This weekend, catch up with Canadian composer Andrew Ager (Frankenstein, Führerbunker)! In an interview led by the National Capital Opera Society, Andrew Ager is joined by Bronx Opera General Director Ben Spierman, and Canadian singers Carmen Harris and Bradley...
This spring, in lieu of its usual run of a fully staged opera given four performances with different casts, UofT Opera offered “Opera in Miniature: A Festival of One Act Operas.” There were five performances over four days with one show repeated with a second cast. Of...
Our advice series continues! In this latest instalment of "Dear singer..." we hear from UK-based composer James Garner, whose opera, Much Ado, is set to premiere out of Opera McGill in 2023. Garner urges composer to sing, singers to look outside of the box, and for...
It's extraordinary, the fast-growing body of work that has come out of the pandemic-inspired opera drought in the last 13 months. It's no substitute for live stages, but there's still enough digital creativity out there that it's easy to lose track. In case our...
Opera companies’ ‘forced’ embrace of digital content during the pandemic has, I think, caused many opera lovers to reevaluate their own relationship to ‘recorded’ opera, be it audio or visual. For most of us I’d venture, our initial exposure to opera was probably via...
If you couldn’t tell by his operatic adaptations of films like Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, and Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light, Canadian librettist Royce Vavrek is a movie buff. So, since we’ve all got more time on our hands than usual, I figured it would be an...
While opera-deprived Canadians stay patient (because we're nice, and frankly, because we have no choice), it's a good time to peek over the border for a few fresh digital items. Out of our neighbours to the south, here's a shortlist of new and brand-new American opera...
Anxiously awaiting the warm weather that signals his return to the golf course, Canadian tenor Paul Frey also looks into his seeing-stone for signs of another a milestone event. April 20th, 2021 marks Frey's 80th birthday. During his heyday from the mid-1980s to 2005,...
In our latest instalment of our advice series, "Dear composer…dear singer", we're diving deep with Vancouver-based composer Rodney Sharman. What homework does he do when writing for a new voice? How does it feel when singers perform his music? Who are his memorable...
This piece was originally published in our Spring 2021 issue; for this and the rest of our exclusive content, peruse our subscription options. Due to the COVID pandemic there have been, for some time in Canada at least, no truly live, in-person performances, so we’ve...
Over the past 4 months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to join the Opera Canada team for an internship as their Editorial Assistant. Going in as an opera outsider, my background included Phantom of the Opera and the Looney Tunes “What’s Opera, Doc?” episodes....
As reported by Musical America, the beleaguered Met Opera Orchestra is joining the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO) for performances of Mahler's First Symphony on Apr. 30 and May 1 at Meyerson Symphony Hall in Dallas. The Met's group of musicians, led at home in New...