Table of contents for Vol. LIX, No. 4 in Opera Canada

One of the central debates in opera today is how to keep the art form relevant for an audience which no longer passively accepts the racist, misogynist and sexist tropes of yesteryear. Our last issue dealt with the challenges faced by women singers when portraying some of the standard repertoire’s iconic roles…many of which are mired in stereotypes we find unacceptable in the #MeToo era. These issues aren’t going away, so it’s no surprise to see them reappear in this edition. Before the Canadian design/director team of Andre Barbe and Renaud Doucet agreed to helm Glyndebourne’s new The Magic Flute, they wanted to feel satisfied they could deal with the work’s inherent racism and misogyny. Read about their ingeniously creative response on p. 8. Bizet’s Carmen is a wasp’s den…

CDs Doctor Atomic ADAMS Nonesuch 7559793107 Doctor Atomic, John Adams’ 2005 opera about the development of the first atomic weapon, makes a powerful CD debut with this issue. This is helped by that fact the piece is almost more oratorio than opera with very little action required. So little, that Peter Sellars’ original production was staged the same way he deals with oratorios: with lots of stylized movement for the chorus and the introduction of dancers. There are definite advantages to having the music without the distraction of the visuals. Much of Act I is spent on scene-setting at Los Alamos. At times the libretto, largely drawn from archive sources by Sellars, is prose-heavy. It leaves you wishing that frequent Adams collaborator, poet Alice Goodman, had continued to work on…

Emily Dorn In the high stress, high stakes world of opera auditions, showing up without German repertoire in front of the director of Dresden’s Semperoper would normally be the kiss of death. Not so for soprano Emily Dorn. Born in Mississauga, Ontario to a musical family, the former Emily Duncan-Brown sang with the Canadian Children’s Opera Company and attended Etobicoke School of the Arts. After studies with Lucille Evans at McGill, and Ruth Falcon at Mannes, the then Florida-based Dorn landed roles in the 2011-12 season with Opera in Williamsburg (Lucy in The Telephone), Lyric Opera of Virginia (Violetta), Palm Beach Opera (Juliette) and Green Mountain Opera Festival (Norina). Her management set up an audition with Eytan Pessen, then of Dresden’s Semperoper—little did she know how potentially important it would…

The city is in the middle of one of its first big snow days of 2019 when I go to meet Ambur Braid at Toronto’s Soho House She’s there when I arrive, already settled in a plush armchair beneath a warm-looking sweater and a striking statement necklace; she flashes a big smile and announces, “I’m getting a cheeseburger.” Tall and stylish, often flanked by her toy poodle, Walter, Braid has a distinct air of star quality about her. But what sort of star? She possesses the conversational skills of a politician, no doubt honed at events like the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson’s 80th birthday. And she has the disarming charisma of an actor, which came in handy while getting her make-up done next to Bryan Cranston on-set of the recently-released…

The cover art says it all. OPERA AS OPERA in big capital letters. The first “OPERA” in the title is given a pristine graphic treatment, the second resembles crumbling marble. It’s perfect imagery to sum up the impetus behind this book—that the operatic art form today is in serious decline, if not in imminent disintegration. Conrad L. Osborne, elder statesman among music critics, took 18 years to write this book and the result is 827 densely packed pages. Even for opera lovers accustomed to lengthy works, this magnus opus is formidable, a veritable treasure trove of operatic/cultural observations from the last fifty plus years. While it’s impossible to cover all the details here, I will address Osborne’s main points, many (not all) of which resonate with this reviewer. Divided into…

Divine Threads: The Visual and Material Culture of Cantonese Opera By April Liu in Collaboration with the Museum of Anthropology Richmond: Raincoast Books, 2019 ISBN: 978-1-77327-023-4 $60.00 Hardcover Opera is an art form that presents a multi-sensory encounter, transporting us to other times, places or cultures. This experience is often transitory, lasting only for the duration of the performance or perhaps in our memories—rarely do audiences have access to the costumes, props, and other objects related thereto. And yet, it is in such objects that the poignant traces of the performers and their makers are found. As York University theatre scholar Marlis Schweitzer tells us: “After the body has gone, the costume continues to hold something of that body within it.” It is in reading these clues that scholars are…

As summer unfolds and the heat of long days leads to warm, starry evenings, thoughts turn to the many cultural festivals happening across Canada. One of the most celebrated is the Festival de Lanaudiere in Joliette, Quebec, which opens its season in early July and runs to early August. Founded in the 1970s, the Festival is located roughly 70 kilometers east of Montreal on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River. Attracting approximately 55,000 visitors per season, performances are held in the outdoor Fernand-Lindsay Amphitheatre. “When I was a teenager this is what people did in the summer,” says the Festival’s newly-minted Artistic Director, Renaud Loranger. “People went to the Festival because it’s lovely, it’s outdoors, it’s not expensive. In hindsight, I can say this is what determined my…