Inhaltsverzeichnis für Summer 2022 in Opera Canada

I HADN’T PLANNED ON THE SIXTH OF March, 2020 bearing any special significance; it was just another Friday, capped by a Flying Dutchman for which I had to write a dispirited review. Would I have enjoyed it more had I known it marked my last trip to the Met, or any other theater, for the next nineteen months? Within a week, the opera house’s doors had been shut “temporarily”—through March 31—to keep the encroaching pandemic at bay; by the nineteenth, though, the rest of the season had been canceled. By the first of June, the opening of the 2020–21 season had been postponed till New Year’s Eve; and on September 22 the season was canceled altogether. From my first taste of staged opera as a not-quite-teen, I’d never gone without one…

Magic Flute OPÉRA DE MONTRÉAL Barrie Kosky and Suzanne Andrade’s production of The Magic Flute has arrived in Montreal almost forty cities after its 2012 premiere at the Komische Oper in Berlin. Their marvellous machine deploys 21st century technology to dress up an 18th century opera in 20th century references like silent film, vaudeville, pantomime, and German Expressionism. It is very impressive. The stage is like an advent calendar, just a flat white wall with hidden compartments that singers pop out of like cuts in a film, which eliminates most entrances and exits and speeds things up, as does replacing Singspiel dialogue with text cards. Paul Barritt’s beautiful animations are projected from floor to ceiling and never stop moving. This total retinal occupation is well-suited to audiences with screen addictions,…

JUNE Glyndebourne Festival, Lewes, UK The Glyndebourne Festival, arguably the most idyllic place to take in opera on the planet, is peppered with Canadians. Conductor Jordan de Souza leads Puccini’s La bohème (June 11 - August 14). Soprano Jane Archibald takes on the title role of Handel’s Alcina (July 2 - August 24), and tenor Josh Lovell is Ernesto in Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (July 22 - August 27). In your formal opera attire during the 90-minute interval, you can enjoy a champagne picnic in the gardens while sheep graze nearby. glyndebourne.com JULY Ottawa Chamberfest, ON Carissa Klopoushak, Artistic Director, has curated a fabulous line-up of concerts from July 21-August 4. Highlights include Finnish-Canadian soprano Emili Losier and pianist Jenna Richards’s program featuring works by Canadian female composers on July 24,…

The creative journey to bring a new opera to the stage is fascinating with so many moving parts. The new opera, Yourcenar, une île de passions, premieres this summer. But remarkably the impetus for this new work can be traced to the passion and enthusiasm of librettist Hélène Dorion, who shares with her friend and co-librettist Marie-Claire Blais, an unbounded admiration for Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française in 1980. Hélène Dorion is a poet, novelist, essayist and a long-time lyricophile. In 2016, at the invitation of Opéra de Montréal, Hélène agreed to become ‘librettiste d’un soir’. The challenge was to choose a well-known opera aria and give it new life by replacing the original lyrics with a new text of her own. In her own poetic…

After undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Toronto, he won the top prize at the Canadian Opera Company’s annual competition as well as a place in the company’s Ensemble Studio. Currently in his third and final year there, he has performed many roles on the stage of the Four Seasons Center including the Prince of Persia in Turandot, the Witch in Hansel and Gretel, Gamekeeper in Rusalka and the First Armed Man in Die Zauberflöte. This season, he also covered Alfredo in La traviata in the company’s first staged production before an audience since the beginning of the pandemic. He will be back at the COC next season for the first time as a guest artist in Verdi’s Macbeth in the role of MacDuff, alongside a star-studded cast…

When I told a few people that I was working on a story about choreographers in opera, there was often a pause. “Wait … what?,” they would say. Then they’d nod, “Oh yes, like when they bring in professional dancers to do a big waltz or something.” Yes, I’d respond, but that is by no means all that they do. A skilled choreographer can make an opera production hum in ways that an audience might never notice but will recognize somewhere in their bones. As an apprentice director with Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal in the 1990s, Alain Gauthier “grew up in the opera house,” he says. Since then, he’s directed many productions for Montréal and other opera houses across Canada and the U.S. Occasionally, he’s been able to…

The impact of a full year of theatre lockdowns is immediately apparent in this third annual Opera Canada economic review of Canada’s opera sector. Total revenues for the Top 40 performing companies in 2020/21 were $57.1 million, compared to $72.2 million the previous year, a further 21% decline since the onset of the COVID pandemic. Our first sector review of 2018/19, when companies were operating “as normal” with full performance seasons, pegged revenues of the sector at $85.1 million. The decline in revenues over the worst of the pandemic amounts to $28 million, a 33% decline. The numbers are grim, but hardly surprising. Performing companies rely on three revenue streams—ticket sales and related earned revenues, public funding and donations. The earned-revenue stream has been largely knocked out of the equation,…

YOU ARE SITTING IN A BARN. Not just any barn, but The Barn at Westben—a custom-built, timbreframe structure which for the past 22 years has welcomed thousands to an impressive array of summer and fall concerts at its beautiful rural location. Echoes of past guests like Gerald Finley, Adrianne Pieczonka, Richard Margison and Wallis Giunta linger in the air. It is a bright, beautiful summer day near Campbellford in southern Ontario, and as usual, the massive walls and doors have been rolled away to welcome in the beautifully peaceful meadows and gently rolling farmlands of Northumberland County, two hours east of Toronto. It is fresh, friendly, and rejuvenating. Just being here is enough to make your heart sing… Singing is a natural at Westben. Certainly, there are those on stage,…