FachMe.com: a new fun game

Humour

If you're into opera, you do that charming/annoying thing where you hear someone sing and come up with your own, brilliant list of what else that person should sing. "Her Susanna is so pretty. She'd be an awesome Lulu." Or, "Ooh, a high C!

Appreciating Opera: A Learned Skill

Editorial

The Royal Conservatory of Music is offering a cool new way to help you get to know some of the shows you can see around Toronto this fall. Opera in the City is a new Music Appreciation Class at the RCM, and it focuses on Handel's Alcina (opening at Opera Atelier October 23rd), Verdi's Falstaff, and Puccini's Madama Butterfly (both at the Canadian Opera Companybeginning in October).

6 TV shows that should be operas

If you're an opera dork like me, you often see operatic potential wherever you go. Today's it's in TV. The Breaking Bad opera has already had its premiere, and it even includes the "Bitch Aria", sung by none other than Jesse Pinkman. Have a listen here. And really, to make a great opera, one would just need all the same dramatic elements that one needs for great books, and for great TV. Here we go, spoilers and all:

Alaina's AutoCorrect

Interview

Alaina Viau is the Artistic Director of LooseTEA Music Theatre. She's hard at work with the creative team of LooseTEA's upcoming double-bill, Love in the Age of AutoCorrect. The double-bill includes present-day adaptations of Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne and Stravinsky's Mavra.

Opera in Summer

Op-ed

We're nearing the end of Summer Program Season, people. As a veteran of SPs myself, I always wonder about the young folks that went to OperaNUOVA or COSI or COAA/AEDO or the Halifax Summer Opera Festival or St. Andrews-by-the-Sea or any of those Canadian summer staples.

Curiosity and the Met

Op-ed

Human curiosity should be to opera companies what human insecurity is to the beauty product industry. We all want to snoop, take behind-the-scenes tours, figure out how that magician created that cool illusion. Hell, even I often prefer to watch a show from backstage. It's special, and unique.

Mutiny at the Met?

Op-ed

If you're reading this, you're probably already aware that the Metropolitan Opera is in trouble. This Thursday, the contracts of 15 unions are set to expire, and the negotiations between the unions and the Met's general manager, Peter Gelb, seem to be going nowhere good.

Everything I know about the piano, I learned from singers

Op-ed

Well, maybe not everything, but my title isn't tongue-in-cheek. I'm aware of the stereotypical opinions about singers that are held by instrumentalists within the classical music scenes; I won't say they're not there for a reason, but there's opportunity for learning between these seemingly polar points of origin in music. Now, singers and pianists work closely together within the opera industry; but when you really think about it, it's an odd pairing.

The heart and the art

Op-ed

Some people really do thrive on this kind of life; others find themselves at a crux, in which they seriously weigh all the things they love against each other. Some people take matters into their own hands by starting their own opera company in whatever city they damn well please. They open a teaching studio, or even admirably straddle the worlds of day-jobs and opera gigs. But some of us are simply stubborn, and we want to do what we want to do; our homesickness and loneliness can, in some cases, be outweighed by the true love of our art.

Elitism, Irony, and The Phantom of the Opera

Op-ed

Guys, maybe we are a little elitist... So. On quartz.com recently there was a piece by a young soprano named Chelsea Feltman entitled "Don't Ask a Young Opera Singer These Three Questions". This piece has kinda been written before, but that's fine, and there were some pretty funny animations done about it from a stage actor's perspective circling around about four years ago.