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La Scena Online is the digital magazine of La Scene Musicale.Contents: News, Concert reviews, CD reviews, Interviews, Obituaries, etcEditor: Wah Keung ChanAssistant Editor: Andreanne VenneISSN: 1206-9973

The cast of Falstaff.
Hungarian State Opera's Falstaff. Photo: Valter Berecz/Hungarian State Opera

Review | Fabulous 50s Falstaff at Hungarian State Opera

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By on Concert Reviews, Opera

Verdi’s final opera, his comic masterpiece Falstaff, was revived by Hungarian State Opera on Nov. 16. in Swiss director Arnaud Bernard’s 2013 staging set in the fabulous 1950s. Opening and closing with a freeze frame set within a giant period TV screen, the update perfectly suits the work’s constant plot shifts and intricately-wrought musical ensembles. Despite a slightly misjudged directorial nod that we are watching a show within a show, this tightly-executed revival delivers all the self-mocking humanity of Verdi’s late comedy. The scene opens with Falstaff and his shady henchmen, Dr. Caius (Péter Balczó), Pistola (András Kiss) and Bardolfo…

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Xavier Roberge as The Little Prince. Photo: Denis Roberge

Review | OM’s Staged Little Prince Produces Mixed Results

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By on Concert Reviews, La Scena Online, Montreal

The magic of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s classic children’s story, can be largely ascribed to the synesthetic nature of the work itself. The interrelationship of visual and narrative art is at the heart of this story; when a pilot stranded in the Sahara Desert encounters a tiny prince, the prince asks him to draw a sheep to eat the baobabs on his planet.  On Nov. 17, Orchestre Métropolitain’s adaptation of The Little Prince for live actors and orchestra sought to add yet another artistic element to this synesthetic work: music. This was a very ambitious project. On the…

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Ethel Smyth

Lebrecht Weekly | Hanni Liang Plays Ethel Smyth With Blazed Conviction

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

Ethel Smyth was a middle-class butch lesbian from an English military family who went to jail for the Suffragette cause and was seen conducting fellow-inmates at Holloway Prison with a toothbrush. That, in sum, is the impression given by Thomas Beecham and other wary admirers. Virginia Woolf once said that being loved by Ethel was ‘like being caught by a giant crab’. The composer’s daunting physicality occluded whatever merit there was in her music, which faded out with her death in 1944. Glyndebourne’s recent revival of her opera The Wreckers has been restorative and several German opera houses have taken it up.…

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Les Idées heureuses at Bourgie Hall, Nov. 12 Photo: Catherine St-Arnaud

Review | Medieval meets folk with Les Idées heureuses

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By on Baroque and Early, Concert Reviews, Montreal

On Nov. 12, Les Idées heureuses presented their second concert of the season at Bourgie Hall. Jamais je ne t’oublierai : échos du Moyen Âge dans nos chants du terroir consisted of a program of French and French-Canadian folk music and Medieval works. As the title suggests, the program was conceived to illustrate the echoes of Medieval music in our local folk tradition.  The concert was divided into five thematic sections—May, The Mother, Flowers, Cries, Goodbyes, and Dances—each featuring one folk song, arranged by Jean-François Daignault, and various Medieval works.  What you missed:  From its conception through to its execution,…

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Turandot
Scene from Hunagarian State Opera's Turandot. Photo: Valter Berecz / Hungarian State Opera

Review | Intriguingly ambiguous new Turandot at Hungarian State Opera

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By on Concert Reviews, Opera

Puccini’s final opera, Turandot, was famously left incomplete due to the composer’s untimely death. It premiered at Teatro alla Scala in 1926 using composer Franco Alfano’s ending based on fragments of vocal lines and indications for orchestration left by Puccini. Much controversy and critical dissatisfaction has always swirled around the Alfano ending prompting the commissioning of many alternate completions. The most famous of these is Italian composer Luciano Berio’s 2002 rendering which the Hungarian State Opera is currently using in their new production of Turandot, alternating in some performances with Alfano’s more familiar ending. Psychological Turandot As director Dóra Barta indicates…

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Miklos Rozsa

Lebrecht Weekly | Miklos Rozsa’s Violin Concerto with LSO Live

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By on Lebrecht Weekly

I had tea once with Miklos Rozsa in a friend’s flat, around the corner from Abbey Road. It was my first encounter with a Golden Age Hollywood composer and I had far more curiosity than he was prepared to satisfy. He wanted to talk about his concert works, not movie scores. I kept reverting to The Jungle Book and Julius Caesar while he nudged me towards his neglected concertos. The Violin Concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz in 1953, took three years to reach the stage while the soloist fiddled around with the score. Heifetz had been savaged by critics for…

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2024: The Year in Records

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By on CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz
2024 November / December / January 2025

As 2024 comes to an end, let’s take a look (and a listen) to those releases we may have missed this year… The Sky Will Still Be There TomorrowCharles Lloyd, saxophone; Jason Moran, piano; Larry Grenadier, bass; Brian Blade, drumsBlue Note Records At 86, Charles Lloyd could claim the title of “Grand Old Man of the Tenor” but maybe he is too idiosyncratic for that… On his latest for Blue Note, he is reunited with pianist Jason Moran and bassist Larry Grenadier, but it’s the presence of Brian Blade (on his first recorded meeting with Lloyd) that makes this one…

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Cecil Taylor in Warsaw in 1984 by Matthias Creutzinger

Cecil Taylor, Dark and Luminous

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By on CD and Book Reviews, La Scena Online, Scena Jazz
2024 November / December / January 2025

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylorby Philip FreemanWolke Verlag, 2024, 344 p. Like his contemporaries and fellow avant-garde masters Bill Dixon and Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor (1929-2018) was not the easiest subject to approach for a music writer. Enigmatic, frequently baffling interviewers and critics who tried to approach him, he could be almost hostile at times—or at least a bit condescending. (This reviewer recalls an uncomfortable dialogue where Taylor tried to express to a French documentarist what it means to be born “on the wrong side of the tracks.”) At other moments, Taylor just enjoyed…

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Grimm
Artists of Alberta Ballet in Grimm. Photo: Paul McGrath

Review | Alberta Ballet’s perfectly nice Grimm

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By on Dance, La Scena Online, Scena Arts

Francesco Ventriglia became artistic director of Alberta Ballet in early 2024 with a vision: to blend tradition with innovation, to maintain the company’s roots in classical ballet while also exploring what it means to be a ballet company in the modern world. With his first production of the season, Ventriglia triumphed with one of the most traditional of all ballets, La Sylphide. His venture into innovation for his second production, Grimm (seen in Edmonton on October 25 and 26), proved to be far less exciting — but not because of the always excellent dancers.   Choreographed for the company by Stefania…

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Musica Pacifica. Photo credit: Claudine Jacques

Review | Musica Pacifica – Rockstars of Early Flemish Music

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By on Baroque and Early, Classical Music, Concert Reviews

On October 23, 2024, the stage of Bourgie Hall was graced with the presence of one of America’s premiere baroque ensembles, Musica Pacifica, which presented a repertoire of music from the 14th-17th century Dutch provinces. The music by the night’s composers —Tarquinio Merula, Jacob van Eyck, Nicolaus À Kempis, Jan Pierterszoon Sweelinck, Bernardino Borlasca, Johannes Schenk, Philippus van Wichel, Carolus Hacquart, Cornelis Kist and Johann Jakob Walther — is largely unknown, even by early music aficionados.  Judith Lindsberg (recorder) and Alexa Haynes-Pilon (viola da gamba) are the core members of Musica Pacifica. For their Montreal premiere, they were joined by…

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