Celebrating 10 years of Opera By Request

News

Shookhoff, whose own operatic career spans four decades and includes opera companies on both sides of the Atlantic as well as university, festival, and music theatre engagements, sees OBR as a way to give back to the operatic community and to provide opportunities for emerging talent, just as established mentors (including Canadian icons Herman Geiger-Torel, Ernesto Barbini, and Mario Bernardi) provided those opportunities for artists of his generation.

Hibla Gerzmava & Danielle Akta with The Moscow Virtuosi

News

Featuring works by Mozart, Shostakovich, Grieg, Poulenc, Verdi and more, the Moscow Virtuosi bring its characteristic "precision and sharply defined phrases" (New York Times) to dazzle Toronto audiences. Tickets are on sale now and can be purchased here. The show is June 8, 2017 at 8PM at Roy Thomson Hall. This promises to be a beauty of a concert. Get your tickets now and don't miss out.

An "imaginative multi-room transformation" with Music in the Barns

News

The event is created for CART/ACRT 2017 Conference Performing the Anthropocene: Setting the Stage for the End of the World, and centres on a performance of John Cage's performance piece, Lecture on the Weather (1976). The piece was commissioned by the CBC, in recognition of the American bicentennial; the text, delivered by 12 performers, features an introduction by Cage himself, expressing dismay at the actions (or inaction) of the American government.

Oksana G.: "It's so out of this world, and yet so realistic."

Interview

"This is very common, and I have heard lots of stories like this," she says. Economic desperation, and a certain level of naïveté can make it quite simple for recruiters to entice young women with the promise of decently paying work. Gennadi grew up in the Ukraine, and she is of a similar age to Oksana herself. "I understand this desperate desire to improve your life."

Talking with singers: Craig Colclough

Interview

Immaturity may not seem like it goes hand-in-hand with an artist who is serious about his work, but Colclough makes a great point. "If you get too serious or too full of yourself or too jaded," he says, "you start cutting off emotional parts of yourself that you need to use onstage." It's part of what's scary about singing or acting, to be an open, vulnerable person, in life as well as at work.

Don't miss Datong: The Chinese Utopia

Interview

"The Kang Youwei story, especially the Hundred Days Reform, has riveted modern Chinese audiences for more than a century, probably as a reminder of the setback for China's political modernization. The incident has been reimagined in movies many times."

5 opera mothers from hell

Humour

They're mean, mad, and even murderous: call it sexism, or call it a series of very loud Freudian slips, but the creators of opera have never been too kind to mothers. Still, Mother's Day is fast approaching; despite the generally poor representation they have in our favourite operas, these crazy mamas sure do get some great music.

"A very Bohemian undertaking": AtG's La bohème

Editorial

Poverty - and the limited options that come with it - is a major theme in the original story of 19th-century Paris. Today, young people across Toronto still have the same limitations, particularly those who choose to pursue the arts. "There are a lot of constraints on their ability to live," says Mokrzewski. "Bringing [La bohème] into this context exaggerates, almost, the underlying class stuff that was happening."

A week in the Amphitheatre

Review

It was Megan Quick's performance of Robert Fleming's The Confession Stone (The Songs of Mary) that left the deepest impression. She sang five songs from the Canadian set written for Maureen Forrester, and showed off an enormous, rich mezzo that seemed to shake the intimate Amphitheatre. Her performance was subtle and thoughtful, yet centred in the voice; she had us thinking of a young Jamie Barton, and we're excited to hear her on the big stage.

A fine mess: an emerging opera composer vs. the American new opera machine

Op-ed

I soon learned that cold-shopping an out-of-the-box stage work is a thorny, if not downright impossible, proposition. In the autumn of 2015, I reached out to roughly 200 small- to medium-sized American opera companies. In a 100-word email, I introduced myself and asked for a five-to-ten-minute phone conversation about trends in the commissioning and production of new opera (a subject that obviously interested me but was benign enough for an initial discussion).