Table of contents for Spring 2023 in Opera Canada

A true storyteller Livingston is deep into her first season as composerin-residence at the Canadian Opera Company, a post that clinches the Toronto native’s place among Canadian composers with a knack for voices—and drama. The residency is designed to be tailor-made for each composer who holds it, and Livingston’s output during this time will likely feel quite different than that of her predecessor at the COC, Ian Cusson. At the moment, Livingston is taking a moment to be very fly-on-thewall, shadowing the likes of Music Director Johannes Debus and observing as they bring big scores from the page to the stage. “That’s what I find most interesting,” Livingston says, “just seeing the level of musical detail work that’s possible when you’re working with excellent singers and an excellent conductor.” And…

EB What does innovation look like in our industry? TM First, innovation is frequently used as a buzz word, to be sure we’re embarking from a singular point let’s define it. Disruptive Innovation, a term coined by HBS professor Clay Christensen as “the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector…eventually completely redefining the industry.” A classic case study of Disruptive Innovation is Netflix vs. Blockbuster. However, another HBS professor, Dr. Linda Hill, defines innovation as “something that is both new and useful” to your organization. Obviously those are very different ways of thinking about innovation, but both of these eminent professors and their distinguished colleagues ask a common question: how do we make innovation repeatable? For me, the most useful lens lies somewhere between: it seems a bit…

ELBA HAID IS CHAIR OF MANITOBA Opera’s (MO) Board of Trustees and has been a member since 2007. I asked her why she thinks it important to support our opera companies: “I consider community organizations such as Manitoba Opera to be a sacred trust, an institution that carries forward knowledge and practices for creating art which is vital to our community and to our collective humanity. By offering my philanthropic efforts to this organization, my hope is that it will endure long into the future. Such an organization represents what is possible when people across communities and economic sectors can cooperate towards a noble artistic goal.” On February 25, 2023, MO celebrated its 50th Anniversary in a buoyant mood. But Elba remembers the difficult times. “We were in a very…

MILAN’S “TEATRO ALLA SCALA,” DATING FROM 1778, is widely recognized as the most important opera house in the world, not because of its size (the New York Metropolitan Opera has 1000 more seats) or for the number of productions (the Vienna State Opera does twice as many) but thanks to its glorious past and enduring symbolic value. In an interview for Opera Canada, Frenchman Dominique Meyer, who left the Vienna State Opera to join La Scala as General Director in February 2020, explains the difference between the two houses: “La Scala is a very political opera house with a genuine social role. If you look at the history of this house, each time there was a crisis, war, or pandemic, La Scala was always the first Italian institution to reopen its…

A few months after moving from Victoria to assume the directorship of the Opéra de Montréal (OdeM), Patrick Corrigan was interviewed by Natasha Gauthier for Opera Canada. He spoke of his plans for raising the profile of the company, creating more operas, finding new funding and new audiences. Ten new operas have premiered since he took the helm in 2016, including five Canadian works with occupancy rates ranging between 80.3% and 92.9%. New ambitious plans were drafted for the company at the end of 2018 when Corrigan, along with Pierre Vachon, then Director of Marketing and Education, participated in a panel discussion about ‘civic practice’ at the invitation of Opera America. The use of the term ‘civic practice’ by the organizers suggested “a shift away from strategies that build audiences,…

As the COVID-19 pandemic brought mental health to the front page of every newspaper in the world, music psychotherapist and pianist SarahRose Black—also, Editor-In-Chief of Canadian Journal of Music Therapy—and her husband, cellist Andrew Ascenzo, realized there was an opportunity to create more awareness around the potential impact of music within communities. Through reflection, they thought, “why not bring information about the tangible ways music impacts us to accessible public spaces?” Their series—Pulse Music Media—brings real-life accounts of how music changes physical, cognitive, and mental health to high schools, libraries, arts organizations, and medical professionals. By making information about the health benefits of music accessible, and by offering people a space to listen to music differently, they found themselves able to “shine a different light on music and show that…

It takes a special strength of will to stay positive in difficult times, and even more determination to share this feeling with others. Conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson found hers most recently by assembling an orchestra of refugee Ukrainian musicians, though it’s likely the resolve was already there. From her family, perhaps, part of whom were Ukrainian and settled in Manitoba, where she was raised. Two grandmothers made it past one hundred years old and she recalls that “they never complained. They might have fallen down the stairs yesterday but it was always, ‘I’m fine!’” Her father was the conductor of the Winnipeg Youth Orchestra and she grew up helping out in that environment. Eventually, she focused on professional studies in flute that took her to Juilliard, and there she embraced conducting…

JOHN RELYEA WAS ANXIOUSLY PREPARING for his Metropolitan Opera debut as Alidoro in La Cenerentola when he happened to run into the legendary bass Sam Ramey. “Are you going to sing that impossible aria?” Ramey asked. Now, more than twenty years later, Relyea tells me from a London apartment, “That’s not what I wanted to hear!” After letting out a raucous and wonderfully resonant laugh, John collects himself enough to explain, “If Ramey’s telling me it’s ‘impossible,’ then I’m in big trouble!” Relyea, now at 50, is “focused on longevity.” In the realm of classical singing, the concept of longevity can be a loaded term. Perhaps he means vocal longevity, I thought. Many singers meticulously plan their vocal development as to not wade into roles that are “too heavy” too…

As a transgender opera singer, I often feel that my role in the studio, and on stage, is to challenge ideas and subvert the form. I walk into a room and subvert conventions of gender, simply by existing, so I may as well embrace that mold. One tenet of my identity as an artist and member of the opera community is that, in order to survive, art must evolve and adapt, responding to and challenging contemporary attitudes. Opera is an artform which often looks to the past for reference, whether it be for contextual information for a production, or the musical scores themselves, the dominant portion of which, as we know, are by dead, white men. There is continued need for evolution and adaptation within our artform to avoid stagnation in…