My review of the Blu-ray recording of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, in a frustrating production by Christof Loy at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2025, is now available at La Scena Musicale.
Catalogue information: Euroarts Blu-ray 8024248744
Intelligence; music by Jake Heggie, libretto by Gene Scheer, is, on the face of it, a spy thriller. We are in Richmond in 1865 and Union forces are closing in on the Southern capital. Elizabeth Van Lew is a wealthy spinster who is spying for the North. She infiltrates her enslaved woman Mary Jane Bowser into the Jefferson Davis household but Mary Jane is not what she appears. She is highly intelligent, literate and has a photographic memory. No-one will think to hide sensitive information from a, presumed illiterate, slave. The relationship between the two women is complex. Mary Jane was born in Elizabeth’s father’s home but was baptised in the white church and educated in the north. She has been told that her mother died in childbirth. But all is not as it seems.
And now, as they say, for something completely different. Swedish band Louisa Lyne & di Yiddishe Kapelye are touring their show Leonard Cohen in Yiddish and it made its Toronto stop at Lula Lounge on Tuesday evening as part of the Ashkenaz Festival. It makes sense right? Cohen’s roots were in the Yiddish speaking community in Latvia and somehow Yiddish seems apt for his typical subject matter.
Dvořák’s Rusalka seems to be a favourite for directors to give the “high concept” treatment. That’s certainly the case with Philipp Stölzl and Philipp M. Krenn’s production for Dutch National Opera recorded in Amsterdam in 2023.
The season starts to ramp up a bit…
Concerts and Opera
Ulrich Rasche’s production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda, staged in the Großesfestspielhaus at the Salzburg Festival in 2025, is austere and interesting. As most people know, the libretto, based oin a play by Schiller, is not at all historically accurate and invents a relationship between Robert Dudleigh, Earl of Leicester, and Mary Stuart that never existed but turns the opera into a love triangle in which the two queens are vying for Leicester’s attention! Rasche’s production runs with this angle and what little sense of actual political events there is n the opera is pushed into the background.
Every year around this time Confluence Concerts work with a group of young artists to curate and present a concert at Heliconian Hall. This year’s took place on Thursday evening. There were twenty two pieces of music on the programme; some written or arranged by members of the group with composers ranging from Henry Purcell and Barbara Strozzi to Libby Larsen and Sting. There was classical vocal and instrumental from the baroque to yesterday, jazz, fado and genre defying pieces. I’m just going to single out a few (to me at least) highlights.
My last show of this year’s SummerWorks was perhaps the most unusual. Date of Performance; written and directed by Maryam Khalili and presented in The Theatre Centre’s Franco Boni Theatre. It’s a lecture-performance documenting theatre and performance practices created inside Iranian prisons from 1954 to 2024. There is no-one on-stage; just recordings of telephone conversations and some voice overs; all in Farsi with English subtitles.
For the last five years the COC has eld a week long intensive workshop/coaching session for a select group of early career singers and collaborative pianists. The week concludes with a “Showcase” concert in the Jackman Studio which happened this year early on Saturday evening. There were ten singers and two pianists with each singer giving us one aria.
GPO Box No.211; written and directed by Carmen Lee (also responsible for lighting) and performed by Chun Shing Au (also responsible for the model/mask/paper design), is a theatre/dance piece inspired by an exchange of letters with the creators’ friend Siu Ming (a pseudonym), who was incarcerated as a political prisoner for three years following the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. It’s presented by Theatre du Poulet at A Space Gallery as part of SummerWorks.
operaramblings 