Category Archives: Uncategorized

Gluck’s down-to-basics reformist opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, is a very human and sublimely musical rite that explores humanity’s most fundamental and blunt existential condition: we die. Or, more painfully for us, those we love deeply die before we do, and … Continue reading →

Alex Pangman’s new CD, titled 33, begins at speeding ticket tempo with I Found a New Baby and it sits comfortably in memories of the instrumental 1937 Teddy Wilson Orchestra recording. After all, Pangman’s band, the Alleycats, are an ace … Continue reading →

At the outset, under conductor Leonardo Vordoni’s baton, the overture to Canadian Opera Company’s current La Cenerentola seems more a reticent sigh than a twinkle of fun one expects in Rossini. What hint of playfulness there is seems outside the … Continue reading →

A composer friend and occasional collaborator, Barend Schipper in The Netherlands, once explained to me how the modern ear, with its reverential and oh-so-serious attitude toward Mozart, often missed the humour in his essence. Tragedy and humour are not separate … Continue reading →

In 1939, when William Saroyan won both the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Time of Your Life, a civilization pummeled by the Great Depression now had the unimaginable carnage of World War Two … Continue reading →

About two years ago I notified the online All Music Guide that their biography of Hamilton’s Jackie Washington contained a number of errors because its author had mixed biographical information of two Jackie Washingtons. I explained further that I, with … Continue reading →

Here’s the scene: a dark and shadowy street with strands of London fog drifting in and out, a lamp post, a bobby strolling through, a variety of street-world English accents, and a voice that shouts the news of Sherlock Holmes’ … Continue reading →

The near-to-first production I saw of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the legendary Peter Brook mounting of forty years ago that placed a smugly grand Alan Howard as Oberon on a trapeze. At the end, the cast burst into the … Continue reading →

South Pacific’s lead characters, ensign Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque, originate conspicuously from two distinct worlds. She is from Little Rock and exudes an aura of everyday small town folk. She is twangy, good-willed, innocent in the ways of … Continue reading →