Calgary Opera launches 2018-19 season

Editorial

"This story seemed to have all those big emotions, everything from love and death and hubris and heroism, " says Talbot. "People absolutely pushed to the full extremes of their mental and physical capacity. It's an interesting psychological journey through the minds of various different people."

Review: ALICE and the Patriarchy

Review

The gallery setting served Prescott's creation. The piece thrives on intimacy. The audience benefits from the freedom to wander around, whisper to their neighbor, and collectively figuring out how to behave in and interact in the brightly lit environment.

Talking with singers: Tara Erraught

Interview

"It never gets easier to say no to an interesting offer, even though you may well know you don't have the time, so your management team and your teacher are vital in guiding you at every step in what is a healthy decision, always."

Talking with singers: Isabel Bayrakdarian

Interview

And right in between, there's the chamber group experience, which feels intimate enough that you don't need a conductor, but there's a constant sense of awareness of the need to be very sensitive to each instrument enveloping you (literally and figuratively) on stage. So there's more conscious give and take - teamwork - to make the collective work and shine.

Review: New music quartet entertains and bores

Review

In the second section, the ensemble collectively sustained a layered, nuanced, morphing wail. Imagine an emergency foghorn exploding a metropolitan soundscape, triggering car alarms, and galvanizing old-timey constables to lay on their whistles. Think a Lichtenstein-ian Whaam! Blam! Pop! in musical form.

Fellow Travelers is "luminous" in Chicago

Review

The chemistry between these two singer-actors in their respective roles was electrifying and irresistible. Your heart soared watching their passion ignite and then sink as their lives and personalities diverged.

Materialism turns tragic: don't miss The Overcoat

Interview

"The overcoat is stunning," says baritone Geoffrey Sirett, who is set to sing the role of Akakiy. "It transforms his life, because it is so beautiful and immaculately designed, and it gives him his five minutes of fame."

Talking with singers: Neil Craighead

Interview

If he could go back and give himself some advice, however, Craighead would add in some encouragement. "I would tell myself that I was on the right track," he says. "I had a lot of the right instincts and a lot of the right tools given to me, but I just needed to trust them."

Gareth Mattey's Belladonna is "unashamedly queer"

Interview

Opera as an art form has always been very accepting of me and other LGBTQ+ people but rarely depicts us on stage. I feel like my work is attempting to develop an intervention in this; to focus on how opera has always delighted in plays of gender and sexuality and, in developing narratives around queer individuals (whether entirely original or adaptations) to bring back an understanding of opera as a strange, queer art form.

Roundtable: an operatic triple threat

Interview

Lots of laughter punctuated our shop talk and often the most memorable moments occurred during the singers' natural repartee. Below is a lightly-edited collection of answers to some of my questions, which I asked over the course of an hour-long conversation. Read on for a bit of insight into these three singers' lives and work.