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Excellent performances cannot turn a conventional production of Massenet’s Werther into a dramatic experience for the 21st century. 

Some 30 years after its first appearance, Robert Lepage’s double bill of Duke Bluebeards Castle and Erwartung is still strikingly effective and very modern-looking music theatre.

The Barber is back in Toronto with an excellent cast, young and old, and it’s as lively, colourful and energetic as ever. 

Christopher Alden’s Victorian-era Rigoletto still divides opinions, despite top-notch performances all around in this Toronto revival. 

The restrained beauty of Robert Carsen’s production of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice is matched by musical elegance in its revival current revival at the Four Seasons Centre. 

Amy Lane’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette at the COC is eye-catching and enjoyable but doesn’t offer the same level of insight as her Faust last season. 

Robert Carsen’s 1997 production of Eugene Onegin has aged remarkably well but the latest Canadian Opera Company revival of it doesn’t quite recapture its magic. 

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.

The Toronto revival of Michael Grandage’s straightforward but elegant production shields Puccini’s genius from contemporary critiques. 

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

The Canadian Opera Company’s season opening production is musically excellent, but the dated, dull production adds little. 

In the title role of Canadian Opera Company's Medea, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky offers the vocal and dramatic goods required by this flawed masterpiece. 

Canadian Opera Company's Don Pasquale offers a stylish Italian 1960s Fellini-inspired concept that delivers  comedy but omits the pathos. 

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.

Canadian Opera Company’s revival of John Caird’s art-infused production is perfectly realised in singing, acting, and the orchestra’s vibrant yet velvety colours.

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

Fourth time around Paul Curran’s production of Tosca at the Canadian Opera Company is workmanlike and well sung, but lacks the necessary dramatic edge to be truly memorable.

Sir David McVicar's grim and creepy take on Verdi's Macbeth, backed up by brilliant conducting from Speranza Scappucci and a fine performance of the title role by Quinn Kelsey, is the best thing seen at the COC since lockdown.

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

The COC revival of its 2016 production of Le nozze di Figaro is still rooted in Claus Guth’s gloomy Scandinavia but it’s lightened up to become much sexier and funnier.

The COC’s revival of The Magic Flute is mostly played for laughs and makes an enjoyable, if undemanding, evening.

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.

The COC's revival production of Puccini's La bohème is an enjoyable trip to the opera but it won't blow your socks off.

Despite an abundance of incongruous symbols, this Toronto performance was remarkable for its outstanding singing.

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.

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.

Roman mythology bumps into Buddhism, not always comfortably, in Zhang Huan’s production of Handel’s Semele at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The Canadian Opera Company's popular production of Puccini's beloved opera returns, its beauty intact and more beguiling than ever, with a powerful lead performance by soprano Patricia Racette.

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.

With smart direction, elegant design, and vocal fireworks, the Canadian Opera Company's Roberto Devereux offers a complex portrait of a much-loved historical figure.

What happens when a hero comes home? The exploration of this question forms the basis of director Peter Sellars’ new production of Hercules at the Canadian Opera Company.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.