Performer: Stephen Lord

Christopher Alden’s production of Verdi’s Rigoletto returned to Toronto tighter, more focussed and with fewer dramatic incongruities. Add to this that every aspect of the music making was top notch and it made for a fine evening at the theatre.

English National Opera’s first staging of Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece is a musical and dramatic triumph.

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.

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.

The human race craves comic relief... a universally accepted fact throughout the entire history of mankind. Comic books, sitcoms, comic theater... all seek to blissfully whisk us out of the doldrums and politics of today’s ever-busy society.

For many people, to repeat a commonplace, opera is about those "wow" moments, the times when music, voice and staging come together to lift you onto a different plane. In ENO's Tosca last night, a "wow" moment happened more or less whenever Gwyn Hughes Jones opened his mouth: his Cavaradossi had total heroism, total artistry and effortless, silk-smooth phrasing.