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

When we sent our Spring 2020 issue off to press in early February, the coronavirus was largely confined to China and Italy. Cancellations of performances had begun in Italy, but the full-on, worldwide devastation of the pandemic was still largely unfelt in the greater opera world. Since then, the bulk of the 19/20 season has disappeared with indications this will bleed into 2021. Significant productions at Canadian companies had to be abandoned as late as post-dress rehearsal in the case of Edmonton Opera’s Candide. The intricate web of artistic endeavour, years of preparation and heavy fundraising that go into producing an opera means the jettisoning of even one production leaves a huge void. We had to quickly re-adjust planned content for this issue in order to properly reflect the current,…

Canadian mezzo-soprano Michèle Losier’s recent assumptions of major roles have consistently been intellectually rich, emotionally committed and vocally enthralling, earning her the highest accolades. Of Losier’s May 2019 Idamante at La Scala, Der Opern Freund wrote of the artist’s “pleasant timbre and well-formed technique,” noting that she “was physically and gesturally a perfect, aristocratic youth,” and that she expressed the character’s “every nuance of emotion.” In December 2019, when Losier appeared at Brussels’s La Monnaie as Nicklausse and the Muse in Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new production of Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Opera Traveller said she possessed “a remarkably energetic stage presence,” with a “ripe, juicy mezzo … with a wonderfully full, rich bottom” and that she “savoured the language, bringing out a world of colours through the text.” Other recent assignments for…

CDs ALMIRA HANDEL CPO 5555 205-2 This recording of Handel’s very first opera, penned and premiered in Hamburg when he was still a teenager, shows the work to be much more than an interesting curiosity. In the hands of the 33-member Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and its renowned co-directors, Paul O’Dette and Stephen Stubbs, along with a brilliant cast, it comes across as a work brimming with inventive and often challenging arias and ensembles, driving recitatives, instrumental dance numbers, and a vaguely predictable story full of intrigue, misunderstandings, marital affairs and rediscovery of a long-lost heir. The recording was made in cooperation with Radio Bremen in 2018, after staged performances that took place in Boston in 2013. The libretto, based on a fictional text by Giulio Pancieri, sets the…

Danika Lorèn SOPRANO/COMPOSER How I am feeling through all of this changes by the minute! There is so much to deal with and digest in this situation, and very little to distract from it. Each feeling seems to have layers of other emotions attached to it. It’s like thinking you’re biting into angel food cake, but winding up with a mouthful of Schichttorte (shoutout to all the stress bakers out there). All of my contracts for the foreseeable future have been postponed. Now, postponing instead of cancelling may seem like a ray of sunshine, but it is actually preventing me from getting financial aid since nothing was technically cancelled and on paper it doesn’t read as a loss of work. The situation, however, is changing day by day; the recent…

OC: What’s the most important pillar you consider when training voice with any student? MD: The biggest pillar for me is ease. Period. By ease, I really mean physical ease. It’s going to vary from style to style, but you want to see how long you can keep up that sense of physical ease. In other words, it shouldn’t feel like you’re doing very much at all. Once ease is looked after, you can start crafting secondary pillars. OC: What are those important secondary pillars? MD: Ease is at the top, and it [allows for] secondary pillars like authenticity of tone, beauty of sound. I want authenticity to be revealed in the same way that actors talk about revealing truth. My colleague, [opera director] Tom Diamond, said in an acting…

Things are looking dire out there. Before all this, did artists really ever think about how their livelihoods are directly linked to mass gatherings? I’ve considered the ways the arts world could be endangered—funding cuts, mostly—but never the particularly menacing threat that’s settled into place, courtesy of the coronavirus pandemic. But that’s where we’re at: cancelled performances across the board, some extending in 2021, and a collective pit in the stomachs of artists and arts organizations about anything scheduled beyond that. I’ll admit to clinging a bit unreasonably to the idea that no news is good news. I don’t grasp at vague hope simply because I miss going to the opera. I do, of course; but more specifically, I miss knowing it’s happening, even without me there. And I feel…

“Like everyone else,” says Charles Barber, Conductor and Artistic Director of City Opera Vancouver, which commissions and presents chamber opera in venues around Vancouver, including the troubled Downtown Eastside, “I want to see Vancouver Opera thrive and prosper. They have been our lead company for 60 years, and many people––myself included––feel a debt of loyalty and gratitude for everything they have accomplished. When a teenager, their production of Carmen was the first professional opera I ever saw. It changed my life.” COV‘s latest project is an opera about the history, people, and culture of Vancouver’s Chinatown. Nancy Hermiston is Chair of UBC’s Voice and Opera Divisions and Director of the University of British Columbia’s 90-member UBC Opera Ensemble, which puts on three full productions a year, often of challenging material,…

One of your jobs as a librettist is to inspire a composer to write really awesome music,” says Royce Vavrek, the Canadian librettist and playwright currently making extraordinary waves in today’s opera scene. “I strive to find words and phrases that are very delicious.” And evidently, the opera world appreciates delicious. The 37-year-old from Grande Prairie, AB, is known for swift storytelling, for writing libretti that are filled with carefully chosen words, not a one placed without purpose or meaning. “Taut and nuanced,” says The New York Times and The Calgary Herald calls him a “bang-on minimalist.” The New Yorker dubbed him the “indie Hofmannsthal,” with a nod to the librettist behind Richard Strauss masterworks like Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier. It’s no empty comparison: teamed with some of today’s most…