Category Archives: Uncategorized

With an L-shaped sofa, a counter holding both sink and stove, and a large coffee table, it’s a neutral, modern setting, sterile and uncluttered. It is made of functional, meaningless elements and inherent corpse-like stillness and, no doubt, resembles many … Continue reading →

Shelby Lynne’s CD launch tour last week passed through Toronto’s Hugh’s Room where she featured the new Revelation Road in its entirety for the first half of an almost two hour set. Grammy-winner Lynne then gave the second half over … Continue reading →

Wilhelm Furtwängler, in a letter to Dimitri Mitropoulos, once wrote: “The question of tempo in Don Giovanni has been raised by amateurs and music critics who feel that it is their duty to be my adversaries on a dogmatic basis. … Continue reading →

Hugh Russell as Figaro in Opera Hamilton’s production of The Barber of Seville.   In Opera Hamilton’s latest Il Barbiere di Siviglia, director Brent Krysa has created a freshly imaginative and hilariously detailed theatrical realization of Rossini’s comically exhilarating score. … Continue reading →

A good part of my musical lifetime flashed before my eyes recently at Roy Thompson Hall as I contemplated the cover of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s program. Of the ten conductors on display, I have experienced nine in live performance, … Continue reading →

In the Canadian Opera Company’s cerebrally insistent production of Rigoletto, now at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, Quinn Kelsey in the title role asserts a commanding physical presence and a dynamic voice. Be he mean or gentle or haunted, … Continue reading →

As one might anticipate, after the COC’s stunning Orfeo ed Euridice directed by Canadian Robert Carsen last year, Gluck’s Iphigenia in Tauris, with Carsen again at the directorial helm, is equally bold and haunting in concept and realization. The minimalist … Continue reading →

“We come with the dust and we go with the wind” is one of the most haunting lines in the folk canon. It was penned by Woody Guthrie when he hitched a ride on the melody of Pretty Polly to … Continue reading →

One day, I think it was in the late 1980s, I was walking down London’s depressingly commercial Oxford Street and suffering from exposure to the garish blend of unforgiving gloss and inhuman shallowness that seemed an echo of the reigning … Continue reading →

Apparently. according to Jay Turvey and Paul Sportelli, Maria Severa’s creators, hand-to-mouth poverty in the slums of 19th century Lisbon was certainly a happy gig to live. No matter the survival through prostitution and the humiliating class structure, it was … Continue reading →