Pianists: 3 tips for sounding like an orchestra

How-to

Pianists, when you're playing orchestral reductions, it's all a complicated system of smoke and mirrors. Rather than on getting every note under your fingers, your priorities lay in creating a broader palate of sound, representing the different sections of a hypothetical orchestra. There's a difference in sound between a viola and an oboe, and a group of strings can have a different collective rhythm than a group of winds.

Talking with singers: Othalie Graham

Interview

"If I'm cast in something, I show up incredibly prepared, I'm a very good colleague, and I do the things I can do to make it work. There's so much of it that we can't control, as you know. *So much* of it that you can't control. But I do the best that I can every day, I work really hard with the things I can control," she laughs. "Which isn't a lot."

Learn: Opera in the City

News

Looking to enhance your opera-going experience? The Royal Conservatory of Music offers Opera in the City, a four-week look into two of Toronto's upcoming shows, La traviata (opening at the Canadian Opera Company October 8th) and Armide, opening October 22nd with Opera Atelier.

Quick tips: the rolled R test

How-to

What I've found is that rolled Rs in a singer's text can act as a sort of litmus test for where that singer is maintaining their resonance. As a coach, if I ask for more consonants in an Italian aria, and a rolled R seems difficult to project, the problem usually lies in the preceding vowel.

Opera nerd meets grammar freak

Editorial

I look at a lot of artist biographies, concert programs, season line-ups, and other lists of opera titles, and I keep noticing a small, nerdy detail that I've finally decided to address. Can we discuss the right way to use capital letters in your opera titles?

#COC1516: the new Ensemble Studio

Review

The Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio have kicked off the 2015/16 Free Concert Series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre with their annual introductory concert, Meet the Young Artists. Eight singers and two pianists performed in what's called the "death by aria" style, each singer showing off an aria that shows what they do best.

Spotlight on: Cairan Ryan

Interview

"I sing because it is a holistic musical experience. It's the only thing I can think of that comes close to complete participation of your brain, body, and what some people may call a soul. At its peak, it unites all three into a living, breathing instrument, that's always completely unique and arrestingly different. I sing to always find that unity."

via Wolf Trap Opera, Audition Season 2015: the conversation

Editorial

This is a cross-post from Wolf Trap Opera's great blog, where Kim Pensinger Witman, Wolf Trap's Senior Director of Opera & Classical Programming, talks all things auditions. The season is nigh, singers! You're working away on the great singing, but how do you tell your auditioners who you are? Read and learn.

Public practicing & pet peeves

Humour

Singers, I love you all. You're brave folks, putting in literally endless hours of practice, taking all the criticism with a smile, getting up in front of bored-faced crowds to bare your souls. I always admire you guys, and never envy your jobs. But singers, let's chat about singing in undesignated areas.

So, can we hear hologram Callas soon?

Humour

Whitney Houston's hologram will sing a concert next year at "a major U.S. venue" next year. Pat Houston, president of the Whitney Houston Estate and Greek billionaire Alki David, CEO of Hologram USA, are working together on this latest hologram concert venture; Whitney's image will be shown onstage "the same way that Tupac and Snoop Dogg interacted onstage at Coachella," according to David.