James Karas is a writer and a lawyer. He holds degrees in English Literature and Law. He reviews opera and theatre extensively and writes about cultural matters for various publications.
The Canadian Opera Company provides a traditional production (that’s a complement) of Puccini’s La bohème at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Its strengths are a well-sung Mimì (Grazia Doronzio) and Marcello (Joshua Hopkins), and fine directing by John Caird. The set design is very good except for the first act and the orchestral playing is sound.
The Canadian Opera Company has judiciously chosen a real chestnut (La bohème) and a more complex if less popular work, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, for its fall season. The latter is given a well-sung and directed production despite some faux pas in the set design and the characterization of Grimes by tenor Ben Heppner.
Whether you call it Un giorno di regno or “King for a Day”, Giuseppe Verdi’s second opera and his first comedy is mostly unknown. That has not stopped the Glimmerglass Festival from mounting a spirited production for its 2013 season in the Alice Busch Opera Theatre on the shores of Otsego Lake in upstate New York.
Opera Atelier espouses truth in advertising: The Magic Flute, they tell us, is a Singspiel in two acts. You can call it a play with songs, a musical comedy, even an operetta, but hardly an opera in the traditional sense. Call it what you will, this is Opera Atelier’s fourth production of the work in the last 22 years.
Opera Atelier has made its reputation as a producer of 17th- and 18th-century operas for more than a quarter of a century, based at the elegant Elgin Theatre in Toronto since 2000. This year it has made a leap into another era and another century with a gorgeous production of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz.
Can you set Verdi’s Rigoletto in a high-rise apartment building, in modern dress, without popping any of your credulity strings? Probably not, but that is what Opera Hamilton has done in its latest production, directed by Michael Cavanagh.
What do you get when you have a woman being burnt on the stake and her daughter tosses a baby – the wrong baby – on the pyre? The correct answer is Giuseppe Verdi’s incredible melodrama Il Trovatore.The Canadian Opera Company’s production (borrowed from Opéra de Marseille) eschews melodramatic displays but does provide some thrills.
Claude Debussy’s only opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, calls for a spring in a forest, scenes in a palace, a well in a park and a scene in the palace vaults. Ever since its premiere in 1902, it has been a difficult work to stage, and indeed to appreciate. Its complex symbolism, impressionistic music and lack of any memorable melodies were not a good recipe for a runaway hit.
The Canadian Opera Company’s second offering for its 2011-2012 season is Verdi’s ever-popular Rigoletto. It comes on the heels of Robert Carsen’s stunning production of Iphigenia in Tauris. In Carsen’s brilliant conception of the opera, everything works to produce a great night of opera By contrast in Christopher Alden’s production of Rigoletto just about nothing works.
