Talking with drag queens: Rosé

Interview

“When you think of the voice as having, like, the sound of an emotion instead of just sounding pretty, that's a really exciting thing to do. It makes it more like a mime performance than just lip syncing.”

Magic everywhere in SDO's Aging Magician

Interview

"After years of creating work after work, it becomes your life," he says about why he is an artist. "Initially, I was drawn to things just because I was fascinated by ideas. The traditional world was not where I belonged. I knew I wanted to be in the arts and I had an impulse to perform."

Boston Baroque's Louisa Muller on Amadigi di Gaula

Interview

"I think the way that I've approached it has been a little bit more of thinking about time expanding and thinking about the things that happen, not happening in real time, so that we take and use da capo arias, we just take a real dive into people's emotional states."

Talking with singers: Étienne Dupuis

Interview

“My answer was always the same, and I think confinement has just strengthened it,” Dupuis says. “It's because, emotionally, we need to share something communally.”

Talking with singers: Pene Pati

Interview

"I like having the feeling that I can bring a poster home from the Wiener Staatsoper or from the Met or from the San Francisco Opera and it has his name on it rather than mine. I feel like it's a good tribute to the man who’s raised me. I also sing for my island of Samoa and I sing for the Pacific people who don't really have this opportunity."

A Merry Return to the Mainstage

Interview

Inside Calgary Opera’s preparations for The Merry Widow in spite of COVID.

Stephanie Blythe: "I can't help but try to connect with people."

Interview

"I've been singing Handel and Rossini and Wagner and Verdi and Schubert and Brahms my whole career. What's the difference if I'm doing that or doing Irving Berlin and Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer and Barry Manilow? It's all music and it’s all just different styles and I enjoy singing them all."

Calgary Opera names Jonathan Brandani new Artistic Director

Interview

The Italian-born conductor led Calgary Opera production of La bohème in 2019.

Talking with singers: Matthew Anchel

Interview

"What I think happens a lot, is that you have people who are maybe more stereotypically attractive in thin bodies, who maybe have medium voices — not the best voices in the world." These singers are well promoted, Anchel says, and they get opportunities to work with opera's best. "So they get really good at singing, even though maybe their voice isn't that amazing."

Radical women & drag Don José: Chicago Opera Theater's Carmen

Interview

"Women who are independent, strong, and sexually liberated have a long history of receiving society's scorn because they refuse to break themselves in order to fit the approved mold. Carmen is many things, but a slutty, evil temptress? Nope."