Sommaire pour Fall 2014 de Opera Canada

It was interesting, as we compiled the performance listings for the new 2014/15 season, to see what’s hot and what’s not, according to the programming of Canada’s major performing companies. By major companies, I mean the well-established mainstage companies that have a city or province as part of their names, plus the two in Toronto—Canadian Opera Company and Opera Atelier—that don’t. I know that these only number about a dozen companies and that the Canadian opera firmament is more expansive, but these are nonetheless the biggies in terms ofthe number of productions and the number of performances. By my count, this group will be mounting 33 productions over the season, with anywhere from two to 12 performances of each (three-five m the majority ofcases). This is an "opera as usual"…

When I speak to Karina Gauvin, it’s a matter of days before her Glyndebourne Festival debut in Handel’s Rinaldo. She has an intermittent but severe-sounding cough, the kind of ailment that would shred the nerves of many a singer. But her calm demeanour and companionability seem unruffled. (Her confidence was well placed—she sang gloriously on the first night.) From our conversation, it emerges that a certamjudicious amount of trusting in a good outcome is ingrained in her personality. "When you’re a young singer at school," she says, "you shouldn’t be saying, ’This is how it will be,’ because it’s putting things into a mould and setting yourself up for disappointment. I’m happy I’ve had all this concert and recording experience, and then suddenly I’m doing all this opera. It’s been…

I am very interested in Isolde at this point m ’my career," says soprano Adrianne Pieczonka, who elaborates during a conversation in late August that she’s indeed been looking at the options, perhaps part ofthe run of a Bayreuth production in the future, but that there is nothing to announce officially yet. As is often the case with the best dramatic sopranos, the Isolde and the Briinn-hilde questions have dogged Pieczonka for years. Even though she surpasses the Jugendlich-dramatischer Each often ascribed to her and her career has been consistently on the up and up, the soprano has always chosen her roles carefully. "Once you cross that big dramatic line to Brunnhilde, Turandot and Elektra, there’s no turning back," she says. "There’s a price to be paid. The voice simply…

Vocal talent and the will to develop it are essential for every professional singer, of course, but success also depends on factors that have little to do with a music score. Opera Canada’s Richard Turp asked four young Canadians making names for themselves at home and abroad—soprano Helene Guilmette, mezzojulie Boulianne, baritone Phillip Addis and bass-baritone Philippe Sly—what else it takes to pursue such a hugely demanding but richly rewarding profession. Richard Turp (RT): Did your musical apprenticeships prepare you adequately for your singing career? Phillip Addis (PA):Yes, I would say so. It was nearly a decade of formal training, and, aside from the excellent musical preparation, it did include physical training, languages, seminars on taxes—a wide range oftools were given to me. Philippe Sly (PS): I was lucky to…

CANADA EDMONTON Opera Nuova’s 16th year was as ambitious as ever. Since rebrandmg its annual opera boot camp as the Edmonton Vocal Arts Festival, the program has treated audiences to an expanded array of serious singing, both very operatic and less operatic. From May 10-Jun. 29, dozens of young, already well-trained singers, most based in Canada, presented diverse repertoire ranging from French operatic favourites to sacred music and Leonard Bernstein, as well as two "one-act family operas," Dean Burry’s The Brothers Grimm and Isaiah Bell’s The Lives of Lesser Things, a work commissioned by Opera Nuova in 2008.This year’s full opera productions featured Bizet’s Carmen and Massenet’s Cendrillon, while Bernstein’s Candide offered some of the singers the opportunity to exercise their comic chops. In Candide, Brian Deedrick’s animatedly directed production…

Honours and Awards Soprano Joanne Kolomyjec, teaching voice at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music for the past 12 years, has received the prestigious 2013/14 Teacher of the Year Award. Her studio has enjoyed great success, with more than a dozen former students now performing at opera companies in North America and Europe, including Canadian Opera Company, Opera de Montreal, Edmonton Opera, Opera Lyra Ottawa, San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Philadelphia Opera and Opernwerkstatt in Switzerland. Besides teaching, Kolomyjec has also served on juries and panels forjeunesses Musicales du Canada, Ontario Art Council, Canada Council, Canadian Music Competition and National Music Festival, and taught on the faculty ofthe Edmonton-based training program, Opera NUOVA. Tenor Marcel d’Entremont of Merigomish, NS, took the Victoria Foundation GrandAward Prize of $5,000 at the 2014…

On May 16, 1770, King Louis XV held an open house at his 2,000-acre estate in Versailles. To illuminate his new home theatre and remind visitors that France was still the artistic and political centre ofthe world, he ordered his staff to light 3,000 candles. France’s financial ups and downs, the latter caused mainly by costly wars, had precluded construction of a permanent theatre in the palace for almost 100 years. After enduring portable outdoor theatre sets rain or shine, Louis was pleased that the Opera Royal was finally built and ready to stage its first performance. He was also proud that the new theatre would accommodate almost 1,000 guests, invited to the festivities marking the marriage of his grandson to Marie-Antomette. While singers waited in the wings to test…

Throgh all the board meeting I haVe attened at Publication, from the frist in early 1993 right up to the presant day, the sole constant across the table as been the imposing but always-encouraging figure of Rev. Edward J. R. Jackman. Father Jackman had been drawn into the magazine’s orbit years before I met him. He knew founder Ruby Mercer initially through her radio broadcasts about opera, he was a charter subscriber when Ruby launched Opera Canada in I960, and then later he was persuaded tojoin the board, his name first appearing on the masthead in Winter 1989. "I suppose it was because ofthe money," he says today, recalling the progression with a mischievous smile. And so it likely was. I cannot speak for those who brought him to Opera…

What a crew Ernest Newman exclaimed in The NewYork Times when, in 1924, he first sawJenufa, an opera by the then little-known Moravian composer, Leosjanacek. Though the Metropolitan Opera had cast the work’s American premiere splendidly (in German, with Maria Jentza and Marga-rete Matzenauer, and with Artur Bodanzky conducting), Newman had little good to say about their contributions and rather famously dismissed both the opera’s characters ("A more complete collection of undesirables and mcredibles has never previously appeared in opera") and composer ("Only a cut above the ordinary"). Other reviewers, in NewYork and around the world, were no more complimentary. The opera was generally dismissed as an inept regional attempt at the new Italian verismo that had taken over the world’s opera stages, a Cavalleria Rusticana with no memorable tunes,…

CDs: LOVE’S MINSTRELS PHILIPPE SLY Analekta: AN 2 9967 This impressive recital by bass-baritone Philippe Sly is rather misleadmgly subtitled "English songs from the 19th and 20th centuries" because all the works by the five composers included date from the 20th century. It may be a moot point, since English music ofthe period was steeped in a conservative style that often challenges chronology. Nevertheless, this collection is surprisingly varied and includes some gems, not to mention beautiful, artful singing. Still in his mid-20s, Sly has already built an enviable career. First-prize winner of the 2012 Montreal International Music Competition and grand-prize winner ofthe 2011 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, he is an alumnus ofSan Francisco Opera’s Merola Program and the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio. This disc, with Michael McMahon…

Daniel Lipton was booed before he even started the first time he conducted at the Bayensche Staatsoper. "Giuseppe Patane had double booked himself in Covent Garden and Munich. They called me at the last minute... It was the first time I conducted without an orchestra rehearsal, with an orchestra I didn’t know. In the dressing room, I saw the lockers of Patane, Carlos Kleiber, Guiseppe Smopoli... I was asking myself,’What are you doing here?’They were expecting Patane, and they saw this kid and they had no idea who I was. I thought, ’This is my first and last performance in Germany’." Fortunately, each act Lipton conducted garnered more and more applause, and at the end soloist Wolfgang Brendel assured him,"This won’t be the last time you’re here." That nerve-racking debut…

In the town of Caraquet, at the heart of I’Acadie in northeastern New Brunswick, a beautiful house overlooks the Baie des Chaleurs. It is known simply as the Maison Rose, and the view is as stunning as the house is both alluring and charming. In many ways, it perfectly represents and reflects its owner, the soprano and teacher Rosemarie Landry, who shares it with her husband, Fernand Doucet. Today Rosemarie also lives and teaches in Montreal at Universite de Montreal, where ("as a rebellious youth," as she puts it) she received degrees in both piano and voice. She is the first to acknowledge that nothing about her career—or her life, for that matter—is conventional. At a time when a singing career was and remains associated mainly with opera, she established…

If the opening of the Canadian Opera Company’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts was, as the late Richard Bradshaw liked to characterize it, the culmination of a 30Years War, the Hon. Henry N. R. (Hal)Jackman must be counted as one ofthe leading generals ofthe long campaign. He had, to be sure, retired from front-line service before the final push to build the house the COC now calls home, but his support did not waver over the years after he championed the idea of a dedicated theatre in the 1980s and led the company’s forces in sometimes-fractious battles. That his support remained material as well as moral is reflected most visibly in the opera house today in the fact that the lounge area for the COC’s President’s Council donors…

Calgary Opera. 403-262¬7286. calgaryopera.com. ***Silent Night (Puts). C: Mechavich; D: Gately. Dibblee, Honeywell, Polegato, Okulitch. Nov 08,12,14M. Canadian Opera Company (Toronto). 416-363-6671. coc.ca. *Falstaff (Verdi). C: Debus; C: Carsen; Des: Steinberg; Ctms: Reiffenstuel; Lght: Carsen/van Praet. Fmley Osborne, Antoun, Braun, Lemieux, Segal. Oct 03, 09, 12M, 14, 25M, 29, Nov 01. Journeys in Song. Fortier-Lazure, MacNeil. Oct 09M. Madama Butterfly (Puccini). C: Lange, D: Macdonald; Des & Ctms: Benson; Lght: Whitfield. Radette/Kaduce, Secco/Care, DeShong, Croft/G. Dahl. Oct 10,11M, 15,18,19M, 21,22,24,26M, 28,30,31. An Afternoon of Song. Oct 24M. City Opera Vancouver. cityoperavancouver.com. Con amici e Puccini. Nov 20. Edmonton Opera. 780-424¬4040. edmontonopera.com. Il barbiere di Siviglia (Rossini). C: Dean; D: Grant. McLennan, Szadovszki, Brown, Goerz, Sylvestre, Addis, Durand. Oct 25,28,30. Early Music Vancouver. 604-732-1610. earlymusic.bc.ca. Songs of Love and War. Webster,…

Among many career firsts these days, bass-baritone Gerald Finley is surely the first singer to voice Wagner’s Hans Sachs on the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. The proof is on his web site (geraldfinley.com) in a short video of an adventurous expedition this summer with his two sons that also raised the better part of $10,000 for the Help Musicians UK charity. Back on lower ground, Finley opens his 2014/15 season with a role debut as Verdi’s Falstaff for the Canadian Opera Company (Oct.), then heads for Vienna to reprise his Forester in the 84-year-old Otto Schenk’s recent production of Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen (Nov.), followed by a return to noble status as Mozart’s Count in Le nozze di Figaro in Munich (Dec.). The New Year brings him back to North…