Table of contents for Vol. LIX, No. 1 in Opera Canada

The heatwave that has affected Canada and Europe this summer brought soaring temperatures to the two opera festivals I attended in August: Festival d’Opera de Quebec and the Bayreuther Festspiele in Bavaria, Germany. You can read my review of Quebec’s new, Metropolitan Opera-destined Robert Lepage production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at operacanada.ca. I am still buzzing from my first pilgrimage to Bayreuth, location of Richard Wagner’s former home, Wahnfried (now a museum) and the Festspielhaus he built for the express purpose of presenting his own works. My ‘neophyte’s view of Bayreuth’ will appear in 2018’s final issue, but first, a few thoughts. The effort to mount even a single Wagner opera is epic—most companies would be happy to present one every few seasons. In Bayreuth, I saw Lohengrin, Die…

Walking into the opera costume department of Malabar Limited is like entering into an ostentatious and intricate lair. As Victorian-style dresses sway from hangers above and embroidered suits with tassels dance as the wind blows through the door, the shop immediately transports every customer onto an imaginary theatrical stage. With their ability to leave a lasting impression on audiences, costumes are among the most important design elements for any theatrical production, says Douglas Begoray, Rental Manager at Malabar’s Opera Department. Boasting a stock of over 10,000 costumes at their downtown Toronto, Little Portugal warehouse location, Malabar has been the go-to rental company for such leading Canadian companies as Opera Atelier, Canadian Opera Company and Manitoba Opera, outfitting casts for some of the repertoire’s most popular titles including La traviata, La…

In 2016, when Patrick Corrigan was appointed the new General Director of Opera de Montreal, he was inheriting a periodically troubled company, one that had finally found its feet again after several financially and artistically uncertain years in the early 2000s. If there were ever any fears that a change in leadership would result in a new period of instability at OdeM—or that an Anglo from a West Coast company simply wouldn’t fit in—they dissipated quickly. Now two years into his tenure, Corrigan has established himself as a careful, collaboratively minded leader, whose innovative impulses are tempered with a ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broke’ mindset, and one who fully embraces Montreal’s culture as the next best thing to a native son. Indeed, Corrigan, who speaks excellent French, was…

It’s the very early days of spring in Toronto, which means fluctuating weather conditions. Today is no exception, with the bright sunny morning turning into a chilly afternoon filled with flurries. Adam Fisher pulls up to the coffee shop on his bike, cheeks flushed but smiling. He mentions that it seemed warm when he left the house and shrugs. The charm and affability he portrays onstage are apparent from the start. Some people are born knowing what they want to do for the rest of their lives; others come to it later on. That day came for the singer while he was a percussion major at Kwantlen College in BC, after touring the Pacific Northwest for three years with a death metal band as their drummer. That’s right, Fisher began…

The availability of live-streamed and on-demand opera has exploded in the last five years. Major companies like Royal Opera House (Covent Garden), Opéra national de Paris, Grand Teatre del Liceu (Barcelona) and Vienna State Opera have cinema distribution deals followed by DVD releases. Many more stream their productions on the internet and make them available to a global audience free of charge for a period of time. Some do it through the legacy media—Glyndebourne for example, via the Guardian and Daily Telegraph websites, and just about all the French opera companies and orchestras on the website Culturebox, run by a consortium of French public TV stations. Others stream through the EU-supported OperaVision platform (which transmits productions from 30 opera houses across and outside Europe) and still others via their own…

CDs PINOCCHIO BOESMANS Cypres: Cyp4647 Belgian Philippe Boesmans is not well-known in North America as an opera composer, but this treatment of the classic children’s fable is his eighth full-length venture in lyric theatre, here recorded live in Sept. 2017 at Brussels’s La Monnaie, where the octogenarian has served for two decades as composer-in-residence. As presented in the highly laudatory DVD profile that accompanies the CD set, Boesmans is a much-loved figure on the European musical scene, a bit of an outsider stylistically, who argues that contemporary music has increasingly made itself remote to listeners and therefore fails to make much emotional connection. “I compose using the history of music,” he says of his own approach. “I treat it like a vast storehouse in which my mind is allowed to…

For the most up-to-date listings of opera events across the country, visit Opera Canada’s online Calendar at operacanada.ca/calendar SEPTEMBER 9 PAPER CANOE PROJECTS & CAHOOTS THEATRE, Toronto. Premiere of I Call Myself Princess, Metis actor and playwright Jani Lauzon’s take on early 20th-century Creek/Cherokee mezzo-soprano Tsianina Redfeather featuring English/Scots/Irish/Kwagiulth/Sto:lo mezzo Marion Newman. 15 OPÉRA DE MONTRÉAL. Baritone James Westman makes his title role debut in Rigoletto surrounded by fellow Canadians Myriam Leblanc (Gilda), Carolyn Sproule (Maddalena) and veteran director, Michael Cavanagh. 20 CITY OPERA VANCOUVER. A new production by Alan Corbishley of Nigredo Hotel, Nic Gotham and Anne-Marie MacDonald’s iconic early 90s jazz-infused operatic thriller starring soprano Sarah Vardy and baritone Tyler Duncan. 30 CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY, Toronto. Canadian premiere of Robert Carsen’s spare, haunting production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin…

Picnicking, boozing and standing ovations Lydia Perović reflects on audience behaviour—across national, class and gender lines That an audience is a culture, that much I knew. But I am always intrigued by how much audiences differ when I travel outside Canada. As the applause kept going for pianist Yuja Wang after her fifth encore at the Philharmonie de Paris this June, I was certain it couldn’t go on for much longer. Yet the ritual continued for two more encores, for a grand total of seven. And while I’ve never seen Parisians give a standing ovation before, here they rose to their feet multiple times. Paris does not give an easy standing ovation. What it does give a soloist is ardent engagement—including the requests for encores. Yuja Wang, as it happens,…