Opera Canada Fall 2014

It was interesting, as we compiled the performance listings for the new 2014/15 season, to see what’s hot and what’s not, according to the programming of Canada’s major performing companies. By major companies, I mean the well-established mainstage companies that have a city or province as part of their names, plus the two in Toronto—Canadian Opera Company and Opera Atelier—that don’t. I know that these only number about a dozen companies and that the Canadian opera firmament is more expansive, but these are nonetheless the biggies in terms ofthe number of productions and the number of performances. By my count, this group will be mounting 33 productions over the season, with anywhere from two to 12 performances of each (three-five m the majority ofcases). This is an "opera as usual"…

Honours and Awards Soprano Joanne Kolomyjec, teaching voice at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music for the past 12 years, has received the prestigious 2013/14 Teacher of the Year Award. Her studio has enjoyed great success, with more than a dozen former students now performing at opera companies in North America and Europe, including Canadian Opera Company, Opera de Montreal, Edmonton Opera, Opera Lyra Ottawa, San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Philadelphia Opera and Opernwerkstatt in Switzerland. Besides teaching, Kolomyjec has also served on juries and panels forjeunesses Musicales du Canada, Ontario Art Council, Canada Council, Canadian Music Competition and National Music Festival, and taught on the faculty ofthe Edmonton-based training program, Opera NUOVA. Tenor Marcel d’Entremont of Merigomish, NS, took the Victoria Foundation GrandAward Prize of $5,000 at the 2014…

Daniel Lipton was booed before he even started the first time he conducted at the Bayensche Staatsoper. "Giuseppe Patane had double booked himself in Covent Garden and Munich. They called me at the last minute... It was the first time I conducted without an orchestra rehearsal, with an orchestra I didn’t know. In the dressing room, I saw the lockers of Patane, Carlos Kleiber, Guiseppe Smopoli... I was asking myself,’What are you doing here?’They were expecting Patane, and they saw this kid and they had no idea who I was. I thought, ’This is my first and last performance in Germany’." Fortunately, each act Lipton conducted garnered more and more applause, and at the end soloist Wolfgang Brendel assured him,"This won’t be the last time you’re here." That nerve-racking debut…

When I speak to Karina Gauvin, it’s a matter of days before her Glyndebourne Festival debut in Handel’s Rinaldo. She has an intermittent but severe-sounding cough, the kind of ailment that would shred the nerves of many a singer. But her calm demeanour and companionability seem unruffled. (Her confidence was well placed—she sang gloriously on the first night.) From our conversation, it emerges that a certamjudicious amount of trusting in a good outcome is ingrained in her personality. "When you’re a young singer at school," she says, "you shouldn’t be saying, ’This is how it will be,’ because it’s putting things into a mould and setting yourself up for disappointment. I’m happy I’ve had all this concert and recording experience, and then suddenly I’m doing all this opera. It’s been…

On May 16, 1770, King Louis XV held an open house at his 2,000-acre estate in Versailles. To illuminate his new home theatre and remind visitors that France was still the artistic and political centre ofthe world, he ordered his staff to light 3,000 candles. France’s financial ups and downs, the latter caused mainly by costly wars, had precluded construction of a permanent theatre in the palace for almost 100 years. After enduring portable outdoor theatre sets rain or shine, Louis was pleased that the Opera Royal was finally built and ready to stage its first performance. He was also proud that the new theatre would accommodate almost 1,000 guests, invited to the festivities marking the marriage of his grandson to Marie-Antomette. While singers waited in the wings to test…

In the town of Caraquet, at the heart of I’Acadie in northeastern New Brunswick, a beautiful house overlooks the Baie des Chaleurs. It is known simply as the Maison Rose, and the view is as stunning as the house is both alluring and charming. In many ways, it perfectly represents and reflects its owner, the soprano and teacher Rosemarie Landry, who shares it with her husband, Fernand Doucet. Today Rosemarie also lives and teaches in Montreal at Universite de Montreal, where ("as a rebellious youth," as she puts it) she received degrees in both piano and voice. She is the first to acknowledge that nothing about her career—or her life, for that matter—is conventional. At a time when a singing career was and remains associated mainly with opera, she established…