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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

Photo: Tam Photography

Review | Gala Talent: In Search of Vocal Treasures

By La Scena Musicale Team on 27 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

On Wednesday December 20, Opéra de Montréal presented its Talent Gala, featuring 11 finalists in the company’s annual Atelier lyrique entrance competition. Adrian Rodriguez, Justin Bernard and Wah Keung Chan attended this decisive final for the future careers of these young artists. Here are their impressions. Heidi Duncan, soprano AR: A great all-around talent with a beautiful mastery of her middle voice. – Adrian JB: Solid technique, but lacking the vocal personality that makes her stand out. – Justin Tessa Fackelmann, mezzo-soprano Ready to embark on a full-on operatic career. Her large lyric mezzo voice effortlessly filled the acoustically challenging…

Kateřina Kněžíková (Vixen) National Theatre Brno’s The Cunning Little Vixen. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Review | An Over Full Cunning Little Vixen at Janáček Brno Festival

By Gianmarco Segato on 26 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

The 2024 Janáček Brno Festival closed on Nov. 24 with a revival of National Theatre Brno’s 2018 production of Janáček’s 1924 opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. Set in Brno’s historic Dagmar Children’s Home for abandoned children, company artistic director Jiří Heřman’s vision is inventive, but insufficiently focused. Too many competing visual and dramaturgical elements distract from the original story’s life-affirming message. At the start, we see period photos of the original care home’s functionalist edifice which are echoed in the clean lines and round window of the set. Children are everywhere, running on and off stage pushing wooden animal toys…

Eliška Gattringerová (Foreign Princess) & Jana Šrejma Kačírková (Rusalka) in Rusalka at Janáček Brno Festival

Review | Rusalka on the verge at Janáček Brno Festival

By Gianmarco Segato on 25 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Years that end in a four have a special significance in the Czech Republic as a cause to celebrate their national musical heritage with a ‘year of Czech music’. The Janáček Brno Festival therefore extended its umbrella this year to include works by other Czech greats like Antonín Dvořák. His opera Rusalka was seen on Nov. 23 in a production by David Radok that premiered earlier this year at the festival’s hometown National Theatre of Brno. This deeply psychological interpretation exchanged the opera’s traditional, fairy tale associations for an adult story centred around problematic relationships. Czech director Radok, who also…

Kremerata Baltica. Photo: Angie Kremer

Lebrecht Weekly | Lebrecht Album of the Year for 2024

By Norman Lebrecht on 22 November 2024 Lebrecht Weekly

2024 has been a flat year for major labels and an unsettled one for minors. Four independent outfits sold out – Hyperion to Universal, Bis to Apple, Chandos to Klaus Heymann, Divine Art to Rosebrook – the biggest shakeout in decades, leaving us wondering how much of their stubborn individuality might survive in the decade ahead. In choosing the album of the year, I look for projects that define the era and will pass the test of time. Janine Jansens’ recording of the Sibelius and first Prokofiev concertos on Decca is one that bears comparison with the legends. Yundi Li’s…

Sarah Dufresne (Ophélie). Photo: Vivien Gaumand

Review | Opéra de Montréal: Hamlet or Ophélie’s Triumph

By Justin Bernard on 21 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera, Romantic

On Nov. 16, Opéra de Montréal (OdeM) took up the challenge of presenting a little-known work from the French repertoire for the first time in its recent history. Of the entire production, conductor Jacques Lacombe was the only one to have performed it before. It sure speaks for the rarity of this Hamlet by Ambroise Thomas. But what a discovery, what an abundance of musical themes, what genius of orchestration! Without analysing the score in detail, we can legitimately be enthusiastic about the saxophone solo at the start of Act II, Scene 2, a gesture as astonishing as it is…

Barbora Perná in the title role of Jenůfa at Janáček Brno Festival. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Review | A Divisive Jenůfa at Janáček Brno Festival

By Gianmarco Segato on 21 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Janáček Brno Festival presented a new staging of Janáček’s Jenůfa on Nov. 20 in a co-production with the Moravian Theatre Olomouc where it had its premiere on Nov. 15. Director Veronika Kos Loulová offers a radical take that includes spoken text as well as some surprising tinkering with the score. The result was both stimulating and provocative, raising the ire of audience members who vocalised their disapproval. Ultimately, Loulová and her all-woman team have created a Jenůfa for today that questions tropes around motherhood and familial relationships. The creative team worked in conjunction with the organisation Úsměv mámy (A Mother’s…

Dorothea Röschmann as Emilia Marty in Staatsoper Berlin's The Makropulos Case at Janáček Brno Festival. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Review | Berlin Staatsoper’s fragmented The Makropulos Case at Janáček Brno Festival

By Gianmarco Segato on 19 November 2024 Concert Reviews, Opera

Leoš Janáček’s penultimate opera, The Makropulos Case returned to Brno, where it premiered in 1926, in Claus Guth’s 2022 production from Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden. This was the company’s first appearance at the bi-annual Janáček Brno Festival where it presented two performances (seen Nov. 18) of the opera based on Karel Čapek’s 1922 “comedy” dealing with the complex emotional baggage associated with immortality. Guth, along with set designer Étienne Plus and costume designer Ursula Kudrna, have chosen a “period” 1920s Art Deco setting that includes a troupe of dancers/movement artists who cater to opera singer Emilia Marty. From the…

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

Review | Fabulous 50s Falstaff at Hungarian State Opera

By Gianmarco Segato on 19 November 2024 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…

Xavier Roberge as The Little Prince. Photo: Denis Roberge

Review | OM’s Staged Little Prince Produces Mixed Results

By Heather Weinreb on 19 November 2024 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…

Lebrecht Weekly | Hanni Liang Plays Ethel Smyth With Blazed Conviction

By Norman Lebrecht on 15 November 2024 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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