Opera's nomads

Humour

Ever notice how the guy from out of town, the traveller, the wanderer-sort of character is often a bit shady and untrustworthy? This isn't limited to operatic characters, but you can certainly find examples in the repertoire (more on those below). More so than I expected, it's difficult to find any serious backing to my musings; although you can find the Fortune-Teller or the Pirate among the list of stock characters, neither the Vagabond, the Foreigner, nor the Travelling Salesman aren't really a stock character in the same way as the Senex Iratus or the Femme Fatale.

Gems: Beverly Sills and Danny Kaye

Humour

Because they're both fantastic, the legendary soprano Beverly Sills teamed up with actor/comedian/singer Danny Kaye, for a hilarious parody bit on all things opera. Sills and Kaye trade short clips of some of opera's most famous tunes. I love this kind of stuff, because it shows that a) Kaye knows his stuff (he actually conducted a few orchestras in his lifetime, with varying degrees of seriousness) and b) Sills is all skill, no ego.

Richard Margison is throwing a Gala in the Gardens

Interview

Highlands Opera Studio present Gala in the Gardens, in honour of their exciting initiative of creating a new, attractive theatre space. Richard Margison, famed Canadian tenor and Artistic Director of Highlands Opera Studio, is putting on quite a show, featuring jazz artists, players from the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra, and alumni singers from past HOS seasons.

Spotlight on: Maeve Palmer

Interview

For Toronto-based soprano Maeve Palmer, learning music is "like a puzzle that you can never quite finish decoding." Currently a student of Mary Morrison's, Maeve has a great handle on the concept of patience. She writes articulately about enjoying the process of learning to sing, and the excitement she gets out of singing well.

Gems: The Anna Moffo Show

Humour

You probably know American-Italian soprano Anna Moffo as Violetta, Susanna, Manon, Cio-Cio San, Périchole, Gilda, Lucia di Lammermoor, really any lead soprano role in Italian or French, it seems. Have you heard of her Italian TV show from the 1960s, Anna Moffo Show? Television and film were always staples in Moffo's operatic career, and I think it's pretty darn impressive for a woman in Italy, 50 years ago, to have her own TV show.

Check out: Essential Opera

Interview

Essential Opera's new seasons starts October 8th in Halifax, with a presentation of Elisha Denburg's Regina at the Gilsig Series in Jewish Arts & Culture at Dalhousie University. Regina reprises along with Monica Pearce's Etiquette in Ottawa on October 16-18, in conjunction with Opera Lyra Ottawa.

Check out: Opera 5

Interview

Artistic Director Aria Umezawa and General Director Rachel Krehm, also known as the ladies of Opera 5, said to me that although they take their work and their art very seriously, they don't take themselves seriously. I think that's a great way to sum up Opera 5, a Toronto-based company that creates a full opera-going experience for its audiences. They commission new works, put up rarely heard operas, and pair their performances with food, drink, and atmosphere suggestive of the evening's entertainment.

Check out: Urbanvessel

Interview

Based in Toronto, Urbanvessel produces performances that are interdisciplinary, provocative, and based in the human voice. Past shows include Voice-Box, a boxing opera for an all-woman cast, Stitch, an a cappella opera for three women and sewing machines, and this summer's Singing River, which brought dance, poetry, singing and more to the Toronto's Don River.

Idealism & questions about unions

Op-ed

I'll never be quoted as saying that artists deserve to be paid less than they already do. They work incredibly hard in a specialized set of skills. I think it's important, though, to be self-aware in an industry that's ubiquitously almost out of money. Will the unions be the first to adapt to a contemporary opera economy, or should contemporary artists be the ones to take the bold steps for the sake of the industry (perhaps martyring themselves along the way)?

But, why didn't they write opera?

Editorial

Before I got into opera, I dealt with a certain list of composers. J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Debussy, Chopin, Scriabin, Liszt - all these guys wrote some pretty fantastic music for solo piano. Then, I started working with chamber ensembles, and my composer pool expanded to Bartók, Brahms, Sarasate, Chaminade, Poulenc, Fauré, and Piazzola. I began looking at song repertoire with singers, so I found Hugo Wolf, and realized what the big deal was with Schubert and Schumann.