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William Kentridge's production of Berg’s Wozzeck has it all: wonderfully imaginative and disturbing designs, terrific acting and singing plus fabulous orchestral playing. 

Bilodeau and Bouchard’s La Reine-garçon is contemporary opera at its best, telling a great story with outstanding music and stunning visuals.

Amy Lane's scattered borrowings from Tim Burton to Stanley Kubrick fail to cohere in the Canadian Opera Company's new Faust.

Kasper Holten’s much travelled and spectacular Don Giovanni gets a fresh and lively remount at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre from a young cast headed up by Gordon Bintner. 

After more than a quarter of a century, Janáček’s late masterpiece returns to the Canadian Opera Company, but falls short in charm, magic, and humour.

A massive rotating cube, CCTV, an immigrants’ detention centre: Fidelio returns to the Toronto stage with a visually arresting production full of contemporary resonances. 

Ambur Braid excels in the title role in the Canadian Opera Company’s starrily cast revival of Atom Egoyan's production.

Young Egyptian-New Zealand soprano Amina Edris makes a great impression in a revival of Arin Arbus’ strong 2015 production.

Leaving unresolved loose ends aside and viewed from a child’s perspective, Joel Ivany’s new Hänsel und Gretel at the Canadian Opera Company it’s a fun night at the opera.

Pavel Kolesnikov impresses in a Mozart performance to savour. 

Robert Carsen's Eugene Onegin was binned by the Met but works wonderfully in its revival by the Canadian Opera Company COC with high class singing and acting from a young, engaging cast.

Late romantic music in the key of D minor reigned at Saturday night’s Seattle Symphony performance.

Bartlett Sher's production of The Tales of Hoffmann, revived at The Met, takes a Kafka-esque, surreal view of the opera.

The Met revived Jurgen Flimm's modern production of Salome, with Patricia Racette making a successfu last minute role debut in the title role.

Was Rufus Wainwright made for the Proms? Quite possibly: he ticks all the boxes needed for the ideal late-night set. He’s a pop artist, yes, but a pop artist whose love of classical music. 

  A suite by Rameau and Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances fill out the program for this Blossom Festival concert.

Don Quichotte makes its Canadian Opera Company debut in triumphant fashion, offering an elegant visual feast in addition to a trio of magnificent, magnetic performances.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.