Home//Opera Canada/Spring 2022/In This Issue
Opera Canada|Spring 2022NOTEBOOKThis is not a time for thoughtless optimism, but welcome to Issue #251 of the magazine, the first published in a brave but cautious new world of opera in Canada and Canadians in opera everywhere. Starting in February, there have been mainstage productions in Edmonton, Calgary and Toronto, reviewed in this issue; meanwhile, news and reviews of live performances in schools, conservatories and companies are appearing at a quickening pace at operacanada.ca, the magazine’s online complement. Artists are working to pick up careers stunted by the pandemic’s forced hiatus, and companies have started to announce more confident and substantial plans for the 2022/23 season. At the time of writing, government-mandated pandemic restrictions have generally eased across the country, allowing theatres and concert halls to welcome audiences back. Some credible sources,…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022VOICE LEADINGHere’s what singers are discussing around the…what’s the theatrical equivalent of a water cooler? Trick question—Don’t clump, don’t gather or socialize or…sigh…I know, we’re all COV-er it. From the factory floor… In Europe and the US, my colleaguesand I continue to be inspired by opera administrators’ strategic planning and execution (Canada is late to this verb) under extreme circumstances. Singing from Romania to North Carolina and proving where there’s a will, there’s a way, we singers thank these underappreciated and often underpaid leaders and staff heartily–Viva il lupo! (Google it—no space)! Could we start, in Canada, with what American and European houses have been doing all along—creating protocols that are more adaptive? For a recent La bohème in North Carolina, we did twice-weekly, drive-thru Rapid PCR tests, with results in…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Mary Morrison“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”—ALBERT EINSTEIN FOR CANADIANS INTERESTED in classical vocal pedagogy, November 9, 2021, was a special day. Mary Morrison, Canadian soprano and voice teacher extraordinaire, turned 95. In recognition of that milestone, the Voice Studies Program at the University of Toronto paid tribute to her with a special concert, Celebrating Mary! Sadly, because of COVID restrictions, the event was open to UofT members but closed to the public. Fortunately, it was videotaped and archived on the UofT Faculty of Music’s You-Tube channel, so we can enjoy the celebration (youtube.com/watch?v=hmYDy7FXZPw) It opens with 1948 film footage of Morrison singing Mimì’s entrance aria in La bohème. It’s vintage Morrison, to be sure, revealing a beautiful lyric soprano in…7 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022U OF T OPERA CELEBRATES 75 YEARS OF OPERATIC TRAINING“In the fall of 1946, an unprecedented and unique form of instruction was introduced into the curriculum of the newly organized senior school of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.”—OPERA AND THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO, KENNETH PEGLER Developed by its first director, Arnold Walter, the Opera School, now the Opera Division of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music, has had an enormous influence on the musical life of Toronto, of Canada and the world at large. As Pegler noted early on in his study: “The performances of the ‘Opera School’ were by no means the first of their kind in Canada. Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia played to pre-Confederation audiences in Quebec City in 1864.” Musicologist and former Dean of the Faculty of Music, the late Carl Morey,…11 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022All is LoveOpera Atelier returned to live performance after more than two years with All is Love, a seamlessly effective meld of Baroque and early “modern” music. The imaginative program largely featured the 17th - and 18th-century fare that is OA’s main focus, but it also adventured as far as mélodies by Reynaldo Hahn and Claude Debussy and the first scene of the latter’s Pelléas et Mélisande. The musical mash—“elision” as OA Co-Artistic Director Marshall Pynkoski more properly spoke of it in his introduction to the program—was heard at the outset when soprano Measha Brueggergosman-Lee sang a piece conjured by Assistant Conductor Christopher Bagan from Hahn’s “À Chloris” and Purcell’s “Sweeter than Roses.” (The Purcell contains the line that gave the show its title: “All, all is love to me.”) Sensitively accompanied…4 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Cinderella“A treasured holiday tradition,” the Met calls its annual series of family-friendly condensed operas, and maybe there’s indeed a chunk of its regular audience that treasures these year-end offerings. But for most experienced operaphiles, I suspect, they’re events more to be tolerated—for their children’s or grandchildren’s sake, or a niece’s or nephew’s, or even a curious contemporary’s—than to be actively enjoyed. That’s been the case for me, from the very start of the tradition in 2006, with the trimmed-and-translated Magic Flute that’s still getting trotted out regularly; anyone who knows and loves Mozart’s score won’t be happy about the many cuts—not to mention the equally many annoyances of Julie Taymor’s brittle puppet-show production. This year’s Cinderella, alternating with another round of Flutes, started out with a distinct advantage: a far,…4 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Le nozze di FigaroThough critics met Paris Opera’s new Le nozze di Figaro by English director and video artist Netia Jones with reviews ranging from lukewarm to scathing, I have rarely enjoyed Mozart’s folle journée so thoroughly. And while most expressed satisfaction at this newcomer ousting the much-decried 2004 production by Christoph Marthaler, they didn’t feel Jones’s measured up to others in recent memory—James Gray’s nostalgic rendition at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées and the slapstick Lotte de Beer last summer at Aix-en-Provence held up as shining examples. Many were also a bit hard of hearing when it came to Jones’s young singers. I beg to differ on all counts. Jones is a multitalented director who also handles décor, costumes and video; controlling these aspects brings unity and coherence to her work. Deftly playing…4 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Amour et FantaisieMÉLODIES DE LIONEL DAUNAIS ATMA CLASSIQUE ACD2 2893 THIS RELEASE FEATURING baritone Dominique Côté and pianist Esther Gonthier, recorded in Saint-Irénée, Que., in April 2021, is a most welcome and long-overdue tribute to a multi-talented musician. Born in Montreal in 1902, Lionel Daunais is fêted here as a composer, but he enjoyed a wide-ranging career. He was a successful baritone, winning a Prix d’Europe in 1926 that enabled him to study in Paris and become principal at Opera of Algiers, where he appeared in Carmen, Faust, Manon, La traviata and The Barber of Seville. After returning to Canada in 1930, Daunais starred in productions of Healey Willan’s The Order of Good Cheer and Deirdre, sang with the Société Canadienne d’Opérette and founded Trio lyrique, a vocal ensemble featured on CBC…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Joel Ivany reflects on the perils of opening in a pandemicFOR MY ENTIRE CAREER, opera has been as reliable as Monday mornings. It just happens. Opera is big, with so many moving parts, with artists booked years in advance, so nothing can get in its way. The last two years have shown us otherwise. Postponements, cancellations and general uncertainty in our industry has shaken us all. Last November, Edmonton Opera hired me as its new Artistic Director. December brought optimism and cautious hope that the city’s first post-pandemic production, La bohème, would happen. As December wore on, the temperature plummeted to -30 for weeks, Omicron surged and whatever hope we had was dashed. As local, provincial and national cancellations poured back in, there was pressure on us to cancel, delay or postpone. We had all become accustomed to this outcome.…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022TAKE NOTEAPRIL Canadian Opera Company, Toronto After Omicron forced cancellation of Madama Butterfly, the Canadian Opera Company returns to the Four Seasons Centre Apr. 23-May 20 with its first mainstage production in more than two years, Verdi’s La traviata. Tenor Matthew Polenzani (pictured), straight from his successful role debut as Verdi’s Don Carlos at the Met, sings Alfredo to the Violetta of Amina Edris and the Elder Germont of Simone Piazzola. The production runs in repertory with a revival of the COC’s Diane Paulus staging of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (May 6-21). Vienna State Opera Tenor Josh Lovell, in the ensemble of the Vienna State Opera, has a busy month with performances as Andres in Berg’s Wozzeck, the Italian Singer in Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Arturo in Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022CATCHING UP WITHPhilippe SlyPHILIPPE SLY started his career in the world of opera as something of a wunderkind. At the age of 21, while still an undergraduate at Montreal’s McGill University, he was awarded one of the Grand Prizes in the 2011 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions. The following year, he took home the First Prize, as well as the prizes for Best Canadian Artist, Best Artist from Quebec, Best Performance of the Imposed Canadian Work and the People’s Choice Award at the Montreal International Music Competition. By the age of 23, he had recorded his first album for the Analekta Label, and had been named “Révélation Classique” by Radio-Canada. After a short stint in the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio, he was offered an Adler Fellowship by San Francisco Opera and made…8 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022TRAINING FOR THE TIMESCanadian opera training may need a rinascimento, a second act in which characters come together, untangle the plot and move it forward. The opera industry has changed, but does the current system for training artists fully prepare them for new realities in the professional trenches? Considering the problem holistically, the system encourages the Perpetual Student Singer, cycling young talent through undergraduate and graduate degrees, summer programs and now multiple Young Artist Programs (YAP). The result is at least 10 years spent learning, but mostly sitting and waiting. Current practice would seem to underplay the new normal, which is that most would-be opera singers need transferrable skills training and more diversity of thought in school and in their apprenticeships to help them develop a portfolio of income streams. Betty Allison, who…11 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022The Merry WidowLive opera has been hard to come by in Canada these past few months and where there have been performances, audiences have been forcibly limited in numbers. For its long-awaited return to the Jubilee Auditorium, Calgary Opera was constrained to 50% audience capacity by government restrictions. As a company proud of its reputation for not laying off a single employee during the pandemic and for finding innovative methods to rehearse while adhering to strict social-distancing measures, the successful February run of Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow was something of a miracle, if not an outright blessing that it happened at all. That it was a high-quality evening of music-making made for an even greater triumph. Together, Omer Ben Seadia’s admirable direction and conductor Tania Miller’s close reading of the score…4 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Cavalleria RusticanaFirst staged by Vancouver Opera in 1966, Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana has enjoyed a respectable performance history in the Pacific Northwest. Although typically paired with Leoncavallo’s I pagliacci, Mascagni’s big-hit opera on this occasion (Feb. 13) received a concert performance by VO as a stand-alone presentation. In a short, pre-performance speech, VO General Director Tom Wright explained that the choice of this opera was a way of atoning for the almost complete lack of work for the VO Orchestra and Chorus during the last two years of the COVID pandemic. The orchestral musicians with the chorus on risers behind them—more than 100 people—made an impressive display when marshalled on stage for the performance. Jordan Baraniecki’s projected design on the large screen behind them all was a harbinger of things to come.…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022When the Sun Comes OutIs America ready for lesbian opera? Portland Opera thinks so and followed up by presenting a superb production of Leslie Uyeda’s When the Sun Comes Out (seen Jan. 28) at the Hampton Opera Center. This was the work’s U.S. premiere, a long wait for a thought-provoking chamber opera first presented in 2013 by the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver and a year later in Toronto. Portland Opera’s rendition, enhanced by the stage direction of Alison Moritz and choreography of Shaun Keylock, made a strong case for bringing this moving love story between two women to a more general audience. Uyeda’s sparse but evocative music and poet Rachel Rose’s lyrical libretto succinctly conveyed the drama of Solana and Lilah, whose mutual attraction is strictly forbidden in their unnamed country. After being…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022The Three QueensDONIZETTI PENTATONE PTC 5186970 DONIZETTI’S THREE “TUDOR Queen” operas—Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux (in which, despite the title, the real star is Elizabeth I)—are often seen as a sort of trilogy and have occasionally been performed as such with a single soprano starring in all three. It’s a feat Sondra Radvanovsky achieved at the Metropolitan Opera in the 2015/16 season. It’s not particularly surprising, then, that she should have been sought by Lyric Opera of Chicago to star in a show featuring the final scenes of each opera, which was recorded live in Chicago in December 2019. The format of this two-disc set is that the overture of each opera is followed by its final scene. Radvanovsky sings the queens while the supporting roles are taken by young…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Dein Ist Mein Ganzes HerzTHE MOST BEAUTIFUL MELODIES OF FRANZ LEHÁR PROFIL PH22004 THE AUDIO COMPONENT OF this dual CD/DVD release documents a June 2020 concert at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of one of the best-loved composers of Viennese operetta. (The DVD, which presents a made-for-TV documentary, Franz Lehár: The Man of Smiles, has not been reviewed.) The concert features the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, which was founded in 1900 and, like the Theater an der Wien, has had a long and close association with Lehár, Polish tenor Pyotr Beczala, Canadian tenor Michael Schade and Finnish soprano Camilla Nylund, all under the baton of Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck. This concert program seems intent on undermining any presumption that Lehár’s tuneful operettas are mainly lighthearted and even…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022JACOBA BARBER-ROZEMA“Not at all,” counters Toronto-born, Munich-based soprano Jacoba Barber-Rozema, a McGill alumna in classical voice performance. “I love film but have always been very excited by the idea of live performance. I’m not closing any doors.” Sound advice. And Barber-Rozema has gleaned other indispensable nuggets from her parents. “Probably to try to listen to your gut as much as you can,” she continues. “Don’t say ‘yes’ to projects just because you may be perceived as ‘successful’ for doing them. Say ‘yes’ to ones you’re excited about, or feel are necessary, or that you’re inexpressibly drawn to. Also, always continue to question the patriarchal, white and hetero-normative systems we find ourselves in, even though it’s easier to just accept and run with them.” Barber-Rozema talks the talk and walks the walk.…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022Correct CastingAs a Latino in Canada, I soon became aware of the unique potential of my position as General Director of two performing arts organizations to help steward progress for other Latinos and facilitate opportunities for friends in the lyric theatre who labour mightily for a space on stage. How little did I know that complexities in cultural matters would thwart many of my moves. Issues arose first in 2003, when I programmed the Cuban zarzuela, Cecilia Valdes, by composer Gonzalo Roig, based on the novel by Cirilo Villaverde, for Toronto Operetta Theatre (TOT). I was fascinated by the operatic treatment of sexism and machismo in Latin America, racial bias, the slave trade, incest and murder, all themes in the novel and followed with equal candor by the zarzuela. But the…6 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022NUGGETSof WISDOMAt the end of her legendary series of Juilliard masterclasses in 1971, Maria Callas is reported to have left the stage with one last instruction: “Whether I continue singing or not doesn’t matter. What matters is that you use whatever you have learned wisely. Think of the expression of the words, of good diction, and of your own deep feelings. The only thanks I ask is that you sing properly and honestly. If you do this, I will feel repaid.” Entire plays, novels and movie scripts have been written about mystical relationships between students and their teachers. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a musician, a journalist or an actuary, you never forget your best teacher—or your worst one. They can become second, surrogate parents. Their words, whether toxic or supportive,…14 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022La bohèmeOn Mar. 12, 2020, Edmonton Opera had a dress rehearsal of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide directed by Joel Ivany, but then COVID slammed the door shut on the show’s opening a couple of days later. Almost two years, later, on Feb. 5, Ivany, now EO’s Artistic Director, welcomed a half-capacity Jubilee Auditorium audience of about a 1,000 back to live opera again. Alberta’s two major opera companies were the first to come out of the long COVID hiatus in Canada. Calgary Opera closed its run of three performances of Lehár’s The Merry Widow the night before EO opened its three-performance run of Puccini’s La bohème. But the haunting menace of COVID was not far off. Tenor Andrew Haji contracted the virus days before the opening, and Adam Luther appeared as Rodolfo…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022SvadbaFew could have foretold the staying power of the hour-long Svadba by Ana Sokolović on the day of its first reading in the Distillery District’s Earnest Balmer Studio in Toronto more than a decade ago, under the auspices of the Queen of Puddings Music Theatre Company. (Full disclosure: as a fledgling writer fluent in both languages, I was to be hired by company founders Dáirine Ní Mheadhra and John Hess to translate the libretto from Serbian and gibberish to English, and remember this collaboration fondly.) After it premiered, the Toronto Star’s John Terauds described it as “not quite an opera, more a cantata” and he wasn’t far off. Indeed, some cantatas contain more drama than this a cappella weaving of the rituals real, reworked and imagined before a maiden’s wedding…4 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022GötterdämmerungThe curtain came down on Wagner’s Götterdämmerung at Madrid’s Teatro Real in February to conclude a Ring cycle that had begun in 2019. Cutting edge when it was first seen in Cologne in 2000, Robert Carsen’s approach to environmental destruction, social decay and military themes seems somewhat dated now. Yet the underlying message remains powerful, and the production reaches a breathtaking conclusion in a shower of rain, as Brünnhilde walks very slowly, completely alone, to the back of an empty stage as a new era dawns. Of interest is how the production shows a sincere side to otherwise vile and vindictive characters, explores the physical interaction between the players, and even gives a nod to Cologne with “Köln” prominently marked on the large map in the Gibichung palace. In the…2 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022PhyrnéSAINT-SAËNS PALAZETTO BRU ZANE BZ1047 THE LATEST RELEASE IN THE CD/book series from the Palazetto Bru Zane is Saint-Saëns’s 1893 opéra comique, Phryné, loosely based on an incident in the life of the famous 4th-century BCE courtesan. It’s a two-act piece lasting about 65 minutes. The original was given with spoken dialogue, but as so often with this genre, recitatives (here added by André Messager in 1896) have been used in this recording, as they were in most contemporary performances. The plot is straightforward enough. Dicéphile is a rather pompous magistrate and has just been honoured by the city with a bust. His nephew/ward Nicias is in love with Phryné, but also broke and about to be arrested for debt. With the help of Phryné’s servants, he beats up the…3 min
Opera Canada|Spring 2022The snow queenABRAHAMSEN BSOREC 1002 AS ORIGINALLY CONCEIVED, Hans Abrahamsen‘s The Snow Queen is a dark piece that cleaves closely to the original Hans Christian Andersen story. This production from the Bayerische Staatsoper, recorded in Munich in 2019 in an English version adapted by Amanda Holden from the original Danish, takes it to a new level of complexity and darkness. Director Andreas Kriegenburg has added additional avatars of the children Gerda and Kay to the scene, creating three Gerda/Kay pairings. There are the children as children played by actors; there’s an adolescent pair played by mezzo-soprano Rachael Wilson as Kay and an actor, Anna Ressel, as the adolescent Gerda; and there’s a 40-something couple played by soprano Barbara Hannigan as Gerda and actor Thomas Graßle as Kay. The magic mirror fragments that…3 min
