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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etc; Editor: Wah Keung Chan; Assistant Editor: Andreanne Venne
ISSN: 1206-9973

Lila Dufy (Dircé) and Joyce El-Khoury (Médée). Photo: DR Stefan Brion.

Review | Joyce El-Khoury Triumphs as Médée in Paris

By Ossama el Naggar on 13 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Premiered in Paris in 1797, Cherubini’s Médée was originally presented with a French libretto, based on Euripides’ play from Greek antiquity. It’s this version that is currently onstage at Paris’s Opéra Comique (seen Feb. 8). The opera was tepidly received at its premiere and mostly forgotten for over a century, until Maria Callas revived it in the 1950s with an Italian libretto conceived especially for her. The original French version is in the style of Gluck, the great reformer who believed opera should be a perfect blending of music and text. It is also an opéra comique in which spoken dialogue alternates with…

Vancouver Opera’s 2025 production of Flight. Photo: David Cooper Photography

Review | Vancouver Opera’s Flight: Laugh Until You Cry

By Kaitlyn Chan on 12 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vancouver, Vocal

On Feb. 8, Vancouver Opera presented the local premiere of Jonathan Dove’s 1998 opera, Flight. This opera—inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee stranded in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years—is an emotional rollercoaster ride from the comedic to the heart-wrenching. The production originated at Pacific Opera Victoria in early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down. Stage direction was entrusted there to veteran Canadian theatre legend Morris Panych who has revived his retro-1960s vision for Vancouver Opera. At the start of the opera, Ken MacDonald’s set design looked quite simple with a tall control tower…

Scene from Paris Opera's I puritani. Photo: Sebastien Mathe

Review | Lisette Oropesa Triumphs in Misguided Paris I puritani

By Ossama el Naggar on 11 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera

Bellini’s final opera, I puritani (1835), premiered shortly before the composer’s untimely death by accidental poisoning. It is one of the highpoints in the romantic Italian bel canto repertoire, leaving us to wonder what other masterpieces Bellini might have written had he lived past thirty-three. I puritani is based on the French play Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers (1833), itself derived from Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816). It takes place in Plymouth circa 1640, during the English Civil War fought between Puritans and Royalists culminating with Cromwell’s victory. Reputed to have been Queen Victoria’s favourite opera, it’s dramatically compact and…

Alexandra Marcellier (Blanche de la Force) in Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia's Dialogues des carmélites. Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponce/Les Arts

Review | A Very Canadian Dialogues des carmélites in Valencia

By Ossama el Naggar on 11 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera

Based on Die Letzte am Schafott (“The Song at the Scaffold”), a novella about the execution by guillotine of sixteen Carmelite nuns from Compiègne in 1794, Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) wrote a screenplay for a film that ultimately was not produced. However, seeing its potential, Italian publisher Ricordi bought the rights and commissioned Francis Poulenc to write Dialogues des Carmélites, based on Bernanos’s work. The opera premiered in 1957 at La Scala to great acclaim, and has been a mainstay of the twentieth-century opera canon ever since. In Act I, Blanche de la Force, a young noblewoman afflicted with an unnamed…

Lebrecht Weekly | Boult’s Elgar : An extraordinary double-album of unpublished recordings

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

There are days when only Elgar will do. When the skies are low and the politics grim, a wash of Elgarian orchestral colour relieves existential gloom like no other remedy. The first symphony delivers pull-your-socks-up bluster and the second a subtler encouragement. Elgar always does it for me. This extraordinary double-album, titled Boult’s Elgar, brings together unpublished recordings by the composer’s young friend, Sir Adrian Boult. The sleeve notes are by Nigel Simeone, whose new book, Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult, chronicles a friendship that was interrupted for seven years by the composer taking umbrage at something the conductor had…

(L to R) Antoine Malette-Chénier, Catherine St-Arnaud, and Sylvain Bergeron. Photos: Alex Tran, Gaetz Photography, and Guillaume D. Cyr

Review | La Nef: From Double-Digit Cold to Sunny Spain

By Jan Krejcar on 7 February 2025 Baroque and Early, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Montreal

I was at a dinner party on a very cold, very wintry night right after Christmas, and one of the guests (a non-musician) said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if people researched old instruments from hundreds of years ago and played the pieces that were written then on those instruments?” I didn’t know what to say, really. There have been whole university departments dedicated to historical instruments for many decades now. But I was pleased to see, a month later, on an equally cold and equally wintry night, music from a time very long past, played on just such instruments, making…

Louis Lortie at Bourgie Hall. Photos: Claudine Jacques

Review | Louis Lortie Plays Crystal Clear Ravel

By Heather Weinreb on 6 February 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Montreal, Piano

It is a rare and special concert when one senses that not only the performer, but the composer, is on stage. On February 4 at Bourgie Hall, Louis Lortie played a wealth of Ravel’s piano works, from the iconic Pavane pour une infante défunte to the highly intricate Gaspard de la nuit. He played each piece with such stunning clarity it seemed as though Ravel himself was onstage with Lortie, calmly listening to his own pieces being played just as he would have wanted them to be. What you missed: Lortie’s playing is particularly striking in its attention to the…

Olga Kudriakova (piano) with the Orchestre symphonique de Laval. Photo: Gabriel Fournier

Review | Orchestre symphonique de Laval and the Idea of North

By Jan Krejcar on 3 February 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Orchestral, Piano, Strings

Winter has been in full swing this past week and with it, the fourth edition of Orchestre symphonique de Laval (OSL)’s Festival classique hivernal. The festival’s aptly titled second concert, Nordic Mosaic, consisted entirely of music composed north of latitude 45 (Feb. 1 at Salle André Mathieu). The program followed a standard format, with the commanding Jean-Marie Zeitouni at the helm delivering a shorter symphonic work (Jacques Hétu’s Legendes, op. 76), and a concerto (Edward Grieg’s famous one for piano and orchestra op. 16). The second half was dedicated to Jean Sibelius’ Symphony, No. 5 in E-flat Major, op. 82.…

Kirsten MacKinnon as Christine in COC's La Reine-garçon. Photo: Michael Cooper

Review | Outsider as symbol in under-characterized COC La Reine-garçon

By Gianmarco Segato on 2 February 2025 City, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Opera, Toronto, Vocal

Composer Julien Bilodeau and librettist Michel Marc Bouchard’s La Reine-garçon represents a milestone as the first co-production of a new “mainstage” opera between two of Canada’s major opera companies. Premiered at Opéra de Montréal almost exactly one year ago, it made its Canadian Opera Company debut on Jan. 31st. Taking iconoclast 17th-century monarch Queen Christine of Sweden as its subject, the new work ambitiously grapples with big topics like the emergence of free will, the rationalist philosophy of René Descartes, religious freedom and unconventional sexual desire. With an evocative score and poetic libretto, La Reine-garçon succeeds on many levels, but…

Lebrecht Weekly | Fatma Said’s New Album of Lieder Everyone Will Rave About

By Norman Lebrecht on 31 January 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

The Egyptian soprano, based in London and Berlin, had a mix of western and Arabic classical songs on her debut album, illustrating musical connections around the Mediterranean. Her ease in both ethnicities was enviable. To change tracks from microtonal maqam precision to the lushness of Ravel’s Shéhérazade was a hair-raising act of cultural transcendence, achieved without a hair out of place. Fatma Said’s new album is pure German: Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. Hard to tell which she adores most. The opening track, ‘Ständchen’, has an arresting liquidity, only to be outshone by ‘Auf dem Wasser zu Singen’. Felix Mendelssohn’s…

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