I lost my breath to the music of Parsifal the first time I heard it probably 30 years ago, but today was the first time I experienced an opera performance, live from The Met in HD. First, you have to get past the intense Christianity. It is hard to find a mountain of salt big enough to take with the message of peace, redemption and forgiveness ( Read more... )

We're going to spend (Canadian) Thanksgiving weekend in Toronto: Danny, Brenna, Marian, Kerri and me. For Saturday we have tickets to see Das Rheingold live from the Met in HD.

Here's the menu for dinner on Sunday afternoon:

• roast turkey
• gluten-free turkey gravy
• rosemary garlic roasted new potatoes
• baked orange squash (bake squash an prepare casserole ( Read more... )

Click to view

Happily, my personal memory of Maureen Forrester is recorded on YouTube. When I was 24, I went with my parents to see this production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe at the Stratford Festival, starring Forrester as Queen of the Fairies. Besides her international career as a contralto, she was known as a champion of Canadian composers and a ( Read more... )

On Saturday Danny and I saw Madama Butterfly broadcast live from The Met. Of all we have seen in the first three seasons of this series, we each rated this performance in our top two favourites.

I knew the music and story, although this was the first time I saw the whole three-and-a-half hour opera. It is one of the most popular in the repertoire ( Read more... )

Recently I acquired the entire Der Ring Des Nibelung in a 14 CD set, featuring James Levine and The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus. This Deutsche Grammophon recording was apparently released to mark the opening of the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto last year, and the Canadian premier performance of the Ring. I ( Read more... )

Sylvie, Les and I went to the Waterloo Galaxy to see Eugene Onegin live from the Met on the big screen today. I was unfamiliar with the opera, but expected Tchaikovsky's music to captivate me, and wasn't disappointed. Several of the dance interludes are popular concert pieces, of course, but the entire work's lyricism and poetry drew me along from ( Read more... )

At dinner in a restaurant this afternoon, Mom declared solemnly, "I achieved one of my life's dreams today."

As a girl, she had read a book about a woman who grew up in New York City and eventually took her granddaughter to see an opera at The Met. Mom, who didn't have anyone who would accompany her to things like that, dreamt of taking her own ( Read more... )