Author: Gary Hoffman

Manitoba Opera opened its 41^st season with a rootin’ tootin’ new production of Don Pasquale from November 23 through 29, last staged by the Prairie company in 1997.

In this unusual programme of late-seventeenth-century airs de cour,
Les Arts Florissants presented a flowing sequence of songs for solo and
ensemble voices with chamber accompaniment, the intimacy of the Wigmore Hall
neatly mimicking the privacy of the royal chambers of Louis XIV in which the
courtly compositions were originally performed.

Francesco Zambello’s 2006 Carmen, here revived for the sixth time, seems to have something of an identity crisis: sumptuous spectacle or gritty drama?

With the gaudy excesses of secular seasonal indulgence just a few streets away and the tills of Oxford Street traders rattling out melodies of materialism, this advent programme of elegance and refinement offered by lutenist Elizabeth Kenny and the early music ensemble which she founded, Theatre of the Ayre, provided a welcome opportunity for repose and reflection.

As part of this year’s tribute to Benjamin Britten the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Chorus, and soloists recently gave several performances of the composer’s War Requiem.

Poor Weber: opera companies, especially in England, do him anything but proud.

‘If she is adulterous, why is she praised? If chaste, why was she put to death?’