UofT Opera opened a sparkling new production of Massenet’s Cendrillon on March 15 at Toronto’s historic, neo-Baroque Elgin Theatre, the perfect setting for director Maria Lamont’s 1930s Busby Berkeley-inspired conception. Massenet’s 1899 version of the familiar Cinderella fairy tale, while not without its Belle Epoque froth, is also lined with a deeply moving vein of melancholy that was successfully brought to the fore by a promising band of student artists. The Elgin’s acoustic is notoriously dry, and so it was perhaps fortuitous that conductor Sandra Horst elected to reduce the size of Massenet’s original orchestration, especially given the lack of…