Table of contents for Vol. LX, No. 3 in Opera Canada

With the publication of this issue, we begin, almost to the day, our year-long festivities to mark the 60th birthday of Opera Canada magazine, Canada’s oldest, continually published arts journal. Celebrations will include a special, expanded 60th-anniversary issue to be released this summer. Subscribers will receive this carefully-curated commemorative edition as a bonus in addition to their four ‘regular’ annual issues. Reaching a milestone anniversary like this 60th provides an appropriate occasion to reflect back, and look forward. And this issue’s feature on ‘indie opera’ across Canada is as good a place as any to start. When considering the indie opera phenomenon, I was immediately reminded of a 2010 article written by arts critic Anne Midgette for the Washington Post. Examining the then-still-relatively-new trend of producing opera in smaller spaces…

I knew I’d made a mistake by not taking the city map the hotel clerk had offered me. Ordinarily when I’m visiting a city new to me, I’ll scope out how to get to the opera house in the afternoon. That way I won’t get lost getting there at night. However, on a recent afternoon in early January, beautiful Brussels’ other sights beckoned. By now it was 6:30 p.m. and in the dark of night, the streets of historic old Brussels, jam packed with tourists still celebrating the New Year, all looked pretty much the same. I had 30 minutes to get to La Monnaie, the opera house I’d heard of long ago, but had never visited. I felt as though I was walking in the correct direction, but just…

For pianist-vocal coach Carrie-Ann Matheson, the biblical saying that ‘a prophet is not honoured in his own land’ has a certain ring of truth, in her case, musically. She’s virtually unknown in Canada, even though she’s that rare bird—a Canadian pianist/opera coach working internationally, and at the highest level. A Charlottetown, PEI native, Matheson was a member of the music staff at Metropolitan Opera for several years, before moving to join Zurich Opera in the 2014-15 season, as assistant conductor and vocal coach. Matheson brought with her a wealth of experience, having assisted such renowned conductors as James Levine, Daniel Barenboim, Fabio Luisi, Gianandrea Noseda, and fellow Canuck Yannick Nezet-Seguin. In addition to her behind-the-scenes work, Matheson also accompanies many singers in recital, among them Rolando Villazon, Jonas Kaufmann, Piotr…

Reviews of CDs and DVDs CDs TRI SESTRY EÖTVÖS Oehms OC986 Peter Eotvos’ 1998 opera Tri sestry, based on Anton Chekhov’s play Three Sisters, is here recorded live at Oper Frankfurt in 2018. It takes fragments of the original Russian play and recombines them in a non-linear way to create a prologue and three “Sequences” from the points of view of Irina, Andrei and Mascha respectively. The recombination is complex enough for the accompanying booklet to contain a table mapping Chekhov’s scene order to Eotvos’. There’s no libretto in the CD package so even with flipping between the fairly detailed synopsis and the track listing, it’s hard to figure out who is singing, or about what. No doubt this was much clearer when watching the staged production. Matters are not…

It seems strange to be writing an article extolling the virtues of preparatory reading in a magazine devoted to opera. Indeed, readers engage with Opera Canada to learn about singers, productions, recordings, and other aspects of the art form. Yet learning—the desire to learn—is fraught with baggage in the 21st century. Recently I learned of an individual who, having seen a particular opera numerous times, had only recently been made aware of its broader history (and connection to other operas) by reading about it on Wikipedia. This individual wasn’t aware the work was based on an older theatre piece, one revolving around the exploration of social hierarchies, and wasn’t aware of the importance of its minor characters, either. Does such ignorance matter, especially in light of longtime enjoyment? That depends…

Cairan Ryan is a rabid soccer and hockey fan who—by his own admission—spends most weekends yelling at the TV, urging his favourite teams on. “I bleed Manchester United and Calgary Flames,” laughs the Canadian baritone. This enthusiasm stems from his childhood years as a competitive soccer player. To this day, his pursuit of excellence on the soccer field mirrors his drive for mastery on the world’s opera stages. Ryan’s father was an Irish trombone player and his English mother sang and played the piano. While his musical family was living in a small town in Belgium, from the age of eight, Ryan started to learn theory and piano in an after school program. His family moved to Cochrane, Alberta when he was twelve, and in high school Ryan played saxophone…

Every business enterprise, large or small, faces similar challenges. Where is the market for what they’re selling? How do they generate cash flow to keep the company afloat and, ideally, growing? How do they judge success? In most cases, it’s the bottom line, but are there other measures as well? Customer satisfaction? Community improvement? Personal esteem? Opera is a business, and whether we’re talking about an institution like the Canadian Opera Company with its $40-million-plus budget, or a tiny, independent operation with zero staff and negligible other resources, the motivations for creating art and being able to continue to do so are fundamentally the same. But in the world of independent opera, the reasons for persisting are head-spinningly diverse compared to the goals of most established companies. Independent opera companies…