On Opera

Somehow “We’re going to the opera!” doesn’t even just mean the building or the performance. It’s about both, and the alchemy of the immersive and transformative experience we anticipate. We go to the opera for the music and for the story, familiar or not. We go for the visual stimulation of the sets and costumes. But we also go for the shared experience and the shared excitement, and because one way or another, the experience is always larger than our own lives.

This time last year, the opera community was celebrating as companies large and small started to announce their first “normal” year of programming. Even as live performance began creeping back after the initial lockdowns, opera presenters struggled to balance reduced seating capacities and ticket sales, and shutdown-related revenue loss with the budgets needed to mount full scale productions – especially those presenters whose audiences have grown accustomed to productions with full operatic scale.

In our February/March issue, Wendalyn Bartley previewed Rodney Sharman and Atom Egoyan’s Show Room, their first operatic collaboration since Elsewhereless in 1998. Presented by new music ensemble Continuum, Show Room ran for two performances this past March 18 and 19, and Lydia Perović was there. 

Probably the most melancholy production of The Marriage of Figaro around, the Claus Guth-conceived Salzburg production first seen in Toronto in 2016, is back at the Canadian Opera Company for another run from January 27 - February 18, with a different set of principals, other than its Cherubino, Emily Fons, an American mezzo-soprano best known for Handel and Mozart trouser roles.