The “Highlands” in this story’s title is the Haliburton Highlands, about a two and a half hour drive north of Toronto. It is home, among many other attractions to a Sculpture Forest and the 60,000-acre Haliburton Forest & Wildlife Reserve, long associated with R. Murray Schafer’s monumental 12-part Patria “co-opera” cycle, and that endeavour’s offshoot, The Wolf Project.
It has also been home, for twenty summers, to Valerie Kuinka’s and Richard Margison’s Highlands Opera Studio, which offers a four-week advanced summer professional training program for emerging operatic artists “making the transition into the professional world,” and a Highlands Opera Community School, serving the general amateur community of Haliburton County.
This fall adds another string to the Highlands Opera Studio bow – the inaugural edition of their Vanda Treiser Opera Competition, with multiple prizes totalling $13,500. Kuinka and Margison received 86 applications. This time the two-and-a-half hour drive is in the other direction. The live event, featuring ten finalists selected by Margison and Kuinka, takes place in Toronto.
“Applications came from singers across the country as well as quite a number of Canadians who are living abroad” Kuinka says. “We had originally intended to have eight finalists, but because the level of the applicants is so high and we are only holding one live round this year, we have expanded it to ten.” That live final round takes place October 11 in Toronto, so GTA audiences need not worry about fickle fall weather.
Vanda Treiser: “Vanda is truly an angel among arts philanthropists,” Kuinka says. “She loves opera with a passion, is an accomplished amateur singer, pianist, and dancer herself, and truly believes in the vital importance of the art form as a means for Canadian creativity and cultural identity.”
Treiser learned about Kuinka and Margison’s work at Highlands Opera a decade ago and liked what she saw. “She began as a strong and greatly valued supporter and donor, joined our board of directors in 2018, and has grown into more of a collaborative partner since then,” Kuinka says. “Like us, she believes that important personal growth and career development can happen away from urban centres in a nurturing atmosphere close to nature, as long as the career development and professional training needs of the emerging artists are always put first.”
“Career development and training”, one assumes, also includes throwing your hat into the ring when opportunities like this present themselves.
Where angels usually fear to tread: October 11 the Sunday of the Thanksgiving weekend is, by reputation, a notoriously difficult time to pull a live audience in Toronto – by my count, there have been 25 Thanksgiving Sunday concerts in our listings over the past 10 non-pandemic years, compared to around 25 on any other typical October Sunday.
On the flip side, it’s an opportunity, for anyone brave enough to try, to be almost the only show in town on that day. Not an impossible task, especially if the finalists have already taken to heart the central idea that becoming a “a going concern” as an artist these days entails entrepreneurship, and that the digital and social media publishing power in their app-posable thumbs – in terms of targeting, focus and alacrity – can do as much, or more, than we can to help them draw a crowd.
As for me. I can think of worse things to do to put myself in the right frame of mind for Monday’s turkey-bash than taking what promises to be an operatic highlight reel, with an added soupçon of competition. And the opportunity, somewhere down the line, to be able to say “I was there when ….”
The Highlands Opera Vanda Treiser Opera Competition final round takes place Sunday Oct 11 at 2:30 pm, at Trinity-St. Paul’s, and the ten finalists are Jamal Al Titi, baritone; Nicholas Burns, counter-tenor; Hannah Crawford, soprano; Ellita Gagner, mezzo-soprano; Alex Halliday, bass-baritone; Monika Mazanka, soprano; Maeve Palmer, soprano; Emily Rocha, soprano; Dante Mullin Santone, baritone; and George Theodorakopoulos, baritone. Competition pianist is Vladimir Soloviev, and Tara Slone hosts. www.highlandsoperastudio.com for tickets and information.
