In Alberta, Edmonton Opera and Calgary Opera are working with the same set of unknowns as the rest of the country, but the two companies have publicly projected quite different future scenarios. Edmonton Opera has announced plans to begin a postponed 2020-21 season,...
This feature on Canadian Indie Opera appeared in the Spring 2020 issue of Opera Canada, Vol. 60 #3 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...
Edmonton composer John Estacio’s immigrant Portuguese family lived on a farm north of Toronto. When John was a child his family’s budget precluded music lessons at first, but at age eleven they purchased him an accordion. In junior high a teacher he’d known since...
Having the title character's leg brush up against your thigh is just one unique prospect in attending a Mercury Opera Carmen. The Edmonton company brings traditional opera into tight spaces, and the performers are apt to be singing and gesticulating their hearts out...
Edmonton’s Mercury Opera prides itself on being a maverick enterprise, taking grand opera into alleys and subway corridors, arid barrens and inner-city parks. It once produced Puccini’s Il tabarro on a docked riverboat. Last year, Mercury Opera staged La traviata in a...
There was a time when ‘opera’ implied a notion of music that unabashedly included the expectation of actual melodies, and Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 treatment of the macabre and ultimately triumphant fairy tale Hansel and Gretel is a marvel in that tradition....