The TFCO kicks off with Tolkien

News

David Day, author of A Tolkien Bestiary, will give a talk and discussion about the fantasy worlds of King Arthur and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Also on the docket are sneak peeks of two operas for young people, coming up later in the TFCO line-up, The Sword in the Schoolyard and The Hobbit, both by Canadian composer Dean Burry (The Brothers Grimm, The Bremen Town Musicians).

Singers: masters of illusions

How-to

There's no faking what opera singers do onstage. It's the result of legitimate hard work, and the staggering skills they show come precisely from not taking shortcuts or band-aid approaches to fixing problems. Real as it is, these artists have their bags of tricks. Singers, please forgive us for outing some of your little secrets...

Talking with singers: Bryan Register

Interview

"Physically, it feels like I'm doing my yoga practice in public, in front of an audience," Register laughs. Singers and yogis alike know how tricky it can be to find a comfortable balance of effort and ease. "I would equate a long, difficult phrase, to holding a difficult pose in yoga. You just have to breathe into it, accept it, you're not going to die."

Requiem on the South Bank

Review

From our place in history, with well over a century of hindsight, Verdi's Requiem can feel like a meta work; it's as though these beloved characters make a cameo, like a "operatic special", sharing the stage to perform a work that seems to evoke a first-person delivery by Verdi of these texts.

Talking with singers: Wallis Giunta

Interview

Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta spoke to us from St. Louis, between performances of Angelina in La Cenerentola and Rossweise in Die Walküre, both at Oper Leipzig. She's also getting ready to sing Mercédès in Oper Frankfurt's Carmen in July, before returning to Toronto for the title role in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas at Opera Atelier in October.

John Fanning on The Pencil Salesman

Interview

June 25-July 3 the Westben Arts Festival Theatre presents the world premiere of Brian Finley's new opera, The Pencil Salesman. Canadian baritone John Fanning will sing the role of Boris, the inventor of the Personal Touch Typewriter, who develops a cynical relationship with the world's technological advancements. We chat with Fanning about playing a "Luddite", about working on a brand new opera, and about how technology dictates our own human interactions.

Violetta, haute couture, & sharing the opera stage with fashion

News

Combining fashion design and opera is like any use of cross-disciplinary art - it's about finding balance. Valentino wouldn't be a great choice for the costumes of Hänsel und Gretel, say, and perhaps Coppola wouldn't have been wise to choose a brand new work as her first foray into directing opera. Likewise, there's little room for homage to hip-hop in Dialoges des Carmélites, or to try adding the Can-Can in Wozzeck.

Royal Academy Opera's L'incoronazione di Poppea

Review

Most importantly, not a note can go by without meaning. Monteverdi is generous with hints; he's a master of word-painting, illuminating words like "sorrow" and "fly" with musical gestures that are almost too obvious to miss. Something like Poppea almost echoes that bit by George Carlin on the blues: paraphrased, he says, "it's not enough to know what notes to play, you have to know why they need to be played."

Robert Ames: Deep Minimalism & LCO

Interview

"I keep notes all the time of pieces that I want to do, and dreaming up programmes. There's an absolutely humongous list of composers, and specific pieces of music, different artists I'd work with, people in theatre, people in dance, electronic artists, certain films that I'm interested in that we'd love to do live scores for."

Morbid musings: art & death

Editorial

Does it mean that all art is rooted in the morbid? A desperate attempt to sweep the dust of life under a beautifully crafted rug? A shout into the constant turnover of individual humans sharing their time on Earth, asking "does anyone care that I'm here?"