Performer: Barbara Ehnes

Dutch National Opera's superbly sang Così fan tutte is transposed into a teenager summer crush story.

The backstory doesn’t bode well: three fugitive criminals decide to found a city that will pander to society’s most vital needs: food, sex, warfare, and alcohol.

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.