Spending part of the day with an excellent fairytale opera should be a great way to to leave a hangover and pending resolutions in abeyance.

French director/designer Laurent Pelly has staged a wonderfully whimsical new production of Cendrillon — Jules Massenet’s  imaginatively rich setting of Charles Perrault’s take on the Cinderella fairy tale premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1899.

You can watch the production first seen in Santa Fe, NM, from a run at the Théâtre de a Monnaie in Brussels (which ended Thursday night) in free, high-definition video to Jan. 19, thanks to the financial support of several forward-thinking Monnaie patrons.

The whole cast is strong, but Rinat Shaham is spectacular as Lucette (Cinderella). Having a mezzo of her charisma in the role is a treat. We had the pleasure of sampling her voice and talents in Toronto two seasons age, when she arrived as a last-minute Carmen stand-in at the COC.

Check it out here.

Happy New Year.

John Terauds

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John Terauds

John Terauds, Editor-Emeritus of Ludwig van Toronto, is currently a Divinity student at the University of Toronto and a church music director. He joined the Toronto Star in 1988, was the classical music critic from 2005 to 2012, and continues as a freelance critic for the paper. He is the co-author of Roy Thomson Hall: A Portrait, a book written with Toronto Star Colleague, William Littler.

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