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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

Les Violons du Roy conducted by Nicolas Ellis. Photo: Florence Geneau

Review | Kerson Leong Dazzles in Lopsided Les Violons du Roy Program

By Heather Weinreb on 18 February 2025 Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Montreal, Orchestral, Strings, Violin

For Valentine’s Day, Les Violons du Roy presented a program full of pathos at Montreal’s Bourgie Hall. On the program were iconic excerpts from J.S Bach’s religious choral works, as well as the rip-roaring premiere of Found in Lostness, a piece for solo violin and string orchestra by Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. Bach and Murphy couldn’t be more different; the disparateness of their music was tied together with two Mendelssohn pieces. Mendelssohn’s earliest piece, the Symphonia for Strings composed when he was 14 years old, started off the concert. His last complete work, String Quartet no. 6 in F minor,…

Benjamin Appl and Eric Lu. Photo 1: David Ruano

Review | Benjamin Appl & Eric Lu’s Schwanengesang at Bourgie Hall

By Amanda Wong on 17 February 2025 Art Song, Concert Reviews, Montreal, Piano, Vocal

A German-born baritone like Benjamin Appl is certainly no stranger to Schubert’s work. I can only assume that the Austrian composer’s impressive list of over 600 songs offer much to Appl’s repertoire, who himself is largely a Lieder singer. Accompanied by American pianist Eric Lu, Appl presented Schubert’s Schwanengesang—his ‘swan songs’—as well as Beethoven’s song collection, An die ferne Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved), at Montreal’s Bourgie Hall on Feb. 13. What you missed Though one’s swan song is typically a final piece or performance before retirement or death, Schubert’s Schwanengesang is a collection of Lieder compiled and shared by…

Opéra national de Paris’ Castor et Pollux. Photo: Vincent Pontet

Review | Peter Sellars’ Unhip Castor et Pollux in Paris

By Ossama el Naggar on 14 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Nothing is less hip than a strenuous attempt to be hip. This is how polite society would describe Paul Sellars’ take on Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (seen Feb. 7). I’ll leave it to your imagination how less charitable souls would describe it, or you might prefer to check your social media. The story of Castor and Pollux is somewhat reminiscent of Orpheus and Eurydice but with fraternal love instead of marital love as the motivation. Castor and Pollux are twin half-brothers born to Leda. Castor was her son from Tyndareus, King of Sparta. Pollux, an immortal demi-god, was her son…

Lebrecht Weekly | The Most Convincing Performance of Stravinsky’s Le Rossignol on Record

By Norman Lebrecht on 14 February 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

The English conductor Sir Eugene Goossens was stopped in March 1956 on arrival at Sydney Airport. He was found to be in possession of pornographic materials and rubber goods that he intended to share with a female lover. The police had been tipped off by a tabloid reporter, in cahoots with the conductor’s professional rivals. Goossens was fined a hundred pounds and left Australia in disgrace. Back in London he resumed working with BBC orchestras and others, going on to make one of my most-played recordings, the Bach double concerto with the Oistrakhs. Sir Eugene, who kept his knighthood, died…

Lila Dufy (Dircé) and Joyce El-Khoury (Médée). Photo: DR Stefan Brion.

Review | Joyce El-Khoury Triumphs as Médée in Paris

By Ossama el Naggar on 13 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vocal

Premiered in Paris in 1797, Cherubini’s Médée was originally presented with a French libretto, based on Euripides’ play from Greek antiquity. It’s this version that is currently onstage at Paris’s Opéra Comique (seen Feb. 8). The opera was tepidly received at its premiere and mostly forgotten for over a century, until Maria Callas revived it in the 1950s with an Italian libretto conceived especially for her. The original French version is in the style of Gluck, the great reformer who believed opera should be a perfect blending of music and text. It is also an opéra comique in which spoken dialogue alternates with…

Vancouver Opera’s 2025 production of Flight. Photo: David Cooper Photography

Review | Vancouver Opera’s Flight: Laugh Until You Cry

By Kaitlyn Chan on 12 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera, Vancouver, Vocal

On Feb. 8, Vancouver Opera presented the local premiere of Jonathan Dove’s 1998 opera, Flight. This opera—inspired by the true story of an Iranian refugee stranded in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years—is an emotional rollercoaster ride from the comedic to the heart-wrenching. The production originated at Pacific Opera Victoria in early 2020, just before the pandemic shut down. Stage direction was entrusted there to veteran Canadian theatre legend Morris Panych who has revived his retro-1960s vision for Vancouver Opera. At the start of the opera, Ken MacDonald’s set design looked quite simple with a tall control tower…

Scene from Paris Opera's I puritani. Photo: Sebastien Mathe

Review | Lisette Oropesa Triumphs in Misguided Paris I puritani

By Ossama el Naggar on 11 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera

Bellini’s final opera, I puritani (1835), premiered shortly before the composer’s untimely death by accidental poisoning. It is one of the highpoints in the romantic Italian bel canto repertoire, leaving us to wonder what other masterpieces Bellini might have written had he lived past thirty-three. I puritani is based on the French play Têtes Rondes et Cavaliers (1833), itself derived from Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality (1816). It takes place in Plymouth circa 1640, during the English Civil War fought between Puritans and Royalists culminating with Cromwell’s victory. Reputed to have been Queen Victoria’s favourite opera, it’s dramatically compact and…

Alexandra Marcellier (Blanche de la Force) in Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía, Valencia's Dialogues des carmélites. Photo: Miguel Lorenzo-Mikel Ponce/Les Arts

Review | A Very Canadian Dialogues des carmélites in Valencia

By Ossama el Naggar on 11 February 2025 Concert Reviews, Opera

Based on Die Letzte am Schafott (“The Song at the Scaffold”), a novella about the execution by guillotine of sixteen Carmelite nuns from Compiègne in 1794, Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) wrote a screenplay for a film that ultimately was not produced. However, seeing its potential, Italian publisher Ricordi bought the rights and commissioned Francis Poulenc to write Dialogues des Carmélites, based on Bernanos’s work. The opera premiered in 1957 at La Scala to great acclaim, and has been a mainstay of the twentieth-century opera canon ever since. In Act I, Blanche de la Force, a young noblewoman afflicted with an unnamed…

Lebrecht Weekly | Boult’s Elgar : An extraordinary double-album of unpublished recordings

By Norman Lebrecht on 7 February 2025 Lebrecht Weekly

There are days when only Elgar will do. When the skies are low and the politics grim, a wash of Elgarian orchestral colour relieves existential gloom like no other remedy. The first symphony delivers pull-your-socks-up bluster and the second a subtler encouragement. Elgar always does it for me. This extraordinary double-album, titled Boult’s Elgar, brings together unpublished recordings by the composer’s young friend, Sir Adrian Boult. The sleeve notes are by Nigel Simeone, whose new book, Edward Elgar and Adrian Boult, chronicles a friendship that was interrupted for seven years by the composer taking umbrage at something the conductor had…

(L to R) Antoine Malette-Chénier, Catherine St-Arnaud, and Sylvain Bergeron. Photos: Alex Tran, Gaetz Photography, and Guillaume D. Cyr

Review | La Nef: From Double-Digit Cold to Sunny Spain

By Jan Krejcar on 7 February 2025 Baroque and Early, Classical Music, Concert Reviews, Montreal

I was at a dinner party on a very cold, very wintry night right after Christmas, and one of the guests (a non-musician) said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if people researched old instruments from hundreds of years ago and played the pieces that were written then on those instruments?” I didn’t know what to say, really. There have been whole university departments dedicated to historical instruments for many decades now. But I was pleased to see, a month later, on an equally cold and equally wintry night, music from a time very long past, played on just such instruments, making…

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