr Anderszewski seated himself on a chair without any fuss and eased into the Allemande of Bach’s French Suite no. 5 in G with a soft touch. His rounded notes, subdued in the left hand, not too sparkly in the right, were as far as you could get from the quirky, angular style of Glenn Gould, who rules in Toronto, his home turf.

Each time I hear the Takács Quartet in concert a new excellence comes through: this time it is their gentleness. Schubert’s String Quartet in A minor, “Rosamunde” is allowed to unfold gently, as the petals of a rose open themselves.

The Mariinsky Orchestra are great, because Valery Gergiev arranges a schedule that only the great could sustain. In the two weeks before they arrived in Toronto, his musicians played six performances of Swan Lake in Berkeley, California. Then Gergiev took them back to St Petersburg (October 15–23) to play the operas Boris Godunov and Aida.

It took me a while to warm to director Christopher Alden’s revisionist production of Johann Strauss II’s chestnut and whipped cream torte of an operetta, but gradually the outrageous battiness of it won me over.The story that Alden and his team fashion into a Freudian farce with touches of Bram Stoker goes like this.

The Shang Emperor of China had inscribed on his washbasin the admonition “Make it New”.Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s 2012/13 season made it new by including in its first-night program a work by a living composer, Harmonielehre by the American John Adams.