Montréal composer Alain Thibault’s first opera is a tour-de-force for solo soprano, based on the dream-like text of René-Daniel Dubois. Thibault makes the most of restricted means, and gives Dubois’s jagged, multi-character text (wich culminates in a meeting of Stalin and Santa Claus) a surprisingly lyrical form. It’s a welcome break from the slick electroacoustic music Thibault spent most of the eighties polishing and repolishing. Vaillancourt is superb, in a piece created especially for her talents and produced two year ago in Montréal by the small but important music theatre company, Chants libres.