“It’s time” I rumble (fussing with the shirt studs and cufflinks) “once again” (muttering while untwisting the back strap on my white vest) “to carp and whine about this ridiculously outmoded uniform requirement!”

The occasion? Getting set to join my colleagues in the Hamilton Philharmonic, a fine regional orchestra where I am sometimes called as a substitute. We are to perform music by Mozart, who wrote his beloved Symphony No.40 in G Minor before white tie and tails were a thing, and Richard Strauss, who lived during their rise as formal evening wear.

“It’s a story that you could say has an old, overused plot that’s not relevant. It’s about an older man who believes he’s irresistible to women. This is a different take on that story, but he’s not going to take no for an answer. He wants to be able to conquer and have his conquests.”

Perryn Leech – General Director of the Canadian Opera Company – is speaking here about Don Pasquale, one of the three final shows of the current Canadian Opera Company’s season, in an interview that ranged from his mission to support new operas to the opportunities and implications of sharing a venue with the National Ballet of Canada (NBoC). After a season of staples of the canon, the COC is closing strong with a trio of seldom-staged works, including the world premiere of a COC-commissioned work. “The good thing is that it’s done in a very funny way,” continues Leech on the topic of Pasquale. “The season is quite heavy, so I think having some levity in there will be welcomed by our cast.”

In contrast to that levity is Luigi Cherubini’s Medea, which follows Don Pasquale in May. It’s an opera that lives or dies based on the soprano singing the title role. When asked what he’s looking forward to the most in Sondra Radvanovsky’s take, Leech responds in his characteristically colourful way:

“It’s a bit like asking, ‘What are you most looking forward to in a LeBron James performance?’ This is a world superstar who can sing anything and I will be entranced. She was the one that approached me and said, ‘I really want to sing Medea. Are you interested in doing that?’ The reason it’s rarely done is not the quality of the music, but the fact that it’s so impossible to cast. So when Sondra comes to you with an idea like that, ‘Yes, let’s see how we can make that work.’”

Leech began his role at the COC amidst the roiling waves of the pandemic, tasked with preparing the company to keep the programming momentum going during the lockdowns, and preparing for live performances when the opportunity arose. In the interview, he looks back on his first time visiting the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts to attend a COC production.

“I walked up from Union Station and knew it was just past the Hilton Hotel. There’s a slight bend in the road on University from Union Station, and I saw this hive of activity. The foyer was lit up, and there were people inside. It looked like such a welcoming space, which is different from some theatres where you just see the sign of the show. This was clearly a communal meeting place to share art. It was wildly exciting to see it for the first time and know that I was going to be part of a 2,000-person audience that night.”

Leech also spoke in the interview about how the Canadian Opera Company Theatre on Front Street offers creative opportunities that the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts cannot encompass.

“We want to present stories that haven’t been told on the operatic stage in Toronto. Opera is an expensive business, so a smaller and more intimate space is a good starting place for someone new to opera. … You can really see the sweat on people’s faces and see them get into the story in a way that is hard to do in a larger auditorium. You can feel the impact of the human voice pressing on your chest. It’s a deeply engaging and immersive way of seeing opera. What I want to do in that space is much more of that.”

The season’s final show is a case in point: Aportia Cryptych: a Black Opera for Portia White appears to be an example of the COC walking the walk in response to all the recent talk about more diverse stories in opera.

“Portia White was a Nova Scotian Black singer who sang opera and would have been an absolute world superstar. However, she wasn’t able to perform on stages because of rules that didn’t allow Black singers and performers to be on stage. So the telling of her story is way overdue. Of course, there are more opportunities now, but you also have to consider if there are still those kinds of barriers in place for Black singers today. Barriers are coming down, but are they coming down quickly enough?”

Created by composer Sean Mayes and director/librettist Haui, Aportia Cryptych runs June 14 to 16, with Neema Bickersteth, Adrienne Danrich and SATE, in the roles of Portia Body, Portia Spirit, and Portia Soul respectively.

Michael Zarathus-Cook is Editor-in-Chief of CANNOPY Visual and Performing Arts Newsletter. The interview with Perryn Leech quoted here appears in tandem with a similarly-themed conversation with Hope Muir, Artistic Director of the National Ballet of Canada, in the Hubs & Huddles series presented by CANNOPY. You can access the full story by visiting the website www.performingarts.substack.com and subscribing to Hubs & Huddles.

When it comes to defining the line between North and South in Ontario, it very much depends on who you ask and where you are.

During a particularly compelling moment in the Art of Time Ensemble’s recent performance, Dance to the Abyss: Music From The Weimar Republic, the ensemble, now in its final season, performed Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher five times in a row. Utilizing a set of detailed instructions from a document titled Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations, the ensemble uses each rendition to iteratively strip away the lifeblood and very essence of what makes that great 1931 song so paradigmatically part of the jazz of swing-era Harlem.

Ah, awards season. That very special time of year when artists across a variety of fields experience the thrill of being nominated, grapple with existential issues of the validity of awards and rankings within the arts, eat a moderately expensive banquet salad, and rub shoulders with fellow Canadian music-industry colleagues. (When I attended the JUNOs, in 2016, Canadian hip-hop legend Kardinal Offishall came up behind me, patted me on the shoulder and said “keep doing what you’re doing, man.” When I turned around, he said “oh, sorry, thought you were, uhh…” and promptly left. It remains a proud moment.)

Lieder, or art song, might seem a tough sell at times. With just two performers on stage, singer and pianist, it does not offer the visual dazzle of opera with its scenery, orchestra and casts of thousands. Texts are usually by 19th-century poets such as Verlaine, Goethe, Rilke, Heine and Hesse, and in German or French which makes them less accessible to English-speaking listeners. To do justice to the texts, songs were often through-composed and so they lack choruses that might catch the audience’s ears.

For months there has been speculation, in “the business” and out, about what the unannounced “secret” seventh show of the upcoming 2024/25 Mirvish season might be. Possibilities mooted have included Beetlejuice and MJ: the musical, among others.

The real news is much more exciting.

Women from Space: In last month’s issue, I wrote about the Women from Space festival, which happened from March 8-10. I was delighted to attend some of the events, and came away feeling inspired and energized by what I heard. The festival opener was a spectacular improvisation by Bloop, the duo made up of trumpeter Lina Allemano and her performance partner Mike Smith, whose electronics wizardry was fully on display in the effects processing he conjured from the equipment at hand. At times Allemano also played various gong instruments, such as a large cow-bell with one of her hands, adding different sonorities to the mix.

I have had a lot of fun going to live musical events these past four weeks – so much so that I will spare readers my periodic rant about post-pandemic supply chain woes, and the perilous state of the arts, and society in general, when workers, in the arts and otherwise, struggle to keep roofs over their heads, both for work and sleep.

I remember a while back, during Wimbledon maybe, a well-known violinist on the local scene (concertmaster for more than one orchestra) going on a Facebook rant about tennis, specifically the scoring system. His complaint was not about the way the scoring works – first to four points wins you a game (except you have to win by two points); first to six games wins you a set (except you have to win by two games); and a match is typically “best of three sets”, except in “major” tournaments, when the men play “best-of-five-set” matches, which can consequently end up running longer than Lohengrin.

As we endure the coldest stretch of the year, anticipating the first signs of thaw around six weeks from the release of this issue, it seems that new music activity in the city is also undergoing a bit of a hibernation, with many of the typical presenters holding off until April to resurge into action. However, as I discovered while perusing the listings, there are some signs of vibrant and percolating life out there. One concert in particular caught my eye – a performance of Morton Feldman’s 80-minute work for piano and cello entitled Patterns in a Chromatic Field, performed and produced by members of Freesound on February 29 and March 1.

When I was a child in pre-amalgamation Toronto, any trip past Bloor Street on the Yonge line was “north” to me, with the magic moment being when the subway emerged from the tunnel and went above ground; for a magic moment you could pretend you were on a different kind of train bound for who knows where.

There is a conventional narrative about a musician’s career trajectory, perpetuated in television and film: in the US version, the talented young musical artist plays progressively bigger stages, from high school talent shows to local clubs to Madison Square Garden, or Carnegie Hall, or the Grand Ole Opry, depending on the genre; and at the conclusion of the hero’s journey, we are left with an image of our protagonist as having arrived, as it were, on their rightful stage, never again to play in a venue smaller than an aircraft carrier.

For those of you who haven’t tried it yet, the “Just Ask” feature under the Listings tab on our website is a handy way of filtering our daily event listings to show only the types of music that you are interested in. For example, select “choral” for the February 1 to April 7 date range covered in this issue’s listings, and you get details of 72 events – far and away the largest single category we list.

“It’s one show stopper after another, isn’t it? There’s not a bad number in it,” is what conductor Jane Glover, DBE, says when I ask how she explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah. We met and talked in December in the lobby of her hotel in downtown Toronto, one day after she’d conducted the first of five Messiah concerts with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir in a near-full Roy Thomson Hall. Her new book, Mozart in Italy, had come out earlier in 2023, and Toronto was a cap on a busy, Atlantic crisscrossing year.