'Director Wim Trompert, working with set and costume designer Nancy Bryant, offers a convincing and appropriate modern-dress concept and staging that is thoughtful, but unfussy. Bryant's striking-looking tryangular set proves versatile, and opens up several times to splendid effect - for instance for the moving chorus of prisoners in the Act 1 finale.'

Kevin Bazzana
Times Colonist, October 13, 2018
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'Pacific Opera Victoria's Fidelio visually arresting,
musically elevated

Pacific Opera Victoria has mounted Beethoven's Fidelio only once before, in 1988 [...] On Thursday, POV openend a new production of Fidelio, one that was visually arresting, emotionally intense and musically elevated.'

Pacific Opera Victoria's Fidelio: superb cast - heavy handed production

'Pacific Opera Victoria’s season-opening production of Beethoven’s Fidelio is musically magnificent. [...] Visually, however, the production (seen opening night, Oct. 11), despite an effective contemporary set, was hampered by fussy direction and heavy-handed projections.

[...} During the overture and behind a scrim, the principal singers mimed Pizarro’s arrest of Florestan and Leonore’s subsequent absorption into a network of dissidents, including Marzelline and Jaquino, ready to assist in her quest to free her husband from oppression. [...] Not only did this complicated setup completely overshadow the overture, but the high drama of soldiers invading a home and dissidents raising their closed fists made the transition to the jolly first scene—which takes place, we gradually find out, two years after Florestan’s arrest — quite jolting. [...]

Beethoven’s message is clear in his music. This otherwise greatly satisfying production just needed to give him a little more space to tell it his way.'

Robin J.Miller in Opera Canada
October 17, 2018
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Fidelio as a mirror of human rights