There’s a line from La Bohème that Jonelle Sills wrote all over her school binders as a teenager.

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She’d just been on a field trip to the Four Seasons Centre — her first real opera. When Rodolfo turned to his friends and said, I am the poet, and she is poetry itself, something cracked open in her. She was a high schooler from Markham. She had no idea what to do with what she’d just felt. So she wrote it down and carried it around with her, in purple ink and pencil smudges, pressed into binder after binder.

She didn’t know yet that she would become Mimi. She didn’t know she’d be standing on the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Theatre decades later — praised by the Globe and Mail, Juno-nominated, the lead in Vancouver Opera’s fastest-grossing production in recent memory. She just knew that something was beautiful. And she wrote it down.

This is the story of what happened between the binder and the stage. But it’s also the story of another woman — Desiree Sills — who sang first, in a different country, in a language shaped by British colonialism and the church, and whose voice became the very first music her daughter ever heard.

The Womb Was the First Stage

Desiree Sills is an ordained minister and a gospel choir soloist. She grew up in British Guiana (now Guyana) — the only English-speaking country in that part of South America, tucked between Venezuela and Brazil — under a grandmother who believed in diction, and who also believed, quite firmly, that no one wanted to marry a woman who sat at the piano all day making noise.

She wanted to play the organ. She wanted to sing. She watched the pastor’s daughter at church — young, in stilettos, moving her feet across the organ pedals without even looking — and was completely, irreversibly fascinated.

Life pulled her toward children instead. Five of them. And when she was pregnant with the youngest — the one who would become a soprano — she sang more than at any other time in her life.

“My womb was the first stage that she was introduced to music,” Desiree says, simply. She pauses. “Because I’m also a soloist.”

She describes singing solos in church, those years ago, and the people who would come to her afterward in tears — asking whether she’d been told to choose that particular song, because it had lined up so perfectly with the sermon. She never had been. She’d always prayed over it and chosen what came.

It is difficult not to sit with that image for a moment. A woman who dreamed of singing, who was gently redirected by the generations above her, who found her voice anyway — in church pews, in gospel choir, in the quiet of a home with five children — and who, while carrying her last child, sang and sang and sang.

Jonelle Sills came into the world already steeped.

Not a Gift — A Responsibility

Jonelle is quick to complicate the word gift. She’s used it herself, in interviews and on stage — I’ve been given a gift from God, and I knew not to waste it — but when you push her on it, something more nuanced comes through.

“It didn’t always feel like a gift,” she says. “It definitely felt like a responsibility. Sometimes a burden.”

For a long time, she didn’t want to share it. She wanted to keep her voice close — private, hers alone. It was her mother and her grandmother who pushed her outward, coaxing her into exposure she resisted. In the Bach Children’s Chorus, she held back from solos. At home, she was reluctant. She describes the version of herself in those early years as insecure, guarded, unwilling to be vulnerable.

“The best compliment anyone could ever give me,” she says, “is that I sounded better than the last time.”

She wasn’t chasing stardom. She was chasing becoming. And in that space, without quite meaning to, she built a career.

Desiree remembers a day Jonelle came home from university in tears. She hadn’t thought at the time they were tears of cruelty — she thought they were tears of someone being pushed toward the size of her own potential. “At that point,” she says quietly, “I don’t know if she fully understood the power of what she was carrying.”

Voluntold

The Bach Children’s Chorus wasn’t Jonelle’s idea.

“She was voluntold,” Desiree says, grinning. Jonelle confirms this with a laugh.

But she stayed. And when she aged into the chamber choir, she taught herself to sight-read — no piano lessons growing up, no formal training before university — through sheer determination. The other children in those ensembles had grown up with music. They could read it the way they read words. Jonelle had to learn the alphabet from scratch, in real time, while keeping up.

“She did not just have the voice,” Desiree says. “She had the discipline. She had the passion.”

When the question of university came up, Jonelle came home and told her mother plainly: everyone else was planning, so how were they going to do it? And then — with a frankness that makes both of them laugh to remember — she added: And I don’t want to hear that God will provide.

“Saucy little girl,” Desiree says.

“I don’t remember saying that,” Jonelle says.

There was not much money. There had not been, really, for most of it. Desiree came to Canada “with not one dime.” Five children. A choir rehearsal here, a school trip there. A binder full of Italian. And a daughter who, against all practicality, kept moving toward the thing that called to her.

Not the Token

There is something that Jonelle Sills carries into every rehearsal room, every stage, every audition — something many of her colleagues do not.

She is one of only a handful of Black women performing at her level in Canadian opera. She knows this. She has always known this.

She describes the moment she first saw soprano Measha Brueggergosman perform — the joy of recognition, the shock of it, and then the immediate question that followed: But how come there’s only one of her?

“No one wants to be the token,” she says. “Even if you are succeeding from it. Like Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle — I think they would have loved to be surrounded by people who were also at that level. We know there are probably thousands, if not millions, of talented Black artists at that level. But only a handful are let in.”

Her Juno-nominated album with the Canadian Art Song Project, Known to Dreamers: Black Voices in Canadian Art Song, carries this weight. Her contribution was a song cycle called The Colour of Joy. The dreamers, she explains, are the people who immigrated to Canada — like her parents, from Guyana — and planted their roots so something could grow. The dreamers are university students trying to find their diaphragm. The dreamers are everyone who ever hoped, without quite knowing what they were hoping toward.

“It is my life,” she says. “It is everyone’s life.”

Desiree puts it differently. “I am not a minority,” she says, “because God did not make minorities.” She speaks about her son too — André Sills, an actor at the Stratford Festival — and the emotion of watching her children’s names appear in newspapers, spoken about on television. “I came to Canada with not one dime,” she says again. “And I stand in awe many times when I see what God has done.”

She wrote something down before opening night. She can’t quite remember the exact words. But it was about this: this is the child of an immigrant.

She Should Be My Alter Ego

Ask Jonelle what her mother has given her, and she pauses.

“She should be my alter ego,” she says, almost laughing. “She has so much vibrancy, confidence, joy. And I feel that is everything an opera singer needs — to stand on a stage and tell very vulnerable stories.” She adds: “My mom is also able to make deep personal connections in an instant. And I feel that’s such an important skill. Because that’s how you build a career. By building trust. By building friendship.”

Desiree, for her part, says she tries to attend every performance she can. Not because she has the money for it. Not because it’s easy. But because, she says quietly: “I only have one opportunity, and it’s called life. I’m not always going to be here. But while I’m here, I want to celebrate — because I saw the journey. I saw the pain. I saw the tears. I saw the fear and sometimes the rejection. But the fact that she never gave up.”

A beautiful vase, she says at one point — without flowers, it’s just a lonely vase.

The Binder Comes Full Circle

There is no tidy bow to put on a story like this. But there is something close.

Jonelle Sills stood on the Queen Elizabeth Theatre stage this spring and sang Mimi — the character whose introduction cracked her open at seventeen, the one she wrote in ink all over her binders. The opera she stumbled toward. The role she spent a lifetime building toward without ever quite planning to.

Her mother was in the audience.

The last time we spoke with Jonelle about all of this, she said something we keep returning to. We asked about the instinct that drives her best singing. She said it’s the same thing that drives singing in church — the commitment to communicating something, to reaching through the music toward whoever is listening. Whether that is the love of God, the strength of community, the search for hope.

“That streamline,” she said, “transcends all genres.”

It started in a womb full of gospel. It moved through a church in Markham, a children’s chorus she didn’t choose, a binder no one else could read, a field trip to the opera, years of discipline no one saw, a stage at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, a Juno nomination, a song cycle for the dreamers.

And somewhere in all of it — underneath the career and the acclaim and the reviews — it is still, very simply, a daughter carrying her mother’s voice into a room and giving it away.

This episode and accompanying Substack article was written, produced, edited, hosted, and recorded by Ashley Daniel Foot.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

On Saturday, May 9, mezzo-soprano Taryn Plater and pianist Derek Stanyer pull back the curtain on how art song is actually made. Deconstructing Art Song — free, 7:30pm, Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall — is a concert for the curious: equal parts process and product, with you in the room as it unfolds.

To mark the occasion, we asked Vancouver Opera Chorus member Rebecca Collett — soprano, teacher, and devoted art song obsessive — to write about what this repertoire actually means to a singer who lives inside it. Read on.

As a student, I had the opportunity to coach with pianist Brian Zeger, who said something I’ve carried with me ever since: there are so many art songs written that you should never sing something you don’t absolutely love. At the time, it felt like good advice: clear, even practical. But I didn’t yet understand what it meant.

A Dead Man Asks a Question Nothing about it was large or theatrical. And yet.

A performance changed that.

“Is my team ploughing?,” asks a dead man to his friend.

In this song setting of A.E. Housman’s poem by George Butterworth from his song cycle, A Shropshire Lad, a grim dialogue between friends ensues and we learn that life carries on without us.

Something in me shifted. Nothing about it was large or theatrical. It was just a singer, a pianist, and a poem unfolding in real time. And yet it was one of the most devastating and poignant things I had ever experienced in a concert hall.

Butterworth - Is my team ploughing? (6 songs from A Shropshire Lad) Baritone Geoffrey Sirett (Vancouver Opera credits: The Overcoat) completely floored me with his performance of Is My Team Ploughing?, years ago. His recording with pianist Stephen Ralls, C.M. is just as stunning.

Art song, at its core, is just a singer and a pianist, interpreting a poem set to music. Unlike opera or oratorio, where stories unfold on a larger stage, it lives in a smaller, more intimate space. In a space where every word, every silence, every shift in tone and timbre (colour) means something. It’s a repertoire many singers love to explore, when gifted the opportunity to do so.

In this performance of “Is My Team Ploughing,” the silences weren’t empty, they were charged. The vocal choices resisted the kind of full, resonant sound many singers are trained to produce. Instead, the voice was shaped around the text—sometimes pared back, sometimes raw—serving the poem and the music more faithfully than any conventionally “beautiful” operatic sound could. I could see that the singer was deeply invested in this song and began to understand, vaguely at first, what Zeger meant about choosing songs that we love.

The Song That Wasn’t There Yet A coaching is not a correction. It’s an excavation.

I was lucky to study with a teacher who lived in art song repertoire. Kevin McMillan’s way with language—how a consonant could land, how a vowel could open or withhold—showed me that singing a song is not about sound alone, but about making the text speak. His insistence on partnership with one’s pianist was equally formative: a kind of shared attention, where meaning passed back and forth, sometimes imperceptibly, between voice and instrument.

I remember sitting in a studio class as another student worked on Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger from Schwanengesang, a collection of songs published posthumously. This song is about a man who comes face to face with a ghostly version of himself, frozen outside the home where he once loved. It’s a piece some singers are drawn to for its mythology, its darkness, its sense of emotional and musical depth. But what stayed with me wasn’t the performance itself. It was what happened in the coaching.

The student was doing what he could with it, but the piece hadn’t yet come fully into focus. And then Kevin McMillan began to work. With each adjustment: attention to a word, a shift in pacing, a change in colour, the song opened. The story sharpened. The harmony took on weight. What had seemed distant suddenly felt immediate, unsettling, alive. I remember feeling, quite unexpectedly, thrilled to hear it again, not because it had become more polished, but because it had become more real. It was the first time I understood how much of art song lives in that process: how deeply one must engage with both the poem and the composer’s response to it for the music to truly speak.

Canadian baritone Kevin McMillan and pianist Lev Natochenny interpret Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger

The Morning That Keeps Coming Some songs you understand immediately. Others wait for your life to catch up.

We are often drawn, early on, to the overtly dramatic. Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen tells the story of a young woman confronted by Death, who first appears terrifying, then unexpectedly gentle. It has all the elements that capture a young singer’s imagination: the supernatural encounter, the clear emotional stakes, even the famous (optional) low note at the end that can feel like a small triumph (it’s a D3—below middle C for those keeping track). I remember a mezzo in studio class singing it and all of us being quietly thrilled by that final descent. But over time, what once felt like a moment of vocal bravura becomes something else entirely. A colleague reflected that what initially draws singers in can give way to something much deeper: an immersive kind of storytelling. When Death speaks, it’s not a menace, but a release for the maiden for whom he has come. Not fear, but a kind of stillness that is almost compassionate. What once felt like a dramatic gesture becomes, with time, something more unsettling and more humane.

Contralto Leah Giselle Field (VO Yulanda M. Faris Young Artist Program alumna; VO credits: Hansel and Gretel, Le Nozze di Figaro, Eugene Onegin, and Cavalleria Rusticana), who shared her insight about this piece with me, partners with pianist Kevin Zakresky to perform Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen

Other songs reveal themselves more slowly. One that returns to me again and again is Wolf’s Das verlassene Mägdlein. I first learned this piece as an undergraduate, when many of life’s experiences were still imagined rather than lived. At the time, I could understand the outline: abandonment, routine, the quiet ache beneath it. But now, the piece feels different in my body. The piano’s repetition no longer feels simply descriptive. It feels relentless. The morning doesn’t offer renewal; it continues. The interpretation has become more hollow, more stripped back, more aware of how life moves forward whether or not we are ready to follow. I find myself wondering how this song will meet me again in some later moment of my life, and what I will find then.

The author, Rebecca Collett, and pianist Richard Epp present Hugo Wolf’s “Das verlassene Mägdlein”

The Same Notes, a Different Woman Interpretation is not fidelity to a single story. It never was.

That sense of change—of returning to the same notes and finding something else there—has stayed with me. I first encountered Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, a song cycle about a woman’s journey through courtship, marriage, and eventually grief, as a student. It’s worth noting: both the poet and the composer were men. I sang it with sincerity and imagination, stepping into a version of love and marriage that felt almost mythic. Years later, returning to it as a mother of two, I find myself resisting parts of it and leaning more deeply into others. The early songs now feel almost too bright, too certain, and naive in their portrayal of love. But the later ones—the quiet domesticity, the depth of attachment, the rupture of loss—have deepened for me. What I might once have dismissed as limiting or anti-feminist now feels more complex and human, layered in a way I couldn’t have accessed before.

And sometimes, it isn’t just time that shifts a song, but perspective. I was struck by a reimagining of that same cycle by Simran Claire (VO Yulanda M. Faris Young Artist Program Alumna), who reframed it through her Punjabi-Canadian background and her grandmother’s experience of arranged marriage. Love doesn’t begin with recognition—it grows, accumulates, is built. This lens expands this song cycle beautifully. It shows us that interpretation is not about fidelity to a single narrative, but about allowing the work to meet lived experience in different ways.

Mezzo-Soprano Simran Claire shares her reimagining of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben as DADIMA, with pianist Kimberley-Ann Bartczak.

Songs That Are Still Waiting Some pieces stay on the shelf until you are finally ready to be changed by them.

Some songs stay with you because of an artist’s interpretation. Finzi’s Since We Loved is one I might easily have missed, were it not for tenor Asitha Tennekoon’s (VO credits: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Flight) interpretation. There is something so tender and earnest in his singing that is immediately captivating. He captures the song’s restraint, its brevity, its quiet intensity. When I asked him why he recorded it, he spoke about it being the last song Finzi composed before his death, written for his wife. That knowledge changes how you hear it. The song is over almost as soon as it begins, but it stays with you.

Asitha Tennekoon, tenor and Stéphane Mayer piano interpret Since We Loved by Gerald Finzi.

And then there are moments of surprise, of delight, even shock, that remind you how expansive this repertoire is. In Leslie Uyeda's (Former VO Chorus Director) song cycle, The Sex Lives of Vegetables, there is humour, nostalgia, and something delightfully irreverent. It reminds us that art song is not a single emotional register, but a spectrum, capable of holding tenderness, absurdity, sensuality, and wit. My favourite song in the cycle is “Scarlet Runner Beans”, which alludes to the Baroque period—a world I'll never stop returning to.

Listen to soprano Heather Pawsey (VO Chorus), clarinetist AK Coope (VO Orchestra), and pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa perform Leslie Uyeda’s Scarlet Runner Beans from The Sex Lives of Vegetables.

And then there are the songs that feel like they are still waiting for you. Alma Mahler's “Licht in der Nacht” is one on my 'to sing' bucket list. The music seems to search rather than settle. It circles and reaches, never quite finding a place to rest. What remains is a suspended longing. I feel that I have something to bring to it. My own experiences and artistry now might meet the composer and poet in a meaningful way.

Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw interpret Alma Mahler’s Licht in der Nacht.

That, I think, is what Zeger meant: loving a song isn’t just liking it. It’s recognizing something in it that you are willing to bring to life, and that asks something of you in return.

Rebecca Collett is a soprano, teacher, communications professional, mom, and enthusiastic art song fan. She sings in the Vancouver Opera Chorus and around the city (and is currently hoping to bring an Alma Mahler and Friends recital to life).

Get free tickets to DECONSTRUCTING ART SONG here.

Don Wright didn’t arrive at Vancouver Opera through the usual door. While his father Tom sang with the VOA Chorus from its founding season in 1960, and his younger brother Edd was already on stage by 1965, Don spent his early years doing something else entirely: playing guitar at coffeehouses across BC, singing Gordon Lightfoot songs alongside a woman from Liverpool named Eileen, and harmonizing in barbershop quartets. Opera was in his blood — he just took the scenic route.

What followed was one of the quiet great careers in this company’s history. One hundred and sixty-eight productions. Four seasons with Opera in the Schools, where he quit his trucking job to sing for children 240 times a year. .

In this conversation — recorded ahead of La Bohème, the production that marks Don’s 168th — Ashley Daniel Foot sits down with him to talk about the folk years, the family legacy, a power outage on Cambie Street in full costume and chains, and what it means to spend a lifetime inside an art form that most people only glimpse from the outside.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ashley Daniel Foot:

We’re Inside Vancouver Opera, and I’m Ashley Daniel Foot.

Today, I’m sitting down with someone whose voice has been woven into the sound of the company for longer than many of us have even been on this earth. Don Wright is a long-standing member of the Vancouver Opera Chorus, a native Vancouverite, and with our upcoming production of La Bohème, he will reach a milestone that I genuinely find astonishing: 168 productions. Count them up, 168!

I’ve been turning that number over and over in my mind since we first started talking about this conversation, but here’s what makes it even more remarkable. Opera is in Don’s blood in the most literal sense. His father, Tom Wright, not our general director by the way, performed with the VOA Chorus from its original season in 1960 through to the 1980s. His younger brother, Edd, was a member of the chorus well ahead of Don, starting with VOA’s 1965 production of Carmen, no less. And there were productions, cherished ones, I would imagine, where all four Wrights performed together on the same stage. This is just not a life lived inside opera. It is a family legacy carried across generations.

Don, it is a genuine honour to have you here.

Don Wright:

Glad to be here.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’d love to begin somewhere earlier and quieter before Vancouver Opera, before the chorus. You came to this art form by what you’ve described as a rather late blooming route. In the 1960s and 70s, you were on the coffeehouse circuit as a folk singer, performing alongside your wife Eileen, dabbling in barbershop harmony world. Your father and brother were already deep inside Vancouver Opera, and yet your own path wound through very different territory.

Looking back, what was that journey like, and when did you feel the pull towards us, towards the opera?

Don Wright:

I was in a barbershop quartet during my barbershop years at the same time that we did our folk music tour around B.C. generally.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Where did you tour?

Don Wright:

The island. Different churches.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What were you singing? What kind of stuff were you singing?

Don Wright:

Well, Gordon Lightfoot, very similar stuff too.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Did you play the guitar as well?

Don Wright:

Yeah.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Do you ever still play it these days?

Don Wright:

I’d like to, but I just don’t get around to it anymore.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Busy with 168 operas, right?

Don Wright:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So how did you find your way into the chorus? I know that Bev Fyfe, that was our long-term chorus master, played a role in drawing you and Eileen in. First through the Greater Vancouver Operatic Society, and then leads in Gilbert and Sullivan in musical theatre. Do you remember when you really started to do the chorus?

Don Wright:

Well, I started the chorus in ‘75, I guess, but we did a lot of G&S with Bev for GVOS, did a lot of lead roles over the years, like from the, I’m guessing ‘60’s, right into the end of the ‘70’s, when I decided to join because our quartet split up, one of them, one of the fellows went East. So that made my mind up that I had the time to join the opera.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You know, I’m fascinated because the life of a chorister. I don’t think we talk about it enough. The chorus asks for complete artistic commitment and a kind of ego surrender at the same time. You’re essential, and yet the work is asking you to kind of dissolve into something larger than yourself. And you’ve named the chorus, you know, camaraderie and all the friends that you’ve made as one of the great pleasures of your life.

That particular warmth that builds when people have shared hundreds of stages and shows together. How do you understand what it means to be in the chorus? And not just musically, but maybe as a way of being in the art form. What has that friendship and those camaraderies meant to you over the years?

Don Wright:

Everything, actually. I don’t think I ever met anybody that I didn’t like. I’m always sorry that a production is finished. I’ve never been happy that a production was over.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

168 productions, Don. I can’t even imagine. Do you remember some highlights over the years?

Don Wright:

Oh yeah, for instance, James McCracken, we went to Nero’s for an after party, and he sprung for drinks for the whole chorus. So that was, you know, that was relatively expensive, even in those days.

It’s been a great run, actually. I mean, that’s including four years of school programs, which I’ve enjoyed even more, because we used to meet after on stage and give 10 or 15 minutes of explanations to all the kids and all the questions that they would have.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And this is our Opera in the Schools program, which you were in from 1984 to 1988. And you said that you quit your day job to do it. Is this true?

Don Wright:

Oh, yeah. I used to drive for a trucking outfit.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So you decided no more trucks. You want to sing in schools.

Don Wright:

Yeah.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And it was opera from then on.

Don Wright:

Yeah, pretty well. Yeah.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You went to 25-28 weeks a year, 220 to 240 performances. There was never a day you didn’t look forward to walking into a school. What was it about that work that meant so much to you? And what do you think performing opera for children does that nothing else quite can?

Don Wright:

Well, the fact that I came off work, you know, eight hours a day driving truck, which I didn’t particularly like. So there was nothing that I didn’t like about the performance, even setting up the stage and everything, which we used to do all the time. And the kids and the comments, all the kids used to write letters.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Why do you think opera is important for children to see in schools today?

Don Wright:

Oh, it’s just a learning experience that hopefully teaches that they might want to be into music and study instruments, or a voice, or whatever. It’s just a good start for them. Plus, there’s a seeing live performance.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What are some of the strangest productions, or maybe there’s some productions that were very unusual in the way they were designed? Anything stand out for you?

Don Wright:

From the House of the Dead was a very exciting offer. That was a Janáček. The thing I remember most was we spent an hour and a half outside the theatre.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You did?

Don Wright:

Because the lights went out.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

The lights went out during a production?

Don Wright:

The power went out, yeah. It was pre-production. It hadn’t started yet, fortunately.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So then what happened?

Don Wright:

Not sure what they did with the audience, but there was no lights in the theatre. So we spent time on Cambie Street in all our costumes and our chains.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

That must have been a sight for passersby.

Don Wright:

Hair shaved. So cars were going by.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

They didn’t know it was Halloween. They thought it was.

Don Wright:

Yeah, they thought it was!

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What’s the strangest costume you’ve ever had to wear in any opera?

Don Wright:

I think one we had quite little on. We were all very colourful with marks. Like we were animals, sort of. They turned us into animals.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And your wife Eileen has sung with you in quite a few productions, too. Is that fair to say?

Don Wright:

Yeah, at least a dozen.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It must be nice to sing with her in a production.

Don Wright:

Oh, yeah. I mean, we used to sing as folk singers prior to that.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

When did you meet Eileen?

Don Wright:

Well, she was pretty well right off the boat from England, from Liverpool. She came from the home of The Beatles.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And so you were waiting with the guitar?

Don Wright:

Oh, basically, yeah. I used to sing on my own.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It just didn’t feel as good, right?

Don Wright:

And then she sang with her sister. She sang with her sister for a while. And then she said, “why don’t we, why don’t I sing with you sometimes?” So I was always good at harmonies. So I said, “I’ll sing the harmony, do the melodies and just join me at the coffeehouse that I’m booked at.” And so we ended up as a couple.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

When the curtain closes on La Bohème and you walk off the Queen Elizabeth stage for the 168th time, what are you taking with you?

Don Wright:

A lot of great memories. Great memories. It’s been a good ride.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It sure has. Don Wright, thank you. And what strikes me sitting here is the full arc of what you’ve just described. A family that gave itself to this art form across generations. Your father on that stage. Your brother. The four Wrights performing together.

A folk singer who found his way to the operatic chorus. A man who quit his day job to sing opera for children. And never once regretted it. I heard no regrets. And now 168 productions later, still looking forward to every one.

Most people who will see La Bohème will see it once, maybe twice if they’re lucky. They’ll carry one night with them, one cast, one memory of Mimi and the candlelight. But you have lived inside this art form across a lifetime, and we are so grateful for your voice, for your consistency, for your constancy, and for everything you and your family have given to Vancouver Opera.

Thank you, Don, for these beautiful memories.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

We should begin with the tenor jokes. It would be irresponsible not to.

There is a whole genre of them — the inability to count, the alleged difficulty of the species in rehearsal, the specific chaos that ensues when more than one is present in the same room. I raise this with Matthew White and Zachary Rioux — the two tenors alternating as Rodolfo in Vancouver Opera’s La Bohème, opening April 25 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre — and neither of them flinches.

“All the rumours are true,” Matthew says, completely deadpan. A beat. “But opera needs us. So tenors will keep tenoring.”

Zachary laughs. The room relaxes. We are going to be fine.

Ask Matthew White why La Bohème endures and you get the answer of a man who has loved this opera his entire life — not as a professional calculation, but as something that got into him young and never really left.

It’s his favourite opera. Has been since childhood. And when he tries to explain why, he reaches for something close to the bone: La Bohème, he says, is the perfect gateway drug to the power of opera. The melodies arrive fully formed, immediately gorgeous, as if Puccini wrote them already knowing they’d be hummed on street corners a hundred and thirty years later. But it’s the story that does the real work — young people, broke and brilliant and alive, loving each other badly in a cold Paris garret, and then time running out on all of it.

The heartbreak isn’t decorative. It’s structural. You feel it coming from the first scene and you can’t stop it, which is exactly the point. There’s something in that combination — the soaring beauty and the absolute inevitability of loss — that cuts through every defence a first-time opera-goer might bring into the house. La Bohème doesn’t ask you to acquire a taste. It asks you to feel something, right now, and that’s an invitation almost no one refuses.

Matthew has sung Rodolfo at Detroit Opera, at the Spoleto Festival, at Opera Naples. He knows this character the way you know a road you’ve driven a hundred times — and yet the opera keeps surprising him. That’s the thing about Puccini. The craft is so deep that there’s always somewhere new to go.

The Kid from Grand Falls

Zachary Rioux did not grow up wanting to be an opera singer. He grew up in Grand Falls, New Brunswick, wanting to be a rock star. He started playing guitar at four. Began singing lessons at seven — “so I could be the lead singer in a rock band,” he says, and there’s no apology in it, just the plain truth of where he came from.

It wasn’t until he was sixteen that classical singing entered the picture seriously. And his first experience watching opera — really watching it — came in his first year at Toronto’s Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music. The twist: it was also his first time performing in one. He went from knowing almost nothing about the art form to standing inside it simultaneously. And he was, by his own account, immediately hooked.

From the Glenn Gould School, he went to the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia — a conservatory Matthew also attended, though at a different point in time. It’s one of those institutions that leaves a particular mark: rigorous, character-focused, serious about connecting the technical instrument to something recognizably human on stage. Both singers credit AVA for deepening their relationship to the work in ways that pure voice training alone couldn’t. There’s something about the pedagogy there — the insistence that you are not just learning to sing but learning to mean what you sing — that shows up in how both of them talk about their craft.

Zachary then spent two years in the Opera Studio at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, one of the great operatic finishing schools in the world — performing on that mainstage in La Bohème, Gianni Schicchi, Lohengrin, Parsifal, and more. Last season, his professional role debut as Rodolfo with Manitoba Opera drew critical acclaim, praised for his “resonant, fully rounded tones, even range and heroic delivery.” He is ascending quickly. And Vancouver — this production — is his Vancouver Opera debut.

What’s striking about Zachary in conversation is how grounded he is about the journey. He doesn’t perform humility, but he also doesn’t perform arrival. He’s someone who has worked hard and knows it, who started from a small town wanting something else entirely and found his way, incrementally, to one of the most demanding art forms in the world. There’s a directness to him that feels very New Brunswick — very this is just what happened, and here I am.

Brake Calipers and Beautiful Sound

The most unexpected detour in our conversation begins with Matthew White mentioning cars.

Before he was a tenor — before any of this — Matthew worked with his hands. Construction. Service industry. He stepped away from formal schooling deliberately, needing the space and freedom to focus on developing his voice without institutional pressure. He wanted to build the technique on his own terms, which required, paradoxically, working with a body that wasn’t primarily a singer’s body yet.

He’s a car guy. And when he starts talking about vocal technique, the analogy he reaches for is the brake calliper.

The idea: a calliper applies precise, coordinated pressure at exactly the right points to create controlled force. Too much in the wrong place — or the right pressure at the wrong time — and you lose everything. It’s a system of interdependent parts, each of which has to be doing exactly its job. Get one wrong and the whole mechanism suffers.

Singing operatically, Matthew says, works the same way. The list of things that conspire against a beautiful sound is almost absurdly long: tongue tension that kills resonance before it starts, jaw rigidity that locks the instrument, posture that collapses the support structure, breath that arrives too fast or not at all. Each one is a caliper point. Each one can betray you mid-phrase, mid-performance, mid-the-moment-that-matters-most. The work of technique — the years of it, the unglamorous daily repetition of it — is bringing all those points into alignment so that the system functions as a whole.

But here is the part that matters most, and where Matthew gets genuinely interesting: once you’ve done that mechanical work — once you’ve drilled it deeply enough that it lives in the body rather than the conscious mind — you have to let it go. In performance, he doesn’t think about any of it. He stops monitoring the calipers. He puts his attention entirely on the character, on the scene, on what Rodolfo wants in this moment and why he can’t have it.

The technique becomes the floor you stand on, not the thing you’re watching. What the audience experiences is Rodolfo. Not a man managing his tongue.

One of the most quietly resonant things he said — and I’ve been turning it over ever since — was about finding the way to make a perfect sound while also honouring your own truth. Those two things can feel like they’re in tension: the ideal of technically correct, beautiful singing, and the particular, irreproducible fact of who you are — your specific instrument, your specific history, your specific emotional relationship to this music on this night. His point was that they don’t have to be opposed. The technique doesn’t erase the singer. Done right, it creates the conditions in which the singer can actually show up — fully, without apology, without the armour of self-monitoring. The goal isn’t a perfect sound in the abstract. It’s your perfect sound, which is a different thing entirely.

Zachary picked up that thread with his own version of it. For him, the character work and the technical work aren’t sequential — you don’t master one and then move to the other. They inform each other in real time. When he’s onstage as Rodolfo, his understanding of who this person is shapes the quality of the sound he makes, not just the dramatic choices. And vice versa. The voice and the character are one instrument. Separate them and you get a beautiful noise. Keep them together and you get opera.

On Being Double-Cast

The double-casting question is the one I was most curious about — because I suspect audiences are too. What is it actually like to share a role, in the same production, just days apart?

Zachary’s answer was more generous than I expected. He said he’s been watching. Paying attention to Matthew’s rehearsals, turning choices over, deciding what to absorb and what to leave alone. Not imitation — something more like dialogue. The kind of learning that’s only possible when you can see the role externalized in someone else’s body, through someone else’s instrument, and ask yourself: what does that tell me about what I’m doing?

At the same time, the two casts have been kept largely separate throughout the rehearsal process. The productions you’ll see on April 26th and May 3rd are genuinely distinct from the ones on April 25th, April 30th, and May 2nd. Same staging. Same orchestra. Same notes on the page. But different casts bring different physics, different chemistry, different ways of being young and broke and in love in a cold Paris attic. La Bohème told by Matthew White’s Rodolfo is not the same opera as La Bohème told by Zachary Rioux’s.

That’s not a limitation. That’s the entire argument for live performance.

On the Act IV Duet, and What It Actually Is

Near the end of our conversation I ask the rapid-fire question I’ve been saving: the Act IV duet between Rodolfo and Marcello — comic relief, or something more?

“Absolutely something more,” Zachary says, without hesitation. And then he takes his time with it, because it deserves time.

The beginning of the duet is a little comical, he admits — two men, not quite admitting how much they miss the women they love, performing a lightness neither of them feels. But then something shifts. It becomes, he says, deeply internal. Each of them is “singing kind of separately, like they’re internally singing themselves” — lost in their own grief, their own memory, their own version of what was lost — “and then it comes together.” The voices find each other again, the way the men eventually do, and something about that convergence is almost unbearable in the best possible way.

“It just blends so well,” he says. “And it really tears at the heartstrings.”

It’s a small window into how Zachary listens to this music — not as a performer calculating effects, but as someone genuinely moved by what Puccini put on the page. The rock kid from Grand Falls, still a little astonished, thirty years into a life he didn’t plan.

I ask about Paris in Act II — best thing about it, worst thing about Bohemian poverty in Act I. Best thing about Paris, he says: “It doesn’t smell like Paris on stage.” The worst thing about the poverty? He barely hesitates. “It’s cold. Very cold. Breezy in the apartment.”

Timothy Chevrolet

Before we wrap, we get to accessibility — who opera is actually for, and whether the form is doing enough to invite people in.

Matthew mentions Timothée Chalamet. Or, as he calls him: “Timothy Chevrolet.” He says it with a grin, clearly knowing exactly what he’s doing. It is, objectively, a perfect joke — the extremely French movie-star name met with the extremely American car brand, delivered by a man who genuinely knows his way around an engine.

But the point underneath the joke is serious. The operatic internet briefly lit up when Chalamet was photographed at a performance — a young, globally beloved celebrity visibly moved by the art form, and a cascade of new curiosity following in his wake. Matthew isn’t dismissive of that moment. He thinks it matters.

His argument isn’t that opera is dying — he doesn’t believe it is. His argument is that the art form sometimes inflicts its own inaccessibility on itself. Hermetically sealed. Coded. Requiring prior knowledge just to enter the room. And that when that seal gets punctured — by a movie star, by a well-priced ticket, by a pre-show conversation that treats you like an intelligent person who just hasn’t been here before — something real happens. New people come. They feel something. They come back.

Opera, at its best, doesn’t need the mystique. La Bohème certainly doesn’t. The story is right there. The cold attic is right there. Mimì’s hands, Rodolfo’s candle, the key on the floor — it’s all right there, waiting.

The question is whether the institution steps aside and lets the art do its work.

Zachary Rioux and Matthew White are in the building.

Rodolfo is in the attic. Mimì is about to knock.

La Bohème runs April 25 through May 3 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets at vancouveropera.ca.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

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Ask Jonathan Darlington what he does when he first arrives in Vancouver, and he answers without hesitation. Ask him what he does when he arrives back home in Paris. He gives the exact same answer.

“Look at the sky,” he says — both times. Not a joke. Not a deflection. Just the honest answer of a man who has spent nearly forty years in pits and rehearsal rooms and aircraft seats, moving between cities so constantly that the sky has become the one reliable thing to measure where he is.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Darlington — Music Director Emeritus of Vancouver Opera, Chief Conductor of the Nürnberger Symphoniker, conductor at the Vienna State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Paris Opera Ballet, and about a dozen other places the rest of us only read about — is back in Vancouver this week. In the pit at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. And the piece is La Bohème: the fastest-selling production in this company’s sixty-six year history.

“He Pushes All of Them in Exactly the Right Places”

The question of why La Bohème sells out — why this particular opera, above everything else — genuinely delights him.

“Oh, golly. That’s a really good question,” he says, and you believe him. “It does it all, you know — the world over. Perhaps it’s the story. The music has at least two of the most famous Puccini arias ever written. But really it’s a combination of the two. Puccini knew what emotional buttons to push. And in Bohème, he pushes all of them — in exactly the right places.”

“It’s just real genius on a level that beggars belief sometimes.” — Jonathan Darlington on Puccini

He came to Puccini the long way round — through a period of genuine snobbery that he now freely admits to. “I grew up with that idea,” he says. “There were always those who thought — and it was always a snobbish idea — that he was somehow second rate. Which is complete nonsense.”

“When you begin to study his orchestration, begin to study the structure of the operas — whether in tonality, or in the use of leitmotifs — it’s so incredibly well put together. Each of these operas has its own sound world. You can always tell it’s Puccini, but he’s using things in the orchestra in different ways in each piece. It’s just real genius on a level that beggars belief sometimes.”

“My World Is a Chamber World”

Before any of this — before Vancouver, before Vienna and Dresden and Paris — Jonathan Darlington was a pianist. Not an opera pianist. A chamber musician. Someone who spent his time on Schubert and Schumann and the French Mélodie repertoire, accompanying singers in intimate recitals, playing as a répétiteur in small opera houses, learning the craft from the keyboard outward.

“I didn’t even think about opera really before my mid-to-late twenties,” he says. “I had friends at university who were opera crazy and we’d sit around with scores of Bohème or the Magic Flute. But it wasn’t really my thing. I was much more a pure chamber musician.”

“My world is a chamber world, which I try and give to bigger ensembles. I try and ask people to listen to each other — to create a more chamber-like atmosphere of making music.” — Jonathan Darlington

This is, it turns out, what the critics mean when they describe his conducting as “sensitive.” It is not softness. It is the specific precision of a musician who learned to hear inside small rooms before he learned to fill large ones.

“Stillness. An Intelligence That Came Out of Every Pore.”

He worked, early on, around three of the most formidable musical minds of the twentieth century: Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Muti, Olivier Messiaen. What he remembers of Messiaen, who was sitting in on a chorus rehearsal at the Paris radio, is almost entirely physical.

“What I remember most is his stillness. He wouldn’t say very much. He would sit there with an intelligence that came out of every pore of his body. But it was the stillness.”

Boulez, he remembers as gentle and clear even when things were falling apart.

Muti is another story entirely.

“I played rehearsals for the Verdi Requiem with him. And I remember one occasion — the singers’ rehearsals had just finished, I was at the piano, and the orchestral rehearsals began. And I remember him shouting: Troppo forte, l’orchestra!“ A pause. “He had quite a temperament. And even then, he was being treated as a god.”

He first came to Vancouver in 2001 — right after 9/11. The production was The Marriage of Figaro. The continua playing wasn’t working, so Darlington did what comes naturally to a keyboard musician: he took it over himself, directing from the piano.

General Director Jim Wright noticed. And then, somewhere during the run, the conversation happened.

“Jim drove me home one night,” Darlington says, “and he essentially asked whether I’d like to become — I don’t think he said music director at that point, because that didn’t happen until a few years later — but our chief conductor. If you like.”

He stayed for nearly twenty years. Fifty-plus productions.

Among the productions he remembers with a very specific expression — somewhere between a wince and a laugh — is Sweeney Todd.

“The staging of that was quite... perhaps eccentric,” he says carefully. “Famously so, might be the way of putting it.” The production placed him on stage, surrounded by a large metal contraption — caging, staircases, machinery that moved and turned. He was required to open the show by simulating playing an organ, then turning to the audience and staring them into a state of fear.

“And in a way,” he says, with a very particular pause, “it wasn’t such a difficult task at that point — because I was so frightened myself, and so irate, that it just came out naturally.”

“I Come In With a Big Smile on My Face”

When asked to describe — as physically and specifically as possible — what is happening in his body in the sixteen bars before the curtain rises on La Bohème, Darlington’s answer is not about the music. It’s about the other people in the room.

“I go in with an atmosphere around me, I hope, of confidence. Confidence not in myself — but confidence in those with whom I’m going to be making music all evening. I try and send that message out.” He searches for the right word. “A sense of ease. It’s a bit more than just confidence. It’s a feeling that I know that everybody can do their jobs. And that I will try and help everybody do their jobs to the best of my ability.”

“If the musicians see someone coming in who looks tense — they are going to be tense.” — Jonathan Darlington

And then the downbeat falls, and Paris, 1830, begins.

There’s a moment from a Vancouver Opera rehearsal — brought up in this conversation — where Darlington stopped the orchestra mid-passage and reminded them that what they were playing was cherry juice. That it should taste like something. That they should relish it.

He smiles at the memory. “Oh, absolutely. If one gives an image of something beautiful, people respond to it.”

Then he reaches for something larger. “Do we reflect the society in which we live? Yes, of course. Does it mean putting on new works that talk about the society in which we live? In some instances, yes. Does it mean recreating old works with an accent on their inner beauty? Yes. I have no magic wand to say, this is the answer. It’s a question that just solicits other questions.”

A pause. Then: “But you have a baton.” He laughs: “I have a baton. Made by a wonderful person here in Vancouver — Craig Tomlinson. He makes harpsichords. And for years, Craig has been making my batons.”

“Sometimes I’m so relaxed it flies out of my hand — and of course it breaks when it lands.” — Jonathan Darlington, on why Craig Tomlinson is always busy

“I break them. Often,” he adds. “They get stuck in bits of things — podiums, chairs. And sometimes I’m so relaxed that it flies out of my hand and goes somewhere. And of course it breaks when it lands.” He is, at this moment, genuinely unapologetic about it.

Ask any conductor who has done La Bohème many times how it has changed for them, and you get biography whether they intend it or not. Darlington doesn’t rush.

“When I first did this piece, I probably wasn’t in the same state of empathy with Puccini that I’ve become. But this piece — seeing the poverty and seeing the sickness that is all around us — is perhaps one of the aspects of it that, as one gets older, one has a little bit more understanding of.”

“Walking around Vancouver sometimes, when one sees people who are desperate — for all sorts of reasons — these characters go into depths of despair. And as one gets older, one understands a bit more.” — Jonathan Darlington

He’s not talking about the opera anymore. Or rather — he is, but so is the street outside. That is, perhaps, what Puccini always intended.

Asked — with nearly forty years of conducting behind him — what piece he still hasn’t done and most wants to, his answer is immediate: Die Tote Stadt, the lush, haunted Korngold opera.

There’s a reason, and it is not entirely musical. Years ago in Paris, he was called at barely an hour’s notice to sight-read the piece for a conductor “who shall remain nameless.” His sight-reading has never been his greatest asset. The score of Die Tote Stadt is very, very hard.

“He went for me in a big way,” Darlington says of the conductor. “He knew I was sight-reading. In front of all the singers. He tore me apart. That was a traumatic experience.” Then, quietly: “I got to know the piece later, and it’s a wonderful piece. And it might have something to do with that — to try and expunge that awful memory.”

Lightning Round

Are you related to Richard Gere? I get that a lot — in Italy especially. People in lifts. They look at me, talk to each other, then look at me again and point.

Last word at the end of La Bohème — Rodolfo or the orchestra? The orchestra.

It is a young boy who gets the last real question of this conversation — not literally, but almost. Ashley Daniel Foot tells Darlington that his own first opera was La Bohème, as a child, and that he remembers not being able to breathe, the feelings of emotion washing over him from the very first bar. He asks: what are you hoping to give to the young people in those seats who are discovering this piece for the first time?

Darlington doesn’t hesitate.

“Exactly what you just said. If we’re true to Puccini — that’s what’s going to happen. It’s going to do it automatically. We have to be truthful. We have to be integrators.” He smiles at the word. “That’s a good word for it. Integrators to Puccini. And if we do that, it’ll happen.”

“If we’re true to Puccini, it’ll happen. It’ll do it automatically.” — Jonathan Darlington

La Bohème is at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, April 25, 26, 30 and May 2 & 3, 2026. Sung in Italian with English Surtitles. Tickets at vancouveropera.ca

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

It starts out like many star-crossed encounters. The girl’s candle has blown out, she knocks on her neighbour’s door, and a cute boy answers. But no sooner has he invited her in than she has a coughing fit and faints; our first indication that La Bohème may not be a rom-com with a happy ending after all. Mimì’s bloody handkerchief serves as Chekhov’s gun.

By the time La Bohème premiered in 1896, 18th century urbanization caused by the Industrial Revolution had driven tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was then known) to epidemic proportions. Some estimates put the mortality rate as high as 1 in 4 people in densely populated cities like London at the end of the 19th century. It wasn’t until 1882 that the German physician Robert Koch implicated Mycobacterium tuberculosis as the causative agent of the disease, and it would take another half century before an effective vaccine became readily available.

But there was a parallel epidemic: portrayals of tuberculosis in art. From Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Chekhov’s own death from the disease in 1904, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain to paintings by Claude Monet, Edvard Munch, and Rembrandt, depictions and accounts of illness quickly spread through Europe regardless of artistic form, including opera. Antonia in Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann and Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata were precursors to La Bohème‘s Mimì.

It may seem surprising, even morbid, that such a lethal disease would attract so many artists. And yet, six years on from our own global pandemic, we see parallels such as the success of the pandemic-apocalyptic The Last of Us on television, and the satirical politics of Eddington on film. Art provides an outlet for the excavation of our greatest fears. Death, loneliness, isolation, pain — what better substrates for artistic exploration?

The cultural critic Susan Sontag wrote about this phenomenon in Illness as Metaphor, where she dissects the aestheticization of illness and implicates artistic metaphor in the shaming and silencing of patients. She wrote the book while being treated for breast cancer, and draws comparisons with the 19th-century romanticization of tuberculosis as a “disease of passion”.

“My point,” writes Sontag, “is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness — and the healthiest way of being ill — is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up one’s residence in the kingdom of the ill unprejudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped.”

But it’s easy to understand why tuberculosis had such an aesthetic appeal: Tuberculosis is “a disease of extreme contrasts,” writes Sontag. “White pallor and red flush, hyperactivity alternating with languidness.” Paintings of Marie Duplessis (the real-life inspiration for Verdi’s La Traviata) or the poet John Keats transform their flushed pallor into an aesthetic ideal that applied to both men and women. Frédéric Chopin was described on his deathbed by his lover George Sand as a “poor melancholy angel”. “I should like to die from consumption,” wrote Lord Byron, who embodied Romanticism at its extremes.

The appearance of tuberculosis signaled elegance and aristocracy, so much so that entire makeup trends centreing around pale skin and flushed cheeks emerged. “The TB-influenced idea of the body was a new model for aristocratic looks,” Sontag comments. “Indeed, the romanticizing of TB is the first widespread example of that distinctively modern activity, promoting the self as an image. The tubercular look …came to be considered a mark of distinction, of breeding.”

The aestheticization of tuberculosis was not limited to the visual and literary realms. Tuberculosis is a disease of the lungs causing scarring in the lung, impaired breathing, chest pain, and a bloody cough. One must suspend disbelief watching a soprano project her voice above an orchestra for hours while supposedly dying of tuberculosis.

But Puccini and Verdi also transform tuberculosis into a vocal aesthetic. The long, soaring lines of Mimì’s act one “Sì, mi chiamano Mimì” or the powerful outbursts in her act three duet with Marcello are nowhere to be found as she dies in the final act. Instead, “Sono andati”, her big solo in act four, sits squarely in the soprano’s lower and middle range. As the vocal line builds and swells in intensity, Mimì’s line drops out, as if unable to sustain her breath — the tenor, Rodolfo, must finish her vocal phrase, capping it with a high B-flat.

Over the course of the scene Mimì’s lines get shorter and quieter, interspersed with pauses as if gasping for breath. “Con voce debolissima, sempre più affievolendosi,” Puccini indicates: ‘with a very weak voice, fading more and more’. Verdi chooses the opposite approach for Violetta’s final lines in La Traviata: he marks them “rianimata”, reanimated, and “agitatissimo”, extremely agitated, which Sontag describes as an “upsurge of vitality” before she succumbs to her disease. Disease symptoms themselves become transfigured into musical language.

And yet while European upper classes commandeered the visual, literary, and musical aesthetics of tuberculosis, epidemiological data shows how disproportionately TB affects the poor. Crowded housing and inadequate healthcare, nutrition, and heating continue to be risk factors for tuberculosis infection to this day, just as they were for Mimì and her friends. Tuberculosis was certainly more likely to affect the artists and sex workers of Paris’ Latin Quarter than the people who attended La Bohème‘s premiere in Torino’s Teatro Regio.

Sontag highlights this discrepancy between tuberculosis patients — their “thin bodies, unheated rooms, poor hygiene, inadequate food” — and the refined aristocracy of the European upper classes who adopted their appearance. For Sontag, this contradiction is perhaps best personified by La Traviata‘s Violetta, a courtesan who at the beginning of the opera is materially wealthy but spiritually starved. Like Mimì, she is consumed by romantic passion that deceives: “liveliness that comes from enervation, rosy cheeks that look like a sign of health but come from fever…an upsurge of vitality [that] may be a sign of approaching death”. But tuberculosis and its supposed “edifying refinement” carry a redemptive quality: Mimì and Violetta, like Hugo’s Fantine and Dostoyevsky’s Katerina Ivanovna, are absolved of their supposed moral failings through the aesthetic purity of their disease. It’s precisely these contradictions that inspired Puccini, Verdi, and their fellow artists: passion and death, luxury and poverty, contamination and purity.

In 1981, three years after Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor was published, the first clinical reports of AIDS emerged. As with tuberculosis, it was the artists who mythologized AIDS as part of a wider political impetus. Activists like Larry Kramer and Edmund White wrote about the disease in ways that startled and confronted; artists like Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Peter Hujar portrayed the devastating human costs of the disease before succumbing to it themselves.

Though HIV, the causative virus of AIDS, was identified in 1983, a treatment to halt the disease took over a decade to develop. Just as the first clinical trials of the combination antiretroviral therapy began, Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, based on La Bohème, premiered on Broadway in 1996. Conveniently, it coincided with the centenary of La Bohème‘s premiere.

Larson’s musical transplants the action to New York’s East Village in the late 1980s: Mimì’s tuberculosis becomes AIDS, and Rodolfo and his roommates become an assortment of artists, musicians, and drag queens. In this setting, the marginalization of the characters becomes more pronounced: Larson’s updated text takes on homelessness, police harassment, and drug use alongside the stigmatization of AIDS.

Rent remained on Broadway for over a decade, grossing $280 million by the time it closed in 2008, the same year the Nobel Prize was awarded to the scientists who had discovered HIV. But while successful AIDS treatment caused rapidly declining infection from 3.3 million new infections per year in 1997 to 2.2 million in 2005, the cultural legacy of Rent and other portrayals of AIDS continued to grow.

Tony Kushner’s 1991 Angels in America received acclaimed revivals in London and New York in 2017, while novelist Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House and filmmaker Ira Sachs’ Peter Hujar’s Day have come out in the past year.

And it’s hard to ignore Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 Moulin Rouge!, an amalgamation of La Bohème and La Traviata set in a raucous cabaret. Its famously eclectic soundtrack featured everyone from Madonna to Nirvana, and Nicole Kidman’s disheveled, waif-like Satine epitomized the “heroin chic” aesthetic of the era. Originating in grunge subculture, the look was swiftly adopted in films, magazines, and, most famously, Calvin Klein ads starring Kate Moss.

As with tuberculosis and AIDS, pale skin and emaciated bodies became aestheticized and transformed into beauty standards, with little regard for the pain and loneliness of illness.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain perhaps best epitomizes this concept of illness as a liminal place between life or death, where time and space are suspended. Within this framework illness heightens the deepest insecurities of the patient, and as such serves as a thermometer to society’s ills. Per Sontag, illness is used “to propose new, critical standards of individual health, and to express a sense of dissatisfaction with society as such”; yet the metaphors they elicit also reveal the biases of the societies they portray. The physical manifestations of tuberculosis, AIDS, or a heroin overdose may be different, but the emotional and social impacts they impart upon patients and the people around them are shared.

Artistic portrayals of illness, such as Mimi’s in La Bohème, can condemn or sanctify, revealing moral codes as well as systemic inequalities of the societies that produce and consume them, to this day.

Get tickets to La Bohème here.

Kevin Ng is a music journalist and critic, covering classical music and opera in New York, London, and Europe for The New York Times, The Times and The Financial Times. He has written about the intersection of music, politics, and technology for Brooklyn Rail, VAN Magazine, Bachtrack, and Parterre Box. Kevin was born and raised in Vancouver, and has fond memories of being introduced to opera during school trips to Vancouver Opera. Read his previous article for VO here.

There is a line in the Book of Ruth that has outlasted almost everything. It is spoken by a foreign woman to her mother-in-law, in the aftermath of collective grief, at the edge of a road between two countries:

Where you go, I will go. Where you die, I will die.

It is a declaration of love. It is also a surrender — to uncertainty, to displacement, to the terrifying act of choosing someone else’s country as your own. Ruth is Moabite. She is making a choice with no guarantee, no legal protection, no welcome.

She is, in the language we still use today, a refugee.

Mother/Land — the opera-oratorio by composer Jeffrey Ryan and librettist Michael MacLennan, premiering at the Vancouver Playhouse on May 16th with the Vancouver Bach Choir under conductor (and VO associated conductor) Leslie Dala — follows Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi from the rubble of their shared losses into a new country that doesn't want them.It is a story of gleaning in fields that belong to someone else, of a community that first shuns and then — slowly, through the intervention of a man called Boaz — turns toward compassion. It ends, as the biblical text does, with a genealogy: Ruth’s son becomes the grandfather of King David, and the foreign woman is folded into the royal line. The story of the stranger becomes, over time, the story of the nation.

The piece has been in development for years. Every single time the creative team returned to it, the same kinds of stories were on the front page of the news.

That hasn’t changed.

Jeffrey Ryan is one of Canada’s leading composers — praised for his “strong personal voice” by the Globe and Mail and his “masterful command of instrumental colour” by the Georgia Straight, commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra and the Vancouver Symphony, and previously Composer-in-Residence with the VSO for five years. He has been nominated for multiple JUNO Awards. He is also the son of parents who came from Ireland and Scotland after the war — a leap of faith into a country that mostly resembled where they’d come from. He doesn’t minimize that relative ease.

“I can’t imagine the frightening, even desperate, leap that so many other people — of different cultures, colours, languages, religions, you name it — have to take to come here,” he says.

He told me about a cab ride that crystallized the entire piece for him. Early in the work’s development, a driver on the way to Pearson Airport told him he had been a doctor in the Middle East, had fled, had arrived in Canada — and had never been able to practice medicine again. The recertification costs were too high. A young family needed food. “He said: ‘Canada opened its doors to us and encouraged us to come, but once we were here, we were forgotten.’”

Jeff didn’t flinch from the parallel. “Like Ruth gleaning in the fields to scrabble for food, he did whatever he could.”

Michael Lewis MacLennan is a two-time Governor General’s Award nominee and the only playwright to have won the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Award twice. As a screenwriter and producer he is best known for Queer as Folk and Bomb Girls — work that has consistently found the human stakes inside large social structures. As a librettist, he approaches the Book of Ruth the same way: by asking whose faith, whose loss, whose slow return of hope is actually at the centre.

“Even in the source material, Ruth is not the first main character of the story — Naomi is,” he says. Naomi is the displaced widow — shunned first by her adopted community in Moab after a cascade of tragedies, then shunned again in Bethlehem, her own birthplace, when she returns. “I’m interested in how Naomi’s loss and return of faith is a key contributor to the story’s events.”

The slash in the title is doing work. Mother. Land. Two kinds of origin. Two kinds of belonging that can be taken from you — or that you can choose to refuse.

Michael is a fourth-generation Vancouverite. The stories of his forebears’ arrival, struggle, and displacement “lived large in my family’s mythos.” He names something specific in the Hebrew that grounds the whole piece: chesed — usually translated as “loving-kindness.” It is the quality Ruth and Naomi show each other, and eventually the quality the wider community turns toward.

Michael connects that movement to something he sees as more than ancient history. “The story of Ruth occurred during what was known as the time of the judges — a period where lack of meaningful leadership led to tribal disunity, idolatry, and oppression. There was widespread violence and moral corruption. People suffered, and out of that suffering, in turn did terrible things.” He pauses. “We wish it weren’t so. But my gosh that sounds woefully familiar.”

What he is most invested in, dramatically, is the community’s arc — not just Ruth’s survival, but the transformation of the people watching her. “The community’s turn from a place of hatred and xenophobic violence to compassion and even celebration of ‘the other’ — that is a kind of redemption that has the power to heal not only Ruth’s broken heart, but the wider world.”

Ryan and MacLennan have been working together for over twenty years, ever since Tapestry Opera’s Wayne Strongman introduced them and each went home with a bag of the other’s work. Their first collaboration, The Laurels, became Tapestry’s first “Opera To Go” short opera series. “When I read the first aria he wrote,” Jeff says, “I immediately knew exactly how it would sound.” That simpatico hasn’t left them. What has grown is scale — from a 14-minute piece to something that is both intimate and epic.

Michael describes writing for Jeff as a process of productive compression. “The words carry less of the narrative and emotional freight than they do in theatre and even screenwriting.” Opera asks language to become scaffolding — and then Jeff builds something the scaffold never imagined. “In my view, while opera is the perfect melding of words and music, it’s the music that is paramount.”

What Jeff builds in Mother/Land includes one of the score’s most quietly radical choices: the musical language doesn’t shift between chorus and solo — it shifts between cultures. Naomi and the citizens of Bethlehem sing music rooted in florid cantorial singing, expressive and metrically regular, a sound Jeff developed across years conducting and arranging for a professional a cappella synagogue choir in Cleveland in the 1990s. Ruth and the Moabites sing something different: irregular metres, a related but distinct mode. “Because we really are not so different underneath.”

And then, across the arc of the opera, Ruth’s music changes. “At the beginning, she sings entirely in ‘Moabite’ music, but as she gradually establishes herself in her new home, her music becomes more like Naomi’s while still keeping much of her original musical self.” By the end, she has incorporated the musical elements of her new community without losing the music of where she came from.

It is, as a compositional choice, a complete theory of integration. Not erasure. Not assimilation. Something harder and more honest than both.

Les Dala and the Vancouver Bach Choir

The conversation that brought this piece to Vancouver happened over coffee. Jeff told conductor Leslie Dala about Mother/Land, described the work, mentioned there was no commitment from anyone for a premiere. “I jumped at the opportunity,” Les says simply.

That instinct comes from somewhere deep in his practice. Now in his fourteenth season as Music Director of the Vancouver Bach Choir — and concurrently the Associate Conductor and Chorus Director of Vancouver Opera — Les has built a career on the conviction that living composers deserve champions. “I am an avid believer and practitioner of promoting and performing the works of living composers,” he says. “We have a responsibility and a duty to promote the work of people of our own time who are brave enough to create it.”

His track record reflects it: the Canadian premieres of John Adams’ El Niño and Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations, the world premieres of The Overcoat and Stickboy among them. He trained at St. Michael’s Choir School in Toronto — where music wasn’t extracurricular but the entire curriculum — earned degrees in piano performance at the University of Toronto and UBC, and has since conducted at the Canadian Opera Company, Santa Fe Opera, l’Opéra National du Rhin, and Carnegie Hall.

He was not unfamiliar with the music of Jeffrey Ryan. Les had previously conducted the song cycle Miss Carr in Seven Scenes — a work Jeff wrote for Krisztina Szabó, based on the writings of Emily Carr — at the Chan Centre in 2020, to an empty house during COVID. That earlier collaboration told him something about what Jeff could do, and about who should sing Naomi.

The rehearsal process, Les says, has confirmed everything. “I have discovered that the piece has a first-rate libretto set to equally excellent music. Jeff understands the voice so well and sets text in a very natural way, so everything lies perfectly for each voice type.” When Jeff and Michael came to a recent choir rehearsal to speak about the piece and answer questions, something shifted in the room. “I think this was a real turning point for some people who may have been on the fence about taking on a brand new work.” He smiles at the privilege of it. “To me, it is a great honour to be able to give voice to a new work for the very first time.”

The Soloists

The cast carries deep Vancouver Opera roots — something Les built in deliberately. Singing Naomi is Hungarian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó, Grammy-nominated, a regular presence on VO’s stage, an Assistant Professor of Voice at UBC, and the very artist who premiered those Emily Carr songs with Les four years ago. Soprano Heidi Duncan, a current Yulanda M. Faris Young Artist and recent VO mainstage presence in Madama Butterfly, sings Ruth. Mezzo-soprano Simran Claire, also a current VO Young Artist and creator of the original film Dadima, brings Orpah to life. And as Boaz, Nikkei-Canadian baritone Luka Kawabata — a YAP graduate whose own artistic project The HAFU ハーフ Project explores identity, memory, and the history of Japanese immigration in North America. In Luka’s hands, the role of the man who chooses to see Ruth — to protect her, to welcome her in — is not abstract. It is personal.

Take Aways

Jeff is direct about what it means to bring this story here, to this city. “As Vancouverites, we can’t forget that these territories ARE unceded, and that the first ‘immigrants’ here were European settlers who basically just took over and displaced the people who were already here. As we continue on a path to reconciliation and moving forward together, I hope we’ll see more art that engages with that.”

Les is thinking about the audience who hasn’t yet decided to come. “There is a really great arts scene in Vancouver,” he says, “with so many performances of music, dance, theatre going on at the same time that it is easy for some important events to go unnoticed.” He draws a line to Vancouver Opera’s 2010 world premiere of Lillian Alling — where a similar open rehearsal helped build word-of-mouth before opening night — and hopes Mother/Land finds the same momentum. “This is a one-night-only special event created by a fantastic Canadian creative team, featuring outstanding Canadian soloists, the Vancouver Bach Choir, and a chamber orchestra made up of some of the finest musicians in the city.”

What Jeff hopes someone carries out of the Playhouse on May 16th is not a lesson. It is a recognition — of the versions of Ruth’s story that exist in our own communities today. “That the people who are already helping feel seen and acknowledged. That others may be spurred to help. And that people who are new here feel welcomed and embraced.”

Michael returns, finally, to chesed. The loving-kindness the Hebrew names. “The story of the immigrant experience — with its conflicts and justifications and difficulties — has not changed in millennia.” He pauses. “And while the story doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of expanding our hearts, it seems to argue that it is indeed our only hope.”

A free open rehearsal preview of Mother/Land takes place April 28th at 7:30 PM — a Voices Free event in partnership with Vancouver Opera, featuring a composer talk by Jeffrey Ryan and live excerpts with the Vancouver Bach Choir and baritone Luka Kawabata. RSVP to the rehearsal here.

The world premiere of Mother/Land is May 16, 2026 at 7:30 PM at the Vancouver Playhouse. Tickets at showpass.com/motherland-world-premiere.

On Sunday April 19, Vancouver Opera and VIFF screen Moulin Rouge! — and everything you thought you knew about it.

The first time I saw Moulin Rouge!, I didn’t understand it. I wasn’t supposed to. But something about it lodged itself permanently in my chest — the colours, the velocity, the way it treated love as simultaneously ridiculous and sacred. I watched it over and over. I memorized the soundtrack.

I had no idea I was falling in love with opera.

That’s the thing about Baz Luhrmann. He smuggles opera into places it isn’t supposed to fit, and you don’t realize what’s happened until you’re already devastated. Moulin Rouge! has been described — accurately, but incompletely — as a jukebox musical, a dazzling collision of pop songs and period spectacle. What that framing misses is what the film actually is underneath all that noise: a deeply operatic work, built from Puccini’s bones, shot through with Puccini’s grief, dressed in the most extraordinary costumes the screen has seen in a generation.

As we prepare to open La Bohème on April 25, we wanted to spend some time with the film that couldn’t stop thinking about it.

What Luhrmann Actually Made

Before Moulin Rouge! existed as a film, Luhrmann had staged La Bohème for Opera Australia in 1990 — setting Puccini’s frozen garrets not in the 1830s but the 1950s, a production that would later transfer to Broadway. When he came to make the film, he wasn’t adapting an opera from the outside. He was working from memory. From muscle. From deep inside the form.

The fingerprints are everywhere. The structure — poet meets fragile, luminous woman; love blooms; jealousy and poverty conspire; she dies — is lifted almost directly from Puccini. Christian is Rodolfo. Satine is Mimì. The Moulin Rouge is the garret, just better lit. Even Luhrmann’s signature palette of deep red against ashen grey is a conscious visual echo of the original promotional artwork for La Bohème. He wasn’t just inspired by the opera. He was making a rhyme across a century.

And the music, for all its anachronism, is deployed with genuine operatic instinct. Queen’s The Show Must Go On is arranged not as a rock anthem but in full operatic format — sorrow dressed in ceremony, Satine steeling herself to sacrifice love for survival.

The Pitch scene — in which Zidler and the Bohemians frantically improvise the plot of Spectacular Spectacular — is built on Offenbach’s Galop Infernal from Orpheus in the Underworld. That’s not a coincidence: Luhrmann structured the entire film around the Orpheus myth, the poet who descends into the underworld to reclaim the woman he loves, and looks back too soon.

Even Come What May — the film’s only original song — is later reprised in a soaring, heightened arrangement that abandons its tender origins for something closer to a grand operatic duet.

In opera, a reprise isn’t a repetition. It’s a reckoning.

Roger Ebert called it all “operatic excess” — and meant it as the highest possible praise.

What Puccini Was Actually Doing

Here’s what gets lost in La Bohème‘s reputation as the world’s most beloved, most accessible opera.

Puccini knew exactly what he was writing about — and it wasn’t romance. By 1896, tuberculosis was devastating cities across Europe, hitting hardest in the crowded, under-resourced neighbourhoods where artists and workers actually lived. The illness shadowing Mimì isn’t atmospheric backdrop. It’s the entire point. Puccini was writing about precarity — about what it costs to be young and poor and creative, with a body that might betray you before the work is done.

He encoded that knowledge into the music with extraordinary precision. When Mimì dies in the final act, the orchestra marks the moment with a B minor chord — a key long associated with death in Western music going back centuries. There is nothing accidental about it. The famous critique of Puccini — very German in its framing — is that his music “sounds better than it is.” Too immediate. Too emotional. Not serious enough. And yet here we are, well over a century later, still performing it in opera houses around the world. Because the immediacy is the seriousness. The emotion is the craft.

Luhrmann understood this. It’s why his film, for all its spectacle, earns its final act. The grief lands because the joy was real.

On Grief That Keeps Travelling

La Bohème inspired Rent — Jonathan Larson setting the same story in 1990s New York during the AIDS epidemic, swapping consumption for HIV, Parisian garrets for the East Village. It inspired Moulin Rouge! on screen. It has been borrowed from, rhymed with, and reimagined across more than a century of popular culture.

Not because it’s a simple story. Because it’s a true one.

Youth. Friendship. Poverty. Fragility. The terrifying possibility that you don’t have as much time as you think — and the laughter that keeps going anyway, right up until it doesn’t.

Every generation finds itself in it. That’s what great opera does. It holds the things we can’t quite say out loud, and says them with full orchestral force.

Join Us Sunday — and Then Again on April 25

On Sunday April 19 at 3:30pm at the VIFF Centre, as part of our ongoing partnership with VIFF, we’re screening Moulin Rouge! and then we’re going to talk about it.

I’ll be there to share what this film has meant to me since I was eleven years old — and what I understand about it now that I didn’t then. And we’re thrilled to be joined by Donnie Tejani, one of Vancouver’s most respected costume and wig designers, who will offer his expert eye on the film’s extraordinary visual world and draw connections to the art of costuming for opera. If you’ve ever wondered how a costume tells a story before a single note is sung, Donnie is exactly the person to ask.

Consider it a warm-up. La Bohème opens at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on April 25, with performances through May 3. The full production features some of the most celebrated singers working in opera today — and a love story that, as you’ll see on Sunday, has never really left us.

The conversation starts Sunday.

🎟️ Screening tickets: viff.org/whats-on/moulin-rouge/#book

La Bohème tickets: vancouveropera.ca

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

To close out Women’s History Month, we sat down with Erica Binder — trumpet player, arts entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Sword Fern Collective — to talk about what it means to build a life in classical music as a young woman in 2026.

Every time Erica Binder claims space for herself, she says it’s absolutely terrifying.

“I was an extraordinarily shy kid. Networking and posting publicly make me sweat. Even doing this interview has felt like I am being chased by a bear — for real.”

It’s a confession that lands with particular weight coming from someone who’s built a career on visibility: performing, producing, creating climate-focused art events that ask audiences to sing and dance and perform slam poetry in public spaces. Someone who’s making a case, project by project, for what classical music can do when it stops preserving itself and starts evolving.

But that tension — between the terror of showing up and the commitment to doing it anyway — might be the most honest thing about building a creative life right now.

The women who made space

When Erica looks back at how she arrived in classical music, certain people feel inevitable. Her former trumpet teacher Dr. Karen Gustafson, who shared her experience on the orchestral audition circuit as a woman thirty years ago, and listened to Erica play her Haydn Trumpet Concerto cadenza “an unbelievable amount of times.” Her mentor Laura Murray, an entrepreneur and business leader in the arts who’s shared “so much of her time (and many cups of coffee).” Her late grandmother Barbara Preston, who raised Erica’s mother, led an impressive career, rocked a leopard print, and inspired her granddaughter “to be more direct and unapologetic in pursuing my goals (and occasionally, to get over myself and ‘get on with it’).”

These are the women who shaped Erica’s sense of what was possible — not just in the abstract sense of representation, but in the daily, unglamorous work of listening, mentoring, modeling what it looks like to take up space without apology.

Relief and disappointment

There’s a lot of buzz in the media right now around the unfair treatment of women in classical music, and for Erica, it brings up a mixture of relief and disappointment.

“There’s a sense of ‘how did it take us this long’ mixed with a lot of excitement for what feels like an exponential growth curve since the pandemic.”

She’s watching institutions make statements en masse — sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally exposing how they’ve participated in systems of sexism, racism, and classism all along. And she’s asking the question that sits underneath all of it: when we attempt to extricate these things from an institution that was truthfully built on them, does the art form still hold up?

Her answer: Yes. It will.

“What I am seeing now is that we’re moving from an industry suffering from chronic insularity to an innovative scene of creative voices and visionary entrepreneurs, who are moving beyond performative action and taking up the mantle of evolving the art form, not just preserving it.”

Excellence and agreeableness

There’s often an unspoken pressure to be both excellent and agreeable — especially as a young woman in professional spaces. Erica sees it as part of the struggle to be authentic.

“When I dove into my early career, I felt like I was armed with all of these ideas of excellence — there’s the buttoned-up professionalism of an orchestra, the J.K. Simmons/Whiplash-model work ethic of music school, the business-deal-winning firm handshake/witty icebreaker combo — and I struggled to find a balance of those things that aligned with how I wanted to be known as a human, which was kind, reasonable, and approachable.”

She was also conscious of being objectified and patronized.

Her approach to finding balance has been building confidence and strong relationships outside of her career — which has led her to build a stronger sense of self. “Having a robust community and an active life helps me distance myself from the emotional weight of disagreements at work, and helps me connect more easily with the people in my work life on a personal level without requiring validation or approval.”

The Sword Fern Collective

Just over three years ago, two Canadian youth climate activists named Paige Hunter and Victor Yin started producing events and education content focused on the complex human emotions associated with the climate crisis. At the time, Erica was working on independent music projects in Vancouver, and she felt pulled toward producing projects that used art to directly address social issues.

Victor and Paige both had backgrounds in art. Erica dreamed up a collaboration where they tried to use the “classical” performing arts as climate action.

They did it once — combining people’s hiking videos and nature footage into a 12-minute graphic video score, performed live in front of an audience.

rerooting, rerouting

Poetry to heal the world

TLDR ❤️ We exceeded expectations for attendance, with a goal of 50 attendees and a real attendance of ~65 attendees! Some attendees were return guests from February, which was a sweet surprise…

Read more

2 years ago · Victor Yin

People came.

They asked themselves: How far can we push audience participation? What can we do with different mediums? How do we get people to push past the obvious cringe of singing and dancing and performing slam poetry in public spaces, and lean into having an emotional experience together?

They’ve collaborated with Patagonia, OceanWise, Vancouver Opera, and a bunch of really fantastic and open-minded artists.

“It’s been the most fun thing I’ve ever done with a bunch of my friends,” Erica says.

Classical music is history

Does Erica see connections between climate action and classical music?

Yes.

“Classical music is history — it tells us so much about how people in the past interacted with power, politics, and hierarchy, and if we’re doing our job correctly as artists and arts workers today, we are currently writing the story of how we think about those things today for those who will come after us.”

She traces a line from Beethoven to John Luther Adams, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Cait Nishimura — a story that undoubtedly includes climate change.

On hope

There is a lot of anxiety around climate futures, and Erica thinks so much of that comes from the knowledge that we are not guaranteed the planet we’re currently living on in ten, five, even one year from now. In fact, we know it’s inevitable that things will change.

From her postal code in Western Canada, she sees tremendous corruption, instability, and cruelty. This moment feels urgent.

“And the idea that on top of all of that there’s another existential threat of climate change, which looms so large and yet it remains almost impossible to harness enough resources to meaningfully move the needle is more than anxiety inducing, it’s terrifying.”

So what keeps her hopeful?

The vast majority of the climate movement is held up by trust in the opinions of experts and a sense of shared accountability for the lives of the people around us.

“Working with climate activists who operate with a level of optimism that almost feels reckless has steeped me in hope — it’s a super contagious energy, and I’m grateful every day for the diverse and scrappy community that I’m surrounded with.”

Every interaction she has — on the street, with friends and family, with an artist who has created something that makes her feel seen — reminds her that to a meaningful extent we’re all in this together.

“And as long as each of us find a way to hold onto the value of human knowledge and basic connection, we are meeting the baseline for what we can contribute in the fight against life-threatening change.”

Part of the ongoing history

We asked Erica what it means to be part of Women’s History Month — to be part of this ongoing history, rather than simply looking back at it.

“Women totally rule,” she says.

She’s proud to be descended from a family of tough women — working mothers, college graduates, world travelers.

“It’s special to know that being a woman means defying expectations and continuing to reshape ideas of who women are and what we’re capable of.”

Being a part of this ongoing history means supporting queer and trans women, and putting ourselves on orchestra stages, in board rooms, and in positions of power.

It also means learning to offer herself the same grace she offers the women she looks up to.

“I try to remember that the women I look up to in my life are unapologetic about pursuing their goals, despite the feels and self-limiting beliefs that undoubtedly exist for them as well. And I would never do them the disservice of judging them for trying their best to go after what they want.”

She’s trying to learn to offer herself that same grace.

Even when it feels like being chased by a bear.

Erica Binder is a trumpet player, arts entrepreneur, and co-founder of the Sword Fern Collective based in Vancouver.

In the opera pit, the harp often arrives as a whisper—a few plucked notes that carry an entire emotional landscape. Janelle Nadeau, principal harpist with the Vancouver Opera Orchestra, has spent her career making disconnected sounds feel like continuous phrases, a technical feat that requires obsessive preparation and an instrument that keeps ringing long after each note is struck.

In this conversation, she talks about why the cramped quarters of the pit feel more intimate than any stage, what it's like to play an ancient instrument in service of grand opera, and how a piece written during the isolation of COVID became a mother's lullaby. From mountaintops to palliative care homes, Nadeau has performed everywhere—but it's in the darkness below the Queen Elizabeth Theatre where she feels most alive.

All music recorded live in one take.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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TRANSCRIPT

Ashley Daniel Foot:

That sound right there. So beautiful. We’re Inside Vancouver Opera and I’m Ashley Daniel Foot. You know, that’s why I wanted to have this conversation today because in the pit, those notes arrive quietly but they carry an entire emotional world. And today we’re going inside that world with harpist Janelle Nadeau. Janelle, welcome to Inside Vancouver Opera.

Janelle Nadeau:

Thank so much for having me. It is such an honour to be here.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You know, you’re a longtime member of the Vancouver Opera Orchestra and what I love about your work is how you mix the worlds of all the genres. We have classical training, have Celtic tradition, contemporary pieces written just for you, and a whole life of performing in settings that are far beyond our grand opera house.

What’s the strangest place you’ve ever performed, Janelle?

Janelle Nadeau:

Strangest place? I mean, I’ve been in all sorts of places. I started gigging when I was nine.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You were nine?! On the harp.

Janelle Nadeau:

Yes. I’m from a very, very small town in Manitoba. Fannystelle, Manitoba…

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’ve never heard of it.

Janelle Nadeau:

Neither has most Manitobans even. It was very small. My parents are grain farmers. So we didn’t even live in town. So really, there was no competition for other harpists at the time, which meant that I got these amazing opportunities starting at a very young age.

So I’ve played at the top of mountains, I’ve played in graveyards, I have played in barns, I have played in some of the most exquisite rooms that one could imagine. I’ve played for incredible people. But strange, think, I don’t know, there’s just so many. I feel like there’s such a wide range of things that I don’t know what qualifies as strange anymore.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’m looking at your instrument and it really is beautiful. How long have you been playing this particular instrument? Is it a very special friend to you?

Janelle Nadeau:

Oh, I’m so excited about this instrument. This instrument’s only about three years old and I’m so lucky that it belongs to me. I’m usually a Lyon & Healy player, so that is a brand or a make of harp that is really from Chicago. And so this one is a Salvi and it’s made in Europe. And so the fact that I could get this one and this particular sound of this instrument, apparently two came to my colleague at the same time, one for me, one for another woman. And when he played both of them, he touched this one, which was not supposed to be for me. And he called me and he said, “Janelle, are you okay to get the color that you least wanted? Because I’ve got an instrument with this amazing sound for you, if you want, but I have to speak to the other woman…” all this stuff like that. The other woman who was getting this other instrument was both colourblind and an amateur. So for her, didn’t matter at all. And so I got this instrument, which I just like feel so lucky about.

The great thing about harps is that they open up. So over the last like two or three years, I have just noticed such a shift in the colour and the tone of this. Conductors are no longer asking for more harp and things like that because the sound really just like blossoms in the orchestra. And so really an instrument that sound really projects outwards versus to the back, toward the musician and I’m just so grateful for it.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

That’s incredible. I would love it if you could demonstrate a little bit about when you talk about the sound, how does this heart bring that out for you? there a piece that you could play that might show that?

Janelle Nadeau:

I’m gonna play for you a little moment from the Première Arabesque from Debussy. Debussy was a composer who really wrote with colour in mind. So this is an arrangement by an incredible harpist Henriette Renie. But you just hear like all of his intention in the colour of this piece and because of this instrument and it really just comes to life. So here it is.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Wow! It’s just, I can’t, I almost have no words. The sounds and the colours that that produces are just spellbinding.

Janelle Nadeau:

Thanks. I completely agree. As I was playing this, I was thinking, this is also one of the unique things about the harp. Unlike the voice, unlike instruments who are bowed or instruments that take breath, the harp is an instrument that has no connection. So every time I pluck a note, it has no physical connection to the next one. The next note is plucked and plucked and plucked. So very easily, especially if you listen to young harpists, right, children’s stuff playing, I call it like typewriter playing. I love that there’s so many kids who are playing, especially as it’s becoming more popular, which I just absolutely love. But what happens is it’s really hard to connect the notes to make that phrase. Right? And so I feel like with an instrument like this one, it just really has aided me in that connection and that phrasing in a growth of a line, in the decay of a line. Because while notes are ringing, you’re still playing other ones. And it’s just, especially in a piece like this, just totally magical.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It is magical and I’m so thankful that you were able to bring this today.

So you’re in the pit usually when you’re accompanying or with the orchestra, accompanying an opera. It’s a different world than if you’re performing say on a mountain or in a barn. In the pit you’re responding to the conductor, maybe it’s Maestro Dala or Maestro Darlington coming up for La Bohème and you have to be ready at any moment for whatever is being asked, the singers, the room. How do you balance all of that while also trying to do all of the things that you just did?

Janelle Nadeau:

I don’t know. That’s an excellent question. I will say that my absolute favourite, favourite place to perform is in the pit. If I was to be given a choice between stage playing or pit playing, and I could only pick one for the rest of my life, I would pick the pit. I love the magic that happens in there. You know, the attentiveness to the conductor who’s really paying attention to the stage, to the way the sound comes out of the pit.

I feel this intense camaraderie with my fellow musicians within the pit. And for me, I’m really, I’m a people person. I love connection. And to me, I just feel like we’re working toward the same goal down there. It’s really like one of my happiest places that I exist. For every opera that I have ever played, I prepare very heavily. So if there is a score available, I’m reading it. I’m making notes. If there are recordings available.

I listen to many recordings. I even write down the times of when parts come in so that I can play so that I know exactly what’s happening within the orchestra, what instrument is joining when, what their lines are, what their rhythm is. And all of this is to be in service of what’s happening on the stage. So I feel like the more predictable we can be with the most emotion possible and the best sound that we can put out also really helps support what’s happening for the conductor and how he supports what’s on stage and therefore how it’s received by the audience. And that’s just like truly one of my greatest joys.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’m biased, of course. I think the Vancouver Opera Orchestra is extraordinary and is able to tell stories with the beautiful ways that over time our maestros have been able to pull out. And it’s no accident, clearly hearing the way that you spend time in conversation with the music and the score.

Is there an opera recently that you can talk about the way the harp was part of it that you could give us an example?

Janelle Nadeau:

There’s multiple that really stick out in my mind that I was just very grateful for. We did Madama Butterfly, and that is one of those parts that when you hear, you know, we’re doing Madama Butterfly as a harpist, you go, “ha ha, like, yay, this is like, I am both so excited and terrified because there are just so many big moments, and I really wanna do my best.”

That is like every single time, my most stressful moment for every opera that I’ve ever been a part of is coming to the first rehearsal. You just don’t know what it’s going to be like, what artistic direction it’s going to go in. And I want to be as responsive as possible. So I would say that that one is just like an absolute highlight for me. Every time I finished any rehearsal or performance of that, I feel on cloud nine. I don’t know how one could not feel that way. The music is so beautiful. It’s just stunning. And then we did Flight.

That was also kind of like exciting and a little bit terrifying as well, but that was so rhythmic and I love playing rhythmically. And so, you know, these are just different skills that I think that’s the most enjoyable thing as an opera musician. You get such a range of styles that you get to like dig into and sink into. And I just love that as well.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I think that’s so amazing that you spend so much time reflecting on how your part is part of the greater whole. I think that’s like so essential to what we do as a company. We all try to strive to support that story and that audience experience.

Janelle Nadeau:

I couldn’t agree more. That’s from everything from the directing to the design, the costumes. What kind of prep all the singers and musicians put into all the thought of what direction will this specific opera take that we want to do? What do you want to put out there? And for the musicians in the pit, what instrument do they have? What are their reads like that day? There’s just so many factors involved to have everybody really pay attention to what their role is. And that’s why I think it can just be so magical. So many people all together trying so hard, paying attention to so many details to create something so exquisite. And it’s just incredible.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It’s so true. I love that you say that because when I sit in my vantage point, when I get to see the opera, I see how that’s happening across the company, whether it’s Tracey on the phones, really engaging with our audience to get them ready for the show. She knows a lot about what’s coming up. She knows where they need to sit so that they can have the best experience, whether that’s Nat, who supervises the audience in the lobby, making sure all the ushers know what’s going on. There’s just all of us pulling together.

My first season of Vancouver Opera, we did Cavalleria rusticana in concert, with Maestro Darlington, who’s coming back to do La Bohème very soon. I’m thinking about that Intermezzo. I’m wondering if you mentioned you have some music…

Janelle Nadeau:

I’d love to play that for you. There’s this incredible line in the strings at the beginning. And then after those bars have been set up, then the harp kind of comes in with these eighth notes. And I just feel like they help kind of propel the story and the visuals that is this pastoral scene. I’ll play a few bars of it for you.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Beautiful.

Janelle Nadeau:

Right? Isn’t it? Yeah, I just, can really hear the genius involved in that, right? They’re really just like this octave in my left hand and then triads in my right hand that change inversions. And now if I was arranging something or if I was to pick up an arrangement from another harpist that involved a whole bunch of triads with a third and just different inversions, I would look at that and think, maybe that’s not a version that I would want to dig into, but then there’s the geniusness of this and that’s what it is and it’s just so incredible and so magical.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love that. Thank you for that beautiful gift. It’s always such a pleasure to hear that music. And that piece is one of the most famous of all of the opera instrumentals that you can imagine. And I still think it stops me every single time I hear it.

Janelle Nadeau:

Right? I played a concert recently and I did it with just cello. And I had an elderly man who really made a point of coming up to me afterwards. And he comes and he looks at me and he said, “I just have to thank you for playing that piece.” He said that his dad loved that piece and played it in their living room constantly. So he said for him, it just held such memory. And it just brought him back. And he was almost just emotional telling me about it.

This is just one story of countless ones we’ve all experienced with different people. And just goes to show the power of it. What emotion it brings up, what memory it can bring up, how it can feel. It was just such a beautiful moment. I just keep holding onto it.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And I think you just articulated beautifully how this art form persists in the way that it does it. It engenders a sense of memory and emotion and love, I think, when people really want to dig in to what this repertoire means. I’m so curious, how on earth, how do you end up on a mountain with a harp at the age of nine?

Janelle Nadeau:

First of all, I will say that Manitoba has this incredible community who’s very supportive of arts, lots of music is constantly happening, and I don’t have any musicians in my family, but all of my family members are music appreciators and music lovers. So when I was very young, about three years old, my parents took me to my first Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra concert where there I saw the harp and I fell in love. I knew right then. And then I was brought to a Loreena McKennitt concert shortly thereafter.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Okay, of course. That’ll do it! We can turn it into a fan podcast now.

Janelle Nadeau:

I know, and how does not everyone want to become a harpist!? I just don’t have the long red fantastic hair that went with her.

And you know, even as an adult, it’s the most intoxicating thing to be sitting and watching something where you just feel completely moved. And I remember I had that right from the very beginning. And I just loved her. I loved all of the sounds that she created.

And apparently when I was extremely young, my parents were just like, “apparently this kid wants to play the harp.” But just to show how little my parents knew about instruments, I asked my dad what it was called and he told me it was called the cello! And I will say, I can’t tell you how often I’m wheeling my harp around and people are like, “is that a cello? Oh yes, and Janelle plays the cello.” No, I wish I played the cello because it’s an amazing instrument.

But yeah, and then from there I was very lucky though as there was a man in Winnipeg who played with the symphony. He was my teacher and he gave me a fantastic foundation. He really cared. And then here we are.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’m struck by just the dimensions of your harp.

Janelle Nadeau:

Isn’t it stunning? if you actually look at the shape of the harp and people can do this online as well, you literally just Google harp, because all the harps have the same shape at the top. If you were to put the harp on the ground, that’s the same curve of the grand piano. That’s the harmonic curve.

Unlike the piano though, that has the hammers that are connected to the keys, as well as the strings to create the sharps and flats, I only have one set of strings. So A, B, C, F, G, and it’s my pedals that create the flats, the naturals, and the sharps. And so this is kind of why there’s so much ringing that happens in these instruments, as you’ve heard from my playing, that so much of harp playing is also kind of cleaning up the notes to make sure when you have an accidental that you don’t also have buzzing that accompanies it.

So that’s where a lot of my practice actually goes in to try and make something clean as I play and musical and accurate and all the things.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

When I was chatting recently with Tracy Dahl, she talked about the list of things that a singer has to think about in order to achieve that sound. And it sounds like you also have a list and you also have to be musical at the same time. So it’s a miracle that all of this happens at the right moment.

Janelle Nadeau:

I think that’s actually like most art. Same thing with all the instruments that I know of. And I remember I had a conversation with one of the musicians in the opera orchestra and the discussion was kind of like, is there such thing as “the hardest instrument?” And he said that like every instrument has their challenge, right? And I just, kind of put things in perspective. Everybody’s got something that they’re working on and that is idiomatic to those instruments. And why, when it comes together can just be such magic. That’s the most incredible thing about this, I think, is all that effort, all the weird things that each instrument has to deal with only to get to this moment that happens that is just transcendent.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Thinking about how opera pits are notoriously tight, you know, they’re awkward corners, tight spaces, instruments I would say that almost seem to be on top of each other. How do you navigate pieces that have like a momentum? I’m thinking there’s a piece that you have Tam Lin, which is rhythmic and driven. How do you, how would you figure that out?

Janelle Nadeau:

Well, I think we spend a lot of time kind of trying to figure out where we all sit in the pit. And often the Maestro comes in earlier, we have a plot set up and all those things of trying to figure out where people should be. But I actually kind of love it when it’s tight, like for Flight, me, piano and percussion, we’re of all right on top of each other. We even took a picture like, “yay! we have a section!” It felt so fantastic. And sometimes when there’s too much space behind, if it’s like a smaller orchestra, I mean, that almost feels less intimate. I like it when it’s tight.

Anyway, let me play Tam Lin for you. So this is actually a Scottish fiddle tune, but a lot of harpists kind of adopt these notes just because they’re kind of exciting and fun and fun to play.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Nicely done, nicely done.

Janelle Nadeau:

Yeah, I think that’s the thing about the harp. The harp is one of the most ancient instruments that along with drums. so there’s just such a variety of music that can be played on the instrument. The harp is the national instrument of Ireland. The Paraguayan harp is major for their folk music and the music of their country.

And then there’s all sorts of instruments like that from all around the world that have like slight variations. And I think that’s one of the things that makes the harp kind of special and unique and probably really works in opera because you can get such different colours, tones, energy out of it depending on where you’re coming from and how it’s written.

Like you said, the energy in the music versus something that feels more lilting or an arpeggio that goes all the way up the instrument and kind of just either dies out or there’s just so much colour involved. And I really love exploring the differences between that. And I think also from the beginning, I’ve been just very lucky that so much of my career has been so diverse. And so I think through that diversity that it kind of makes it so that when I play music for opera, I’m kind of pulling from different styles to change the colour and the character depending on what that opera requires.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love that and I think the composer Dorothy Chang wrote a piece for you. It’s so rare that that happens and I’m just wondering how do think that experience shapes the way that you bring your individuality into your playing not only in the pit but beyond?

Janelle Nadeau:

Well, I will say that we had the chance to do this composition because, well, as we all know, COVID hit. And then after that happened, Turning Point Ensemble, which I’m very grateful to be a part of, kind of created this project that was called 1+1+1. So one musician could pick one composer and then made one film together.

So I picked Dorothy because I just feel like out of all of the composers that I had worked with up until that point, she understood the harp in a way that I felt was very special and very unique, and it felt also like a challenge, and therefore I wanted to dive in.

And so when we were having conversations about what we wanted to do, I had a little one-year-old at home, and then I was newly pregnant when we first started chatting, with my second, and I was just talking about how all humans in the world who were isolated, who were trying to balance whatever it is that they had going on. That was kind of the struggle that I was going with at that moment, like being pregnant, going to appointments and, you know, having being masked and I don’t know, all the things, It’s just, it was so odd. And Dorothy is also a mother. So we were kind of talking about that experience.

And I will say what was so crazy was that we’d had a couple more meetings and then eventually my second child was born. And after all this discussion, I didn’t know what she was going to call it. And she didn’t know what I called my son. So the title of this piece is Shelter and she wrote it and she said, “for Janelle and all the little birds.” And we named our son Wren. How like, you know, even saying it just, right? And anyway, it’s just, I feel like we’ll never, that that’s just a moment in time… You know, I’m never getting pregnant ever again. Hopefully COVID is never hitting ever again, right? You know, it’s just such this very specific moment.

And that’s something so incredible. Look, we were on the same page without knowing we’re on the same page. You know, so special. So I’ll play just a little bit of this for you so you can hear kind of the colour that she brought out for Shelter.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Music composed expressly for our guest Janelle Nadeau, that’s Shelter by Dorothy Chang. That was so beautiful.

Janelle Nadeau:

Isn’t it? Doesn’t really sound like anything else that’s composed for my instrument and for that alone, I love it. Never mind the different texture and colour that she’s able to capture in such a short period of time.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Thinking of the pit again, I’m so fascinated with that, and I’m looking forward to talking to more members of our orchestra in the months to come, you’re constantly watching. You’re the conductor, the singers, if you can even see them from where your vantage point is, the score, the stage. How do you choreograph all of that in your mind?

Janelle Nadeau:

I will speak first of just my own personal little world. I really am particular with my exact angle of my instrument, where the column of the harp lines up with the conductor. I’m sure I’m within like a centimetre of the same setup every single time.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Really?

Janelle Nadeau:

Absolutely, because I need to have my music kind of as close to my instrument as possible without touching it. And then I also want it as high as possible so my eye doesn’t have to wander to find my strings or to look at the conductor, but not so high that it blocks the conductor. I am so wildly precise and I cannot speak for the rest of my colleagues in the pit, but I would imagine that there’s a lot of precision for everybody else as well.

We actually can’t see the singers, which is why one of my, and that I believe may also be true for most of my colleagues, my favourite rehearsal is the very first one we get with those singers.

It’s just the power, the emotion. the feeling is just literally I feel like all the work that I have done, moving of provinces, all the, you know, which harp, who to study with, how much do you practice, what score, all the things, you know, all the things that you put together for it, then you get to this one rehearsal. And it’s like, I would literally live that whole lifetime again of all that work just for those moments. There is no feeling like in the world. I just feel like such gratitude for it.

And then in terms of the singers, we usually can’t see them after that. Over on the stage, they’re above us and over. I will say that like the most wonderful thing about being in the Queen Elizabeth Theatre is if I’m kind of as close to centre as possible there is the sound booth at the back of the theatre and it has this incredible plexiglass that has a lovely glare, I will say. And so with the lights from the stage, every once in a while I get these little glimmers of what’s happening up there. And I’m very grateful for that perspective and that vantage point.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Is there anything that you remember in your time at Vancouver Opera, unusual or ridiculous, that’s happened down in the pit?

Janelle Nadeau:

The opera opens up and it’s basically like harp solo with a singer. And the singer, unfortunately, I skipped a couple bars.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Uh-oh!

Janelle Nadeau:

Yep, and poor Jonathan was conducting and we were just, his arms were, you he’s trying to figure out how to get us on and we were so far away from each other. And I had listened to this over and over again and, you know, caught the singer as quickly as I could.

And I just remember finishing the piece and just literally being sick to my stomach. Just like, my goodness, what just happened there? And then whatever, the moment passed, barely anybody noticed it. I knew it, of course. that just, I mean, even telling you the story, I feel that in my bones.

And I will say another pit story that I thought of recently again, and it just made me giggle. It wasn’t for the opera, but it was for Nutcracker. So same pit, same orchestra, just dancers, obviously. It was the beginning of the second half, and there’s this lovely sixteenth-note section of the harp that is just beautiful, and it feels endless, and it flutters and it flies.

All of a sudden, there’s a smoke machine that starts the beginning of the second half. They couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. So all the fog went into the pit. And so all of us are playing blindly, trying to figure out what the heck is happening.

Somebody had the wherewithal to open up the pit door, which then sucked all that out. But I don’t know how long had passed. But there’s always something.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Hazard pay.

Janelle Nadeau:

Indeed. Indeed. But honestly, I kind of, love things like that, right? Like that’s why we go to live theatre, why we watch live things. This is the unpredictable stuff that happens. And what we get to do is watch people react, right? And decide how they’re going to deal with the situation. And I love that. And it’s amazing.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It is amazing. Well, I would love it if you might play something else for us. Your tango Regret lives in a world of pulse and tension. Let’s hear this tango Regret.

Janelle Nadeau:

Here we go, so this is for solo harp.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Beautiful.

Janelle Nadeau:

Thank you. will say that this piece is also written by a woman named Mildred Plante. I don’t know where she is, who she is, but it was found in a harp book. And that’s the woman who composed it.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Beautiful. When you’re not in the pit, when you’re performing solo or performing Celtic works or contemporary works, do you think you find yourself carrying habits from opera into those works?

Janelle Nadeau:

Certainly. As I’ve spoken about my level of preparation, I really try to go in as prepared as possible wherever I go. mean, one of the things I do a lot of is care homes and I play palliative care and things like that. I just feel like even though that’s sometimes just for one person, I want to have as much available to that person as possible, right? So I kind of get everything organized as much as possible so that when I show up, when they ask me to play something, I’ve got it.

But I think rhythm is another thing that I bring and I would argue that probably most of my colleagues do that as well. This precision required that really might be almost exactly the same from one night to the next. And if there’s an exception, that is because it is intentional. And I really love that. I feel like through that kind of thing, this is where these special moments happen where the art can kind of grow because then you get to really lean into the emotion, into the musicality, into the phrasing, and that’s when those little goosebump moments happen.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love all of that. Thank you so much. You talk about our orchestra and the physicality, the listening, the undercurrents, it really gives such a fuller picture of what the harp brings to our art form. It’s been such a joy to hear you expound on this and to play the harp. What a gift!

Janelle Nadeau:

Thank you so much for having me. I’ve loved every second of this.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Janelle Nadeau is in the Vancouver Opera Orchestra where she plays the harp in such a way that really ameliorates story and that’s something that we love to do here at Vancouver Opera. As always, it’s been a pleasure thanks to our producer, Mack McGillivray, and I’ll see you, I’ll see you at the opera.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

When Rachel Fenlon walks onto the stage, she acknowledges the audience, and gestures toward the piano.

There is no one there.

In a traditional recital, this is the moment when a singer introduces their collaborator — a small ritual that affirms the whole structure of the form: voice and piano, two artists in dialogue. Fenlon performs both roles herself. The gesture remains. The expectation quietly dissolves.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

She has built an international career around this premise — self-accompanied recitals that collapse the usual hierarchy between singer and pianist, that ask what the form becomes when one person holds all of it. Her debut album, Winterreise, released in 2024, was the first self-accompanied recording of Schubert’s cycle, one of the great summits of the repertoire. Critics responded with cautious astonishment. “Extraordinary.” “Spellbinding.” The surprise wasn’t only that it worked — it was that it seemed to reveal something latent in the music itself.

For Vancouver audiences, her return carries an extra charge. Fenlon is a graduate of UBC and an alumna of Vancouver Opera’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program. She’s been based in Berlin for years now, her career moving steadily away from conventional pathways. On April 12, she performs at the Kay Meek Arts Centre in West Vancouver — a program of Schubert and Britten, folk songs, music she describes as reaching for a kind of distilled clarity.

The impulse to combine singing and piano goes back to the beginning. Fenlon grew up on the West Coast, started at the keyboard at three, and came up through choral singing, musical theatre, and instrumental work simultaneously. When she entered formal training, that overlap became a point of tension.

“At eighteen, I remember asking why I couldn’t just sit and sing and play Schubert,” she said. “It felt strange to have to choose.”

She chose voice. She entered Vancouver Opera’s Young Artist Program, was cast as Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, and stepped into Pamina in The Magic Flute when a colleague fell ill. The piano receded — not abandoned, but private. A parallel practice running quietly alongside.

“Once I started following it,” she said, “I realized it wasn’t going away.”

The turning point came during the pandemic. Fenlon was living outside Berlin, in relative isolation, working intensively through new repertoire. She chose Winterreise.

She was also grieving the death of a close friend.

“I felt like I was living inside it,” she said. “It wasn’t something I had planned. It just became the piece that reflected where I was.”

Her approach was methodical: piano first, memorized completely before the vocal line was added, so the accompaniment could settle into the body and the voice could move more freely. In her studio she surrounded herself with texts, colour-coded annotations, sketches of the emotional terrain of each song.

The technical challenges are considerable — Winterreise is rhythmically intricate, and holding two parts in a single body demands a particular kind of integration. But Fenlon describes the relationship between piano and voice as mutually reinforcing rather than competing.

“The piano can actually help the voice,” she said. “In the faster songs, the momentum of the accompaniment becomes the breath. They start to inform each other.”

She also points to something often overlooked: Schubert himself is believed to have performed parts of the cycle accompanying himself at the piano.

“When you remember that,” she said, “it changes the way you think about it. It reminds you that it’s possible.”

If Winterreise marked an inward turning point, what’s followed has moved steadily outward — into contexts where the conventions of the classical recital are less rigidly observed.

In March 2025, Fenlon performed at South by Southwest in Austin, a festival built around discovery and genre collision, where on any given night an audience might drift from a country set to an experimental electronic performance to something with no category at all. Not where anyone expects to find Schubert.

“It was in a club,” she said. “People could sit or stand, they could film, they could react however they wanted.”

She has become increasingly interested in presenting classical repertoire in spaces where concert etiquette loosens and audiences engage more directly.

“A lot of people feel excluded from classical music because they’re worried about how to behave,” she said. “In those spaces, that disappears.”

The program she brings to the Kay Meek is more restrained — Schubert paired with Britten’s folk song arrangements, music that emphasizes melodic clarity and narrative immediacy.

“I wanted something that felt simple,” she said, then quickly qualified it. “Music that people could leave humming.”

Returning to British Columbia, she says, is less about nostalgia than about grounding. Her mother lives on Salt Spring Island. The West Coast — the landscape, the light — functions for Fenlon as a kind of recalibration.

“You feel it in your body,” she said. “It changes how you approach the work.”

In conversation, she speaks less about innovation than about alignment: between disciplines, between intention and execution, between the music and the self. The language she uses is consistently physical. When asked what it feels like when everything is working — when technique and presence and expression converge — she paused.

“There’s no barrier,” she said. “No separation between the music and the body. You’re not trying to do anything. You’re just there.”

She searched for a word.

“It’s the feeling of being the vessel.”

For audiences accustomed to the conventions of the recital stage, the evening at the Kay Meek may begin with a small moment of disorientation — a gesture toward an empty bench, a familiar structure quietly undone. The dialogue between voice and piano hasn’t disappeared. It’s been relocated, held inside a single performer, and made visible in a way it rarely is.

Rachel Fenlon performs at the Kay Meek Arts Centre on April 12. Tickets here

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host and Creator of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

Behind every opera is a vast network of people whose work rarely receives the spotlight. Sets must be built, schedules coordinated, artists supported, and hundreds of logistical decisions made before a single note is sung. As Vancouver Opera’s Director of Artistic & Production, Nicole Lamb sits at the centre of that work, shaping seasons and guiding productions from the first planning conversations to opening night.

In recognition of International Women’s Day, we sat down with Nicole to talk about the craft of production, the responsibility of leadership backstage, and the evolving role of women in theatre and technical fields.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Subscribe now

Before she joined Vancouver Opera, she spent years as a Production Manager, Technical Director, Lighting Designer, Stage Manager, teacher, and administrator with companies across the country. Nicole Lamb is Vancouver Opera’s Director of Artistic and Production. For the last few seasons, she’s been one of the key people deciding what you see on stage and how it all comes together, from season planning and artistic teams to the thousand invisible choices about budget, time, and people that make an opera actually happen.

Nicole, welcome to Inside Vancouver Opera.

When you think back to your childhood, what’s one of your earliest memories of making something? Maybe not necessarily in theatre, but that feeling of organizing, arranging, or creating a world.

Nicole Lamb:

I don’t actually remember a time where I didn’t make something. I was always making stuff as a kid. My mom especially was into crafting, so I inherited a lot of that. But also, I would make my sisters take part in choreographed dances and would make our dolls clothes and would perform for my parents.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

This is probably one of my favourite interviews we’ve ever done already on Inside Vancouver Opera, only because I’ve had the honour to get to know you and I see just how much you do and what you do to facilitate the environment that we have here. And hearing that story, I’m wondering, what do you think that memory tells you about the person you’ve become now? To me, it’s clear, but I wonder if it is for you.

Nicole Lamb:

I was always not only just creating, but I would always organize all of the logistics to have a good show or a good product. I corralled my sisters once into starting a crafting business when we were kids. We called ourselves NAK. It’s an acronym of our first names. But not only did we just make crafts, but I had the hours planned and I had goals for us of like, this is how many products we’re going to sell for this week….

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And did you make those goals?

Nicole Lamb:

It folded pretty fast.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Was there a moment when you realized that, yeah, this is where I belong, this is my future?

Nicole Lamb:

I would say it was actually high school. I had auditioned and I got some parts in the high school musical. All my friends were in the high school musicals. But it was actually in the first few musicals that I did that I was always watching the stage manager and the technicians around and I was way more curious about what they were doing instead of what I was doing on stage. So I quickly transitioned as soon as the traditional stage manager, the girl who was doing all of the stage management, retired from high school stage management. I was quick to step in and ask if I could do it, with zero training, but I found my way.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You certainly did. I have to identify with that because I would go to the theatre in our little town and I’d spend most of the time in the performance with my head craned around looking up at the lighting grid and wondering, well, “what’s going on up there?” Or wondering, “how are those curtains coming up and down and who’s making the decision if there’s going to be a trap door happen or something like that?” It’s just, just truly magical.

So we’re going to skip forward a little bit from your first moments as a high school stage manager and some of your early work was indeed stage managing for Green Thumb Theatre taking shows like Cranked and Out in the Open into schools and communities, and later you worked with Heart of the City Festival. And what did touring and community-based work teach you that you still use in opera and the big institutional, massive stage settings that you still work in?

Nicole Lamb:

In the smaller shows, mean, Green Thumb Theatre, you tour with maybe two to three other people. At Heart of the City Festival, a lot of the shows are a lot smaller and you get pretty granular and you get to know people very well and you get to take care for every choice that you make and every deliverable that you need to see to. And I would say that I take that forward into the job that I do now.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

When you’re in a gymnasium at 10:00am with the touring show, and I’ve seen you do this for little kids or teenagers versus at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre with a full crew, and I’m thinking of things like Magic Flute where your crew was, I want to say, close to 50 people or something like that. How does your sense of responsibility shift? Is there really a big change there?

Nicole Lamb:

I would say there is a responsibility shift between the two sort of instances. When I’m in a gymnasium with theatre for young audiences, or TYA, I carry this sense of wanting to inspire the next generation of theatregoers, or staff, potential performers, in a way that I don’t when I’m working on the big shows at the Queen Elizabeth. And I would say the Queen Elizabeth show, I just want to produce the best show and to contribute to the best show that I possibly can.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Hearing that answer, it really makes me wonder how many people really understand what it means to be the Director of Artistic and Production. And on paper, your job sounds impossibly simple. Oversee every element that brings opera to life. But in reality, what does it actually look like on, an ordinary Tuesday? What does the director of artistic and production actually have to do?

Nicole Lamb:

I tell people I’m ultimately responsible for getting everyone on stage and backstage at the same time with the help of my team, of course. There are no two ordinary Tuesdays that are ever the same. It’s really show dependent.

When we’re recording this, I’m getting down to the granular details for Così fan tutte, but I’m also costing a show for potentially two seasons from now. Not a day goes by in this role where I don’t work on multiple shows and multiple seasons and that is not an exaggeration.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

No, it’s sure not. I know what you’re up to.

When you think about costing, and again, what does that mean? How do you do that?

Nicole Lamb:

You have to look at all of the artists and all of the set, the costumes, the props, everything that goes onto the stage, and you have to break it down and try to come up with your best guess as to how much that’s going to cost in two, three years from now. And what the schedule, best guess, what the implications of the schedule on your budget will be.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So you joined Vancouver Opera as Director of Production and now you’re both the Director of Artistic and Production. You shape the season, you oversee how it all happens. When you arrived, what did you see that you wanted to protect and what did you hope to change?

Nicole Lamb:

When I started, I mean, there’s so much history with Vancouver Opera that, you know, I wanted to learn sort of the history of how we got to this point and sort of preserve that and keep it moving forward. When I started, I mean, it was coming out of the pandemic. And I will say there was, I don’t know, a lot of panic that ensued around mounting these large productions. And I questioned whether it was necessary. So I wanted to try to have a part in creating sort of a calm and, you know, it doesn’t have to be a mad dash to every finish line.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

No, and I would argue you’ve succeeded wildly in keeping the calm there while we dash beautifully sometimes. You know, hearing you talk about that, I still think about the scope of the productions that we’ve done since you’ve been director of artistic and production.

For those of the audience who remembers Carmen, two seasons ago, was it that long ago, was one of the most enormous shows I’ve ever seen. How did that logistically all come together? There was massive amounts of trucks that were coming in.

Nicole Lamb:

That was certainly a push to the finish line. I have to credit the team who was working on Carmen. It wasn’t, you know, independently me by any means. And I think we were all dedicated to get that thing up and running. It was a special set aesthetically and the concept behind it, we were all on board to try to make it work.

We also had a very large cast and it’s a set that accommodated the number of people that we needed to get on stage. So I think there was just overall a dedication to getting that production up and going.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So when you and Tom Wright, our General Director, and Jacques Lacombe, our Music Director, are talking about a season, at what point does your production brain kick in and you say, well, artistically, this is gorgeous, this is beautiful, but here are the constraints we’re gonna be dealing with.

Nicole Lamb:

The trick and the nuance of it all is to embrace the parameters as a challenge instead of shutting it down right away. So my reservations come up immediately, but I definitely don’t share them immediately. And I think there’s always a way forward. I think whether it’s director, or Tom, or Jacques, I need to understand what their ultimate goal is. And then I can usually find a way to get them to that goal within budget parameters and scheduling parameters.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Absolutely. And I’m thinking actually what I wanted to mention before is just how often you have to bring so many disparate threads together at whatever time of day that will be.

I remember recently on Rigoletto, I was walking backstage during one of the shows and you were in your office having a production meeting with a whole bunch of people, deciding what you were going to do with the set once the show was over. And I thought, well, that’s something a lot of our audience doesn’t probably even think about. How does that come to play out? Why is that something you have to have meetings about at 10 o’clock at night?

Nicole Lamb:

I mean, it was 7:45pm. Ultimately, sometimes it’s hard to coordinate across companies and across time zones. So you end up doing these meetings at unique times, but there is still a deadline at the end of the day and you need to make sure that you know what you’re doing with the set before loadout. And I think we were maybe a week before loadout. So yeah, you just make it work.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I think it’s so important to kind of think that just what we see is not the end of the story. There’s so much more that goes on.

I just wanted to take a moment and talk about some of the specific shows that you’ve designed lighting for. And I was wondering if there was a cue or a single moment of light from Chemainus Theatre’s The 39 Steps or Glorious! that you still carry around in your head.

Nicole Lamb:

There are some shows that I hold a special place in my heart. Yes, 39 Steps is one of those shows. It was the first show that I designed out of the pandemic. So it was particularly special to be in a theatre again, doing a spectacularly theatrical show.

Glorious! was actually one of my early apprentice credits and it was at the Belfry Theatre and I thought I was never gonna work in theatre again, because I had borrowed my roommates backpack and he had left his cell phone in the backpack and it rang from backstage.

Anyways, I ended up, fast forward, I don’t even know how many years, but I ended up lighting Glorious! and the culmination of like, I think it was 15 years or something of career to get me to light Glorious! at Chemainus Theatre.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

That’s lovely.

You teach stage management at Douglas College, mentoring at Vancouver Island University and working with students at SFU. Why do you think teaching is such a consistent thread for you?

Nicole Lamb:

Something that I fell into, but I don’t actually know why it’s a consistent thread for me, but it is something that I find particularly motivating. And I think it goes back to the conversation about Theatre for Young Audiences and sort of why I have so much drive and passion towards those particular shows, but I think it’s to inspire folks to do this, it’s a viable career. What?!

Ashley Daniel Foot:

We are releasing this conversation for International Women’s Day and so much of production and tech has been sadly historically male dominated. Over the span of your career from those early stage management gigs you’ve just been talking about and touring shows to now sitting at the table as Director of Artistic and Production here at Vancouver Opera, Canada’s second largest opera company, what changes have you seen for women and gender diverse people backstage and what hasn’t changed enough? I know it’s a tough one.

Nicole Lamb:

There’s so much room to still go in terms of the evolution of equity and equality backstage. Early on in my career, one of my first semi-professional shows, I was referred to as “this little stage management girl” backstage. And it happened to me the other day as working at another job and I went to lift something that looked heavy or whatever. But it’s actually my job description there that I need to be able to lift a certain amount of weight. And you know, someone assumed that I would need help lifting the monitor.

I would say that I’ve been doing this for a long time and I have seen, you know, a little bit of an evolution. And I would say that it actually gets called out more and there’s more invitation to actually champion yourself in those moments. But that being said, as a young technician, I don’t know if I would still stand up to those sort of comments or assumptions in the way that I do now. It’s been my experience that has gotten me here. I also call it out for other people.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’m just in awe of the courage it takes to do that. And I keep thinking about the responsibility that you carry in your role to uphold professional standards in the room, not just for yourself, but for everyone. How do you understand that responsibility and when have you most felt called to stand up for artists?

Nicole Lamb:

I mean, I think I have felt a call forever and always. for every day in my role, I feel the desire to make sure that everyone feels safe in this space that we invite folks into. I mean, I think my general philosophy is that I try to lead by example. The way that I treat people is the way that I would like to see people treat each other and treat me.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I think it’s really beautiful and really true. mean, that’s my experience working with you. And I’ve learned so much just about my own practice just from watching you do that. And I have to say, like, it always is something that I’m grateful for.

You did an MBA at SFU after already building a substantial artistic and technical career. What questions were you trying to answer by going back to school at that time?

Nicole Lamb:

Honestly, when I decided to pursue, and it wasn’t an MBA at the time, but I think it’s called the Graduate Diploma of Business Administration at SFU. And I was kind of just dabbling. I had read some of the course outlines and I was like, “oh, managing people is a course; that’s something that I do every day.” I knew when I moved to the mainland, which was right before the pandemic, I knew I wanted to go back to school. I was actually thinking that I would go in and do my master’s in design. But then the pandemic happened and it was not a good time to go back to school and do your master’s in design.

So I explored sort of this graduate diploma. But in taking a few courses, I realized just how relevant it is in the roles that I work, whether it’s managing people or learning how to budget, figuring out risk analysis. So anyways, that’s why I ultimately pursued the full master’s degree.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Is there a moment, maybe it’s at Chemainus, maybe it’s at Vancouver Opera, when you’ve stood quietly at the back of the house, looked at the stage and thought, yes, this is why I do this, what was happening in that moment for you?

Nicole Lamb:

Once upon a time, I was on the road with Green Thumb Theatre and I was working on Cranked and it was a show about crystal meth. And we toured all the way from Prince George and I think we drove, I think we had three or four days and we went down to Modesto, California. Had to cross the border. So we went from the dead of winter to summer and none of us had packed any shorts.

Anyways, we got hired to do a show at a real theatre, which was always special on a Theatre for Young Audiences tour. And there were, I don’t know, 20 to 30 high schools that came to watch us that day. And there were a number of kids who came up to us after the show and related to the content, which, you know, was hard to hear because it was a show about crystal meth. Kids came up to us after the show and just said that they appreciated the story and what we were doing.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Some fun rapid fire questions. First job you ever had in theatre.

Nicole Lamb:

First job was probably a technician at the Belfry Theatre or some small stage manager gig in Victoria. First time I received my paycheck in theatre.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Favourite position you’ve ever held backstage.

Nicole Lamb:

I love me a good Assistant Stage Manager gig where you get to like run things backstage and hang out with the cast and crew with, you know, responsibility, but not the utmost responsibility on a production. I also love calling a show.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

The role you never plan to fall in love with.

Nicole Lamb:

I worked at Theatre Under the Stars and I was Assistant Site Coordinator and there was a lot of really not-nice tasks that I needed to do as part of that job. But there’s something about being in the park and spending the majority of your summer outside that was pretty special.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Tech Week, is it sacred ritual or sheer survival?

Nicole Lamb:

Ritual. I always make a bunch of food before and then I just grab something out of the freezer every day for those busy long tech days.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I feel like Tech Week Nicole is a special Nicole, especially when we have to have phone calls about things related to a different show during Tech Week.

Lighting cue you’re secretly most proud of.

Nicole Lamb:

It was Lumberjacks in Love. There was this cyc and the next day, like it was a, I think it was a sunrise cyc. And the next day I woke up and outside my window was the same colour. I was like, “there it is!”

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love everything about that answer.

After opening night, celebrate or collapse?

Nicole Lamb:

Celebrate then collapse.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Nicole, thank you so much for letting us into your world, the long days and layered decisions, the quiet leadership that so often goes unseen, and the deep care that holds it all together. Your work reminds us that opera doesn’t only live in the spotlight, it lives in the hands, the spreadsheets, the cues, the conversations, and I would argue the steady courage it takes to stand up for artists and for standards day after day.

Nicole Lamb - Director of Artistic and Production, Vancouver Opera

Nicole Lamb, Director of Artistic & Production at Vancouver Opera, has been instrumental in shaping the company’s productions. She oversees every element that brings an opera to life – from season planning, to artist considerations and production logistics. Nicole fosters collaboration across creative teams and staff to produce the best productions possible within time and budgetary constraints. Before her time at Vancouver Opera, she was a seasoned production manager, technical director, lighting designer and technician. She continues to seek relationships with and teach at local post-secondary training institutions in the field and brings her passion for mentoring the next generation into her work at Vancouver Opera.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley is Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice and host of Inside Vancouver Opera. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

It seems to me a lot of opera folks have an understandably hard time with anything that remotely implies opera is dying. Jaded yet wistful well, duh’s from underworked singers, cheeky no-its-noooooots from org accounts and clapback promo codes. Ad hominem chirps from operagoers, some harsh, some clever, and all in ways only the internet can generate.

But most of it begins and ends there. The backlash flares up like acid reflux, everyone takes the Instagram equivalent of an antacid (for my algorithm, it’s bad music puns), and that’s that.

But therein lies the rub. The opera community, admins and marketers included, seems so intent on reacting that few have stopped to consider where a statement like “no one cares about opera” comes from. I’m reminded of Monty Python’s sketch where a guy complains that all he’s getting from his paid argument session is mere contradiction and gainsay, not genuine argument.

All of this is understandable. I don’t think it’s defensible, but it is understandable.

Being a geriatric millennial, I’ll make something very clear before proceeding: me pointing this out does not mean I’m defending Mr. Chalamet, taking his side, or promulgating some enlightened centrist viewpoint.

It means I’m attempting to do something Rainer Maria Rilke commanded: live in the questions. Writing to a 19-year-old admirer, he said:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

So. Why is a LaGuardia High School grad and third-youngest nominee for an Oscar—whose grandma, mom, and sister were in ballet—saying this, now? What does his position in his industry currently allow him to see? What does it prevent him from seeing?

And, perhaps more crucially, what things about opera as a community become highlighted or hidden by our own response?

Rilke’s a smarter person than I am, so let’s just take his medicine and wonder for a while. Below are wonderings brought about by conversations with friends, loved ones, and strangers.

La Solita Solfa

“I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore.’ All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there”.

-Source should be obvious by now

Timothee hasn’t said anything new or surprising. 345 years ago, the Venetian opera historian Cristoforo Ivanovich said, “Profits at the door instead of growing are diminishing, evidently endangering the continuation of this noble entertainment”. It was only 44 years before him that Venice’s Teatro San Cassiano pushed opera from private to public, and thus into market forces.

Title page of the first public opera, Ferrari’s L’andromeda.

So you could say it also took merely 44 years for operagoers to become ansty about the genre’s longevity.

And yet, here we are.

On Keeping Things Alive

Dwelling on Tim’s quip has me wondering: why would someone NOT want to work in a state of advocacy for something? Is the work too grim or sad? Is it frustrating? Is the feeling of all your discipline and training being slowly drained of relevancy by vampiric, misshapen, end-stage capitalist empire syndrome too much to bear?

Is it an ego thing? Is he so hungry for an Oscar that he’s more interested in eyeballs, prioritizing mediums that have those in spades?

Perhaps it’s deeper. Does too much advocacy work rob you of time better spent honing the very thing you advocate for? Or! it’s shallower. Is your marketing giving Jeb Bush Please Clap energy to your art form?

The uncomfortable wondering I had with my partner (and fellow Opera 101 conspirator) is this: Tim’s not wholly off the mark saying he lost a mere 14 cents of viewership, is he? And this leads me to ask, are we holding ourselves accountable for that number in a good way?

Do we, as the gatekeepers—more than that, gate makers—of opera do our best to tend to each other and the work?

I don’t mean reposting. I don’t mean the easy stuff. To paraphrase a wise old man, I mean the constraint upon your personal infinity which is helping other people. I mean losing time, money, sleep, freedom, options, preferences, and pleasures. I mean spilling the good wine and the widow’s mite and planting the tree whose shade you’ll never enjoy.

I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but I can say with humility that I could do more. I could connect more, be a little more village-minded, reach out to folks more often. Yes, there are better days, where writing like this happens, gatherings are attended, and money happily flies from my pocket into the work of my colleagues. There are also days where it simply doesn’t happen, to my shame.

If those of us who could do more regularly attended to those of us who are doing just a little more often, then maybe the viewership would be 15 cents. Maybe a dollar. Maybe people start switching currencies.

Fourteen Cents Strong

One of the reasons this got so much traction is, I believe, that we ARE niche, and on top of being in the arts, that begets sensitivity in the extreme.

There are so few of us that it can feel like we have family in dozens of cities across the planet. At the same time, the loss of a single company has existential weight. I nod in sober understanding when yet another person from my grad class puts their scores up on FB Marketplace. For free. I laugh with cast mates who have mastered the art of career/self-deprecation, because I’m aware of what it cost to gain that mastery.

This wondering was brought to me courtesy of Opera Unbound’s co-founder. In so many words, she asked if the real conversation was whether or not opera is a living community that occasionally “pops out” an opera.

This is a lovely question, because it’s the kind that survives being answered. It also ties into the above thoughts on our collective wellbeing.

Is opera less a “thing” and more a collectively generated creature? And if it’s a creature, is it alive or dying?

I’d argue that it most certainly is not dying. A few signs something is alive are…

1. It reproduces.

2. It continuously adapts to and collaborates with its environment.

3. At the same time, it resists or defies its environment just enough to be discernible and differentiated.

Opera’s myriad subspecies, its Bohèmes and Tosca’s, COC’s and VO’s, Ammolite’s and AVA’s, appear to be doing all three.

But point 3 is cheeky, because it implies there’s a balance. Precarity. Too much adaptation and your creature has difficulty reproducing. The more relevant and “up to date” a production is, the higher the risk of it becoming dated and irrelevant, and the more necessary spectacle becomes.

Too much resistance has a similar consequence. Environments change. Rough weather is a thing. The Cretaceous Period was thoroughly unkind to dinosaurs.

Beneath It All

If you’ll indulge me, this is the end of it. Via this whole debacle, what is being asked of us as artists? As audience members? As donors?

We live in a troubled time. Go ahead and declare there have always been troubles, but I think you can acknowledge that this time is particularly riddled through.

We’re all free to consider that a horrible imposition.

Or perhaps instead, it is our commission.

This is one of the things art asks of its children. It is art’s most ramshackle, beautiful, and grief-soaked assignment: hovering over the troubles of the times. Engaging with them, refracting them, translating them.

No, it is not always “worth it”, especially from the perspective of your wallet, your time, and your personal sovereignty. Come on, now. You know this already. If you’re still reading this, you’ve listened to Finishing the Hat as many times as I have, and your tears have soaked the carpet. Don’t feign ignorance.

But, beloved, sometimes it is worth it.

Because the consequence is that your art, when it bears this assignment in mind, rings the oldest dinner bell in the house, and from the back forty of all your training and diligence and soulsearching saunters the Real Thing.

And lo, it’s wearing your art like only the Real Thing can.

And an audience, upon the visitation of a Real Thing, doesn’t just become aware of troubles through your work. An audience becomes awakened to them. You have transformed an audience into witnesses. You have, in the fullest and oldest sense of the word, involved them.

The mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw wrote in his lovely book, Courting the Wild Twin, “the business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is waking up.”

So, my final question. If we tend to this business and each other, and we give the wake-up stories their due, and we bear witness, and we make culture…

What might be?

Aaron Durand will be appearing at The Paul Wells Road Show on March 20. Get tickets here while you still can.

Aaron Durand was raised in rural British Columbia and trained at the University of British Columbia, Durand has performed across Canada and internationally, including with Vancouver Opera, Tapestry Opera, and Against the Grain Theatre. Known for his “beautiful, fluid baritone” and thoughtful engagement with storytelling and culture, he writes frequently about opera, community, and the strange ecology of the performing arts.

For decades, Paul Wells has been one of the country’s most attentive listeners.

Readers across Canada know him as a political journalist — the kind who writes with patience, curiosity, and a sense that the story of a country is rarely contained in the day’s headlines. His columns have always moved at a slightly different tempo from the rest of the news cycle. Where others chase speed, Wells has often chased context.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

It’s a quality that has made him one of the most widely respected voices in Canadian journalism.

And yet when you ask him where his story began, the answer is not Parliament Hill.

It’s the band room.

“The first writing I ever did was arts writing,” Wells says. “I wrote about jazz for my campus paper.”

That early love of music never really left him. Long before Ottawa, long before Maclean’s magazine and decades of political reporting, there was a teenager in Sarnia trying to figure out how to belong.

Wells describes himself as awkward — younger than many of his classmates after skipping a grade, unsure where he fit socially. The band room changed that.

“Sitting in the band, the only thing that matters is whether you can play,” he remembers.

It was a simple rule. A liberating one.

In the band, ability mattered more than status. The goal was collective: to make something beautiful together.

For Wells, that experience shaped how he thinks about art and society to this day.

When Vancouver Opera co-hosts The Paul Wells Road Show on March 20, the evening will bring together opera singers, politicians, journalists, and scientists — an unusual lineup that might feel surprising at first glance.

But the mix actually reflects Wells’ long-standing belief that culture and politics are not separate conversations.

They are the same conversation, happening in different languages.

“Culture is a set of questions about how people live their lives,” Wells says, recalling a line from jazz musician Wynton Marsalis. “And wars are fought over that.”

Art may feel gentler than politics, he suggests, but the stakes are not necessarily smaller.

Mozart’s operas scandalized aristocrats. Theatre has challenged social hierarchies for centuries. Music, literature, and performance often surface tensions that politics struggles to articulate.

“Art is in some ways how society rehearses for being a society.”

The Road Show itself grew out of another experiment.

After leaving Maclean’s magazine and launching an independent newsletter on Substack, Wells discovered he had built something new: a direct relationship with readers.

The newsletter was thriving. Thousands of people had signed up. Many had become paying subscribers.

But Wells wondered what might happen if those readers gathered in person.

“I wanted to find some way to thank my subscribers,” he says. “So I decided to put together a live event that would have no other real vocation except to be a good time.”

The first show came together quickly in Ottawa.

Paul Wells

The Paul Wells Holiday Show 2025

I am happy to bring you these photos and this audio from the Paul Wells Holiday Show, presented by Cameco, that took place last Saturday night, December 6, at the Azrieli Studio of Canada’s National Arts Centre. My podcast feed has been too quiet lately. This will help change that…

Listen now

6 months ago · 64 likes · 9 comments · Paul Wells

The lineup was deliberately eclectic: a diplomat, a jazz singer, a poet, a newly elected Member of Parliament. The guests had little in common except that Wells thought they were interesting.

He laughs remembering the moment.

“These people had nothing in common. They had no idea why they were on the bill with one another. I was just pretty sure it would work.”

The experiment succeeded immediately. The show sold out.

The next year the venue doubled in size and sold out again.

In Wells’ mind the concept had a name: “nerd Ed Sullivan.”

“It’s interesting stuff,” he says. “If you trust me to find interesting stuff, I will find you some interesting stuff.”

Now the Road Show is travelling.

When the idea of bringing it to Vancouver surfaced, the partnership with Vancouver Opera felt almost inevitable. The evening would feature opera singers throughout the program, weaving music between conversations about politics and culture.

For Wells, the musical component felt natural.

“I immediately knew that all the music would be opera music,” he says. “Singers affiliated with Vancouver Opera would be the music on the bill.”

The Vancouver lineup reflects the same eclectic curiosity that shaped the first show.

BC Premier David Eby will join Wells for a conversation about governing during what Wells describes as “a very complex time for the government of British Columbia.”

Paul Wells

BC Premier David Eby talks

Maybe it’s something to do with premiers. I usually take my time with an interview, take care to put a guest at ease, try to draw them out on some element of their life away from work. But I feel like, when I have a provincial premier in front of me, there are so many files to catch up on that I don’t ha…

Listen now

3 years ago · 34 likes · 13 comments · Paul Wells

A political panel will follow, featuring veteran journalist Richard Zussman, former federal minister James Moore, and CBC podcaster Rachel Siegel.

And then the evening will pivot — unexpectedly — to forests.

UBC scientist Suzanne Simard, whose research revealed how trees communicate through underground fungal networks, will appear as a special guest. Wells encountered her work while looking for someone interesting at the university.

Her research fascinated him immediately.

The result will be a conversation that moves from provincial politics to the secret language of forests, with opera arias unfolding in between.

The structure may feel unconventional.

But it reflects Wells’ view that curiosity thrives when disciplines collide.

His journalism works the same way.

When Wells left Maclean’s and began writing independently, he realized he had the freedom to pursue stories in a different way — slower, deeper, more exploratory.

Paul Wells

A quite romantic vision

The notion that Canada constitutes a community whose attributes extend beyond its tax rate, its weather forecasts and the latest ledger of offences inflicted and endured has always rallied too many detractors and too few champions. The champions took a heavy loss overnight when Peter Herrndorf, one of the people I a…

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3 years ago · 140 likes · 49 comments · Paul Wells

“I basically do the kind of journalism that used to be more common 20 or 30 years ago,” he says.

Instead of chasing headlines, he looks for the history behind them.

“The context behind the story. The historical echoes that resonate through it.”

Often that means leaving Ottawa entirely.

Paul Wells

"Worse than I've ever seen"

The story I have to tell you this week is complex, nuanced and important. I tried to tell it in a single post but it’s just too ungainly. This will be the first of three daily* installments…

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2 years ago · 280 likes · 44 comments · Paul Wells

He travels to places where his reputation carries no weight.

“I like going someplace where people don’t have any real sense who Paul Wells even is,” he says. “So that I’ve got to work for my news.”

In those moments he becomes, once again, the reporter he was at twenty-three.

Paul Wells

The Q&A: "You're competing in the most absurd, oversaturated field"

I’m interested in the ways independent musicians attract attention and build audiences as a special case of the predicament so many of us face in so many fields: technology offers more tools than ever, but when everyone uses those tools at once, it actually becomes harder to get noticed…

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a year ago · 69 likes · 11 comments · Paul Wells

Listening. Asking questions. Trying to understand.

That instinct also shapes how he writes about political leaders.

One recent piece explored Stephen Harper’s relationship with music — specifically, the piano sitting quietly in the background of Harper’s official portrait.

Paul Wells

Stephen Harper's piano

I owe you some sort of thoughtful piece on Mark Carney’s new defence industrial policy, but winter travel threw logistical curveballs into my day so that will have to wait until I have more time to myself…

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4 months ago · 202 likes · 48 comments · Paul Wells

The instrument intrigued Wells.

He discovered that Harper had been a serious piano student in his youth, then abandoned the instrument for decades before rediscovering it while playing music with his son.

That small detail became the starting point for a meditation on creativity, collaboration, and leadership.

The moment that changed Harper’s relationship with music, Wells writes, came when he realized he could play with others.

“There’s the whole difference between playing by yourself and playing with other people,” Wells explains.

Neither experience is superior.

But they are profoundly different.

The same might be said of journalism, politics, and art.

All of them ultimately depend on people gathering together to attempt something difficult — to make sense of the world collectively.

As Wells reflects on the present moment, he does not pretend that things feel easy.

“I think the times are objectively worse than they’ve been for a long time for Canadian society in a lot of ways,” he says.

But difficulty does not erase choice.

People can retreat into polarization.

Or they can build something together.

“In a time when everyone is polarizing, do you build community?” he asks.

The answer, he suggests, lies not in sharper criticism but in deeper acts of creation.

“At some point when things take a turn for the better, it won’t be because some people were better at mocking,” Wells says.

“It will be because some people were better at creating and forgiving.”

Those softer instincts — curiosity, generosity, collaboration — may sound unfashionable in an age of outrage.

But they are the instincts that build societies.

On March 20, those instincts will fill a room in Vancouver.

There will be political debate. There will be scientific curiosity. And there will be opera — the human voice carrying emotion across centuries.

It may not solve the problems of the world.

But it will do something almost as important.

It will bring people together to listen.

Get tickets here to the show in Vancouver.

On the afternoon he was scheduled to record a podcast about Black history, Brandon Thornhill went to therapy.

This was not incidental. He had been thinking about discomfort.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

“I was talking to her about my discomfort with singing this music,” he said later, chatting over Zoom. The discomfort was not about the repertoire itself — the spirituals, the hymns, the soul anthems, the civil-rights harmonies — but about the audience. “It’s singing this in front of an audience where I know at least one person in the audience is looking at me and like, hmm, should this guy be singing this music?”

“It sucks to feel scrutinized while you’re trying to bring the true meaning out of a song.”

He laughed softly when he said it, but the sentence lingered in the air.

February in British Columbia is Black History Month — a period that asks institutions and audiences to remember what has often been omitted. In Vancouver, the remembering can feel especially delicate. The city does not always advertise its Black histories; they must be sought out, stitched together from archives, family stories, and the occasional plaque.

Thornhill’s concert, Ebony Roots, is a deliberate act of stitching. The program traces roughly three hundred years of Black musical expression — from work songs and spirituals to Blues, R&B, Motown, and Soul — not as a museum catalogue but as a living current. The songs are not arranged to be polite. They collide. A funk groove might pivot into “Old Man River.” Oscar Peterson might swing where a hymn once stood.

“It can be a little jarring,” Thornhill admits. “To go from a funk song straight into ‘Old Man River’ or ‘I Got Plenty of Nuttin’ from Porgy and Bess.” He pauses, then adds, “But I like that tone shift.”

The jarring is intentional. Black musical history is not linear; it is adaptive. It has bent under pressure and re-emerged in new shapes. Thornhill wants audiences to feel that elasticity — the joy braided tightly with endurance.

“You might feel a little discomfort at times,” he tells them before the show begins. “Because we’re going to be doing some deep songs. But we’re also doing some songs of celebration. Regardless, you will leave feeling uplifted.”

He grew up in Florida, spending summers in North Carolina with his father’s family. Black culture, he says, “was just my life. That’s what I grew up around.” It did not require explanation; it required participation. It was there in the cadence of speech, the meals, the music drifting from kitchens and car radios.

Moving to Vancouver complicated that ease. The city’s Black population is comparatively small, its histories less visible. It was here, paradoxically, that Thornhill began to immerse himself more consciously in Black history — Canadian Black history, civil-rights history, the meanings embedded in spirituals. The immersion was less about discovery than affirmation.

“It’s been a journey to connect to that side,” he says. “Really knowing and affirming that this is my culture as well and that I have the space to be able to give my voice to this music.”

“I can count on one hand how many times someone has guessed I’m biracial.”

Thornhill is biracial. His appearance, he notes, often registers as ambiguous. “I can count on one hand how many times in my entire life someone has guessed right off the bat that I’m biracial. It doesn’t happen often.” The ambiguity is not neutral. It invites projection. It sometimes invites doubt.

Onstage, in the middle of a spiritual, that doubt can feel amplified. “It sucks,” he says plainly, describing the sensation of being scrutinized while trying to emote. “To have that feeling while you’re trying to bring the true meaning out of that song.”

And yet he continues.

Part of the urgency of Ebony Roots lies in its refusal to treat Black history as distant. Vancouver has its own histories — early Black settlers, musicians who shaped the city’s jazz and gospel scenes, families who built community before highways fractured it. “There is Black history here in Canada, here in Vancouver,” Thornhill insists. “Vancouver actually has a pretty rich Black history, especially in music.” The concert includes a tribute to African-Canadian musicians who paved the way — a gesture that is at once celebratory and corrective.

Music, he argues, is the most generous entry point. “It’s universal. So what better way to spread this awareness and this knowledge?”

The universality he describes is not flattening. It is connective. In one moment of the show, Thornhill sings Oscar Peterson’s “Hymn to Freedom,” reimagined in a lightly swung arrangement. He recites one of the verses almost reverently:

“Every hand joins every hand

And together molds our destiny…

When everyone joins in our song

And together singing in harmony —

That’s when we’ll be free.”

The words are direct, almost disarmingly so. Their power lies in repetition — every hand, together, harmony. In performance, the audience joins in quietly, some mouthing the words before the chorus lands. The uplift Thornhill promises is not bombastic. It is communal.

Opera — another of his artistic homes — is a different architecture. It carries centuries of European lineage, white composers, inherited narratives. Thornhill has sung Mozart and Puccini, stepped into roles that were not written with his body in mind. When asked what history he steps into as a Black artist on an opera stage, he answers without theatrics: the same history everyone else does. But representation, he acknowledges, matters. “It’s always really empowering and inspiring and hopeful to see different representation on stage.”

The two worlds — opera and soul — do not compete inside him. From a technical standpoint, they strengthen each other. Opera demands control; soul demands surrender. One refines the instrument; the other insists it mean something.

What Ebony Roots ultimately stages is not certainty but permission. Permission to claim lineage. Permission to hold joy and heaviness in the same breath. Permission to sing songs that have carried generations and to do so without apology.

Black History Month, Thornhill suggests, is not a container but a catalyst — a time “to get curious and to learn about the fact that there is Black history here in Canada, here in Vancouver.” Curiosity is a beginning. Song is a continuation.

The discomfort he described at the outset does not disappear. But it softens under repetition. Under harmony. Under the simple act of standing in front of an audience and choosing to sing anyway.

“Really knowing and affirming that this is my culture as well,” he says again, “and that I have the space to be able to give my voice to this music.”

In a city that is still learning how to remember, that act feels quietly radical.

Tickets to Ebony Roots are available here.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Subscribe now

Ashley Daniel Foot:

We’re Inside Vancouver Opera and my name is Ashley Daniel Foot. Today I’m joined by Canadian composer Dean Burry, whose operas for young audiences have been performed across Canada and beyond. His works include The Brothers Grimm, The Hobbit, and today’s focus, The Bremen Town Musicians, an immersive opera created especially for elementary students.

Dean, it’s great to have you with us.

You’ve written so much music, but a big part of your career has been about creating music for young audiences. Can you tell me what drew you specifically to writing for children and families?

Dean Burry:

A lot of composers look at writing for young people as well as almost being something lesser, in a sense. A lot of times it feels like it’s a gig or it’s something like that. And that’s something that I’ve kind of come up with quite a bit in my own career kind of thinking about that as well. I think one of the reasons is I just haven’t grown up myself. I think that’s a part of it as well. But I was always quite involved with teaching young people as well. And I realized that the kind of stories that I wanted to tell really resonated, ideally resonate with young people, and with adults as well.

I started with the Canadian Opera Company working in their box office, right after I graduated with my master’s in composition from University of Toronto in 1996. And I was working in a dive coffee shop on Yonge Street and actually got a job in the box office of the Canadian Opera Company. Whereas a lot of people, it was just a gig. For me, I spent my lunch hours up in the library or up in the practice rooms and I actually started doing some of the workshops for the school groups that were coming in.

When I finished that box office job, I got a job teaching the after-school opera program, which is something I did for them for about 17 years. So 7-12 year-olds, writing operas with kids across the city. And at one point I found myself in the elevator with Richard Bradshaw, the general director, and I said, Richard, you probably don’t know me. I work in the box office, but I’m an opera composer.

So it was a combination of him having looked at my music, me being involved with the education department, a couple of years later when they needed someone to write an opera for their school tour, which was The Brothers Grimm at that point, I was there and kind of fit right into it.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It’s funny you mentioned The Brothers Grimm because right after that you were commissioned to write The Bremen Town Musicians. What about those Grimm fairy tales made you want to turn them into operas?

Dean Burry:

The idea of doing The Bremen Town Musicians came up a few years later. In fact, Grimm premiered in 2001 and it was 2009 when we first did Bremen Town Musicians with Opera Lyra. Again, it comes back to the Canadian Opera Company. When I was working in that box office job, they asked staff members to do presentations on the upcoming season because people who work in marketing or, you know, in the box office, for example, don’t necessarily know all the operas that are going to be coming up.

And so I was given the task of doing a presentation on Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel. It’s a wonderful story. It’s a wonderful opera. But in working on that, I found that the story of The Brothers Grimm was even more interesting. We know the fairy tales really well. But this idea of an opera with the two heroes being essentially librarians, or scholarly philologists, word lovers, nerdy, just like me. And so the actual story of how those very famous fairy tales came into being was fascinating as an opera as well.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Writing for adults obviously is different for writing for elementary kids. When you’re considering an opera like The Bremen Town Musicians for young folks, what are the tools that you’re thinking of using as you’re composing?

Dean Burry:

Talking about how that particular fairy tale, Bremen Town Musicians because again, Brothers Grimm uses Little Red-Cap, which became Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel. So I had to kind of choose the three stories that I wanted to choose. And The Bremen Town Musicians was, which did not figure into it, but it was one of the ones I thought how musical it is, know? When you have a piece that has music built right into it, it almost kind of demands to be made into an opera, right?

The interesting thing about The Bremen Town Musicians it is very much about a group of friends working together. It’s funny, I’m watching Stranger Things right now, just the fifth season. And so it’s that classic story of a group of friends, friends who feel down on their luck and who feel isolated, coming together to find kind of a community and to find a way to work together.

Although the very interesting thing is that in The Bremen Town Musicians , the animals are all seniors. They’re all kind of animals who have, you know work animals, a donkey and a dog and a rooster, who’ve outlived their usefulness in a sense, right? And they’ve been cast out on that end. So again, like to kind of make reference to famous movies like Goonies or Stranger Things or that kind of thing. Classic. Except all the characters are senior citizens.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I want to talk a little bit more about theatricality, pacing, musical language. Are these things that you think about when you’re crafting or is there, what does your process look like when you’re building the work?

Dean Burry:

When I was in high school, the question for me was, am I going to go to theatre school and become an actor and a playwright? Or am I going to go to music school and become, what I thought was a saxophonist at that time? Because I was so very involved in both.

I started writing songs about grade six, I think. I had a piano teacher that got me into the composition side of things, really. But at the same time I was writing my own plays in grade nine, my junior high school drama club produced Good Gods, which was the first play that I had written. And in grade four, used to do puppet plays in the back of my grade four class. So it was trying to find a way to bring those two worlds together.

I did go to Mount Allison University in New Brunswick to do a music degree with saxophone, but I pretty quickly realized that there was a way for me to be in both worlds. And I thought it was going to be musical theatre, chiefly. This was the age of Les Misérables and Phantom of the Opera.

So in my third year of my undergraduate, I wrote my first opera and then I fell in, as I mentioned, to the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. And so for me, obviously a lot of times as a composer… and if you think traditionally about opera, music was often the thing which was over anything as justified by some of the odd libretto choices that you find in traditional opera. But for me, it is all about the story that is equally served by the drama and the music and the design.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What do you hope a young person seeing maybe their first opera with The Bremen Town Musicians will extract from the experience? What will they take away from it all?

Dean Burry:

We know that opera still has a knee-jerk reaction from a lot of people. Twenty years ago, when I was teaching a lot for the Canadian Opera Company, there were still a lot of stereotypical things on TV and in movies. I know there’s the “fat lady” in Harry Potter. There was a gum commercial that was on television that had opera as well.

And so, but, you know, in some cases it feels like even some of those stereotypes are kind of are moving away.

I think the main thing is that, yeah, we’ve got that word opera in it, but when those kids sit down in front of it, there shouldn’t be any barrier. It hopefully is really strong storytelling with engaging characters and engaging music. That’s what you want from a children’s opera. But in reality, that’s what you want from any opera. That’s you want from an adult opera as well.

Ultimately people should be pulled into the story, and as I mentioned before, the music and the design and the theatricality and the drama should all just pull them along in that as well. And maybe they will go home and say, “Hey, mom, hey, dad, you know, I saw an opera and I really loved it today.”

Ashley Daniel Foot:

So Dean, imagine you’re talking directly to students right now. They’ve watched the opera and they’re amazed at the thought of possibly becoming composers or involved in the creative arts. What would you say to those young folks who are dreaming about composing an opera or maybe being involved in the world of the arts?

Dean Burry:

I know it’s sometimes hard to imagine yourself being a composer. When we think of the big classical composers, you think of Beethoven or Mozart, and they just seem impossible like aliens almost in a sense. And there’s no possibility of doing that. Listen, a three-year-old child can pick up a crayon and be an artist. Essentially being creative with sound is being a composer.

So it’s something that I did from a very early age. And I feel like the creative part of it… I mean, I love performing. I do love being on stage, but there’s something about being able to sit back and kind of create these worlds, you know? Like anything, it takes a long time. It takes a long time to learn how to fix a car, right? It takes a long time, but it’s not so foreign that it’s out there.

Start by writing songs. That’s something that we have around us. And again, an opera, The Bremen Town Musicians is about 45 minutes long, but some adult operas are hours long in a sense, right? And that can seem really daunting, but starting with a two or three minute song, that is essentially what an opera is. It’s storytelling using music and drama as well, you know? It’s thrilling. I did it from a very, very young age. And again, the ability to be able to make up a world like that is magical.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What do you remember about the first piece that you ever composed?

Dean Burry:

Again, I think it would have to go right back to grade four and that those puppet shows, you know, where the teacher got everyone to turn their seats around. This is grade four, I remember, Mrs. Scamel. The last Friday of every month, I would bring in my little homemade puppet theatre and the puppets that my mother had made from my sister’s old stuffed animals. I would do a show. If it was February, I would do a Valentine’s show. If it was October, I’d do a Halloween show. And there were a bunch of little sketches and songs as well. Essentially, again, an opera in grade four. And the high of it all, the excitement of being able to kind of like share that with people.

Of course there’s the fun of like being on the stage and everyone’s looking at you kind of thing. But it’s more so about the idea of being able to share something and to share stories with people. And again, I would come back even further than that. Yes, my degrees are in composition, but first and foremost, I’m a storyteller.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love that so much and I think that’s what we strive to do is bring the story to life through music. Dean, it’s been a real pleasure chatting about your work and your contributions to Canadian opera. Really, I can see where it started all back in grade four thanks to Mrs. Scamel.

Dean, thanks so much for sharing your time and insight and for creating work that welcomes young audiences into opera with such imagination and care. If you’d like to learn more about Dean’s music you can visit deanbury.com.

If you’d like to experience The Bremen Town Musicians in person, Vancouver Opera’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program will be presenting public performances on March 6th - 8th.

You’ll be able to find more information at vancouveropera.ca. As usual, I’d like to thank my producer, Mack McGillivray, and I’ll see you at the opera.

Dean Burry is an award-winning composer and librettist, dedicated to creating educational programs that introduce opera to children. The Brothers Grimm, Burry’s work commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company, premiered in 2001 has been seen by over 180,000 school children across Canada, the United States, Europe and South America. Other major works include The Hobbit for the Canadian Children’s Opera Company and Sarasota Opera, The Scorpions’ Sting for the Canadian Opera Company, The Vinland Traveler and Le nez de la sorcière for Memorial University of Newfoundland, Pandora’s Locker for The Glenn Gould School, The Mummers’ Masque for Toronto Masque Theatre, the CBC serial radio opera Baby Kintyre, The Bells of Baddeck and Beacon of Light for Rising Tide Theatre. Recent premieres include the Dora Award winning Shanawdithit, Sea Variations (Canadian Art Song Project), String Quartet No. 1 (New Orford String Quartet) and the opera Il Giudizio di Pigmalione with COSA Canada and Opera McGill. His chamber work The Highwayman was released in October 2023.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host, Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Subscribe now

The scene is set: a drafty room, a few embers glowing in the fireplace, candles flickering as the light drops outside the leaded windows.

Two men occupy the room. One — a young composer with a quick mind, restless energy, and a gift for melody — sits at his pianoforte. The other — once a priest, now a charming scoundrel and librettist — paces the floor with pages in hand.

They’re deep in discussion. Plot. Characters. Morality. How far to push comedy. How lightly to treat cruelty. What audiences can tolerate — and what they will recognise.

Music takes shape. Scenes sharpen. Libretto and score weave themselves together.

The result is Così fan tutte.

At least, this is how we imagine it. The reality may look different, but we do know this: Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte worked closely, creating some of opera’s most memorable characters across their trilogy — Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and finally Così fan tutte.

Both Mozart and Da Ponte were shaped by the Enlightenment — an era obsessed with knowledge, rationality, and the gathering of empirical evidence.

So it’s no surprise that their questions about fidelity and love arrive in the form of an experiment.

And the premise is disarmingly simple.

Don Alfonso, a patriarchal philosopher and busybody, wagers with two young men — Ferrando and Guglielmo — that all women are unfaithful if pressed. Their lovers, Dorabella and Fiordiligi, will prove no different.

A scheme is hatched. The men depart, only to return in disguise, each determined to seduce the other’s partner. If they succeed, Don Alfonso wins.

And if they don’t?

The opera doesn’t quite say who wins anything at all.

Così fan tutte is labelled opera buffa, a comic opera. And yes, it carries all the usual trademarks — disguise, mistaken identity, absurdity. But beneath the playful surface, something darker unfolds.

And once again, it falls most heavily on the women.

Even the title sets the tone:

Così fan tutte — “All women are like that.”

A verdict delivered before the curtain rises.

Dorabella, the more impressionable.

Fiordiligi, the serious and virtuous.

Both judged emotional, predictable, and weak-kneed when virtue is tested.

The men — Alfonso, Guglielmo, Ferrando — hold the cards and the power. They orchestrate the trick, they know the punchline, and they are very much “in” on the joke.

The stereotypes are all present. And consent is nowhere to be found.

But Mozart rarely leaves things so flat. His characters — like his music — hide layers.

Enter Despina.

Mozart’s maid-with-attitude, often played for laughs, but also the opera’s most quietly perceptive voice. She has observed love up close, from the margins — where its risks are sharpest. She understands its consequences, its disappointments, its dangers.

She is practical and unromantic. And she steps in immediately, offering the young women the unvarnished truth in her aria, “Una donna a quindici anni.”

At fifteen, she says, a young woman must learn the world:

what is right, what is wrong, where danger lives.

Know your feminine self.

And use it.

Arm yourselves.

Later, after the “the mounties have left, Despina offers another dose of realism:

Why despair? Why not have a little fun yourselves?

After all:

In men — in soldiers —

you hope for faithfulness?

She says all this, incidentally, while accepting payment from Don Alfonso.

Well — why not?

And here is where the opera becomes more complicated than its premise.

Despina, written in a thoroughly chauvinistic age, becomes the character who punctures the chauvinism. She exposes the men’s foolishness. Their disguises are ridiculous, yes, but their behaviour is even more so — and no man enjoys looking like a fool.

Viennese audiences didn’t mind the risqué nature of the plot, and Emperor Joseph II certainly approved, but Mozart’s contemporaries were another matter.

Beethoven thought the entire subject beneath Mozart — frivolous, even degrading.

Goethe objected to the “over-simplicity” of the plot and “the feebleness of the dénouement.”

And George Bernard Shaw, normally a fierce defender of Mozart, dismissed the libretto as worse than an improvised play scratched out in ten minutes.

Harsh criticism indeed.

But it is unlikely that any of these men objected to the opera’s treatment of women.

But, back to the plot.

Dorabella tells Fiordiligi that marrying their “new” suitors might not be such a bad idea. Fiordiligi protests — it’s only been a day.

Dorabella responds simply:

“But what if they die in battle? Is a bird in hand not worth two in the bush?”

For many women of the time, marriage wasn’t romance. It was survival.

Dorabella chooses door number two rather than no door at all. Fiordiligi, under pressure, eventually bends as well — especially given Guglielmo’s demands.

Mozart and Da Ponte give Despina real influence. Through her, the women avoid the usual tragic fate of young operatic heroines — dying to protect their virtue. Instead, they navigate, adapt, and survive.

Despina emerges as the wisest figure on stage — while Don Alfonso remains rigid and one-dimensional.

And perhaps the most ironic twist of all:

In an opera titled “All women are like that,” Mozart gives the lion’s share of emotional intelligence to a woman.

Maybe that’s what he meant all along.

Don’t miss the magnificent Tracy Dahl as Despina in Così fan tutte, on stage from February 7th to 15th at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre.

Learn more about Così fan tutte:

Jane Potter - Writer and Narrator

Jane holds an MA in Critical and Creative writing from the University of Gloucestershire, and loves telling stories in all forms: She lives in Victoria, and when she isn’t busy reading and writing, she can be found running a small business, baking in the kitchen, or weeding the garden.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley is Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice and host of Inside Vancouver Opera. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories.

Barry Ekko is a Vancouver-based illustrator and graphic designer whose work features retro-futuristic poster aesthetics. He collaborates with cultural institutions—including Vancouver Opera—and applies striking, nostalgic graphics to contemporary storytelling. His style evokes vintage cinema and bold geometry, reimagining dramatic narratives through modern visual language.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

In opera, transformation often happens before anyone notices it. A shift in silhouette, the weight of a skirt, the angle of a wig. Long before the characters betray themselves in the story, the costumes have already begun the work of telling the truth.

For our upcoming production of Così fan tutte, costume designer Donnie Tejani steps into a world powered by disguise, comedy, and emotional sleight of hand. His job is not simply to outfit performers, but to reveal — and conceal — the inner logic of Mozart’s lovers as they twist themselves into new shapes.

Tejani came to the work early. He describes walking into a costume shop as a teenager and finding what felt like an alternate universe: racks rising to the ceiling, textures stacked into chromatic stories, and the unmistakable sense that someone had built a small empire out of imagination and fabric. “It felt like so much theatre history all at once,” he says now. “Magic and wonder everywhere.”

It’s as good an origin story as any designer could hope for.

The Music Before the Sketch

When Tejani begins a new project, he starts with the music. Not the sketches, not the fabrics, not the mood boards — the sound.

“I put on the music for Così a lot during the design process,” he explains. “Listening helps me understand how things flow.” Opera, for him, is physical long before it’s visual. He listens for the places where the lovers soften, where the deception sharpens, where the comedy begins to bite.

There’s an architectural patience in the way he describes this. He waits for the score to reveal its openings.

“The music tells me where the costume begins.”

Inside the Costume Shop

There is a certain reverence in how Tejani speaks about the Vancouver Opera costume shop. Not a romanticised reverence — an artisan’s kind.

The way he puts it: “The inside tells you more than the outside.” Zip open a dress and the hidden engineering becomes obvious — how a builder reinforced the seams for a brutal quick change, how the stitching accounts for sweat, movement, lights, weight.

This is the history of a company embedded in fabric. It’s also the invisible collaboration between designer and makers. Tejani is quick to say that working with a team he already knows changes everything: there’s trust, shorthand, a shared sense of humour about the chaos of production timelines.

Wigs as Character

Tejani is also a wig stylist, and he talks about wigs as though they carry a kind of psychological charge.

“It frames your whole face and changes so much about you,” he says. “The performer has to feel totally secure that the wig is now part of them.”

He mentions one wig for Così that sits nine inches above a performer’s head — an intentional exaggeration, almost sculptural. It’s a character in its own right.

“Sometimes the wig is the character.”

He’s equally precise about how that construction stays on. It’s not glue. It’s not social-media gimmicks. It’s wig prep — quiet, meticulous, unseen.

Disguise and the Logic of Così fan tutte

Rob Herriot’s production leans into the slipperiness of Così: the disguises, the half-truths, the moral tensions that hover under the comedy. Costume design becomes a narrative engine here — the thing that signals how far the lovers are willing to go in their own self-deceptions.

Tejani’s answer to Così’s moral geometry is surprisingly simple: elegance. Used sparingly. Deployed intentionally.

“I’ve kept the elegance to a few places so when it appears, it pops,” he says. It’s a designer’s version of comedic timing — knowing when beauty arrives as a punchline or a revelation.

Working in 2026

Opera costumes don’t exist in a vacuum, and Tejani is frank about the constraints: rising costs, shrinking timelines, unpredictable shipping, and the simple reality that garments have to survive eight or nine shows a week.

“I’m designing something that’s attainable,” he says, “and something built to last.”

There’s no glamour in this part of the job. But there is discipline. And, perhaps, a kind of stubborn optimism.

The People Who Shaped Him

Two names surface when he talks about influence. Paul Tazewell — Oscar and Tony-winning designer — whose scale and detail Tejani describes with genuine awe.

And also Cory Sincennes, a Canadian designer whose openness and clarity left a mark.

“Seeing how he selects fabric and texture… I felt like a sponge around him,” Tejani says. Influence, in his telling, is less about imitation and more about generosity.

What to Watch For

When asked what the audience should be paying attention to, Tejani doesn’t hesitate: elegance. “Some beautiful satins, beautiful silks… I’m excited to see how they sparkle and move.”

In this production, elegance isn’t filler. It’s punctuation.

Talking with Donnie Tejani is a reminder that costume design is one of opera’s great interpretive arts — part craft, part architecture, part psychology. It carries the history of a company, the vision of a director, the music of a composer, and the vulnerability of a performer. And, in Così fan tutte, it carries the whole idea of disguise.

We’re fortunate to have him shaping our stage.

Vancouver Opera presents Così fan tutte on February 7, 12, and 15 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets and information are available via our website.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host, Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

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Ashley Daniel Foot

We’re Inside Vancouver Opera, I’m Ashley Daniel Foot. Today we are speaking with a singer who shaped my imagination long before I ever thought I’d work in this field.

When I was young, I remember hearing her voice on CBC, CBC Radio 2, what it was called back then. It was bright, it was fearless, effervescent, but so human. That singer was Tracy Dahl. And for so many of us in this country, she became the sound of what Canadian artistry could be: daring, witty, and unmistakably individual. Tracy has sung on the great stages of the world, the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden, and continues to nurture the next generation of Canadian artists from her home in Winnipeg.

Now she’s taking on Despina in our upcoming production of Così fan tutte, a role that is often written off as comic relief, but actually for me, maybe the opera’s sharpest and most subversive moral compass.

Let’s begin with something that really fascinates me. The way that a role changes as we change. You’ve lived with Mozart for decades, undeniably as a singer, teacher, and interpreter. You understand both the architecture of the music and the psychology of the characters. But when you return to Così now, in this moment in your career, what feels new for you?

Tracy Dahl:

The role itself really lends itself to any age. So she could be Rizzo in Grease.

That was the first musical that I did was Grease. But it also lends itself to someone who’s a little bit wiser, perhaps a bit more jaded or just wanting to encourage people to, you know, take life a little less seriously. Not saying that I would be saying the things that Despina is saying. But I think it lends itself to kind of a variety of age perspectives.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Since you’ve sung it a few times, have you discovered new things in the periods in between, so to speak?

Tracy Dahl:

You always do and the discovery is layered, right? So there’s the musical layer. I couldn’t possibly have taken that in the first time I did it. First time you do it, you’re just, I want to make sure I get all the words right. It’s a lot of words. It’s a lot of words. And you want to get the story right and you want to, you you’re just checking boxes the first time around.

But as you get into it deeper and deeper and deeper, especially, I would say that the one that I did with the Canadian Opera Company, the first time I did the Atom Egoyan production, it was open. There were very few cuts in that recitative. And so I really got to know Despina in a different way.

So now when we make cuts, I know the entirety of the libretto and what that can mean and can influence the character. But the other thing that changes every time are the people. The cast changes each time, so everybody brings something new to it. And from that, you start to evolve into a different type of Despina and how you react with them, whether you are chummy or whether you’re distant. It all starts just to play out with how your colleagues are.And we have a fine group of people here. It’s just a blast.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

It really is. It’s an amazing cast that we’ve assembled and Rob, our director, is just full of life and energy.

We’ll get back to Despina a little bit later. I want to talk about coloratura and the idea of this incredible fusion of temperament and technique. And I think that as a coloratura singer, you need to organize, I guess the word is lightning almost here. I’m kind of interested in the psychology of that. When you think back on your early training, do you remember the moment that you understood like, yes, this is the kind of singer that I am, This is where my voice is. What kind of, was it a technical discovery? Was it more existential?

Tracy Dahl:

It definitely wasn’t existential. It wasn’t that. I can tell you exactly when it was. So I was in Banff in the summer training programs that they had there. And I was in the musical theatre program. And Dodi Protero was one of the voice teachers at the program. She sat down at the piano and she said, let’s warm up. And she started taking me, she said, :do you know where you are? Nope. Keep going. Keep going.”

I had no idea and she stopped, you just sang a B flat above high C. And I said, “Sorry, what?!” And I had no idea I had that extension. I had never sung there. My voice teacher back home had been very straightforward, lyric soprano. I was singing what everybody else now would go, you sang what? You know, Je dis, Butterfly, because I had the notes. And I didn’t know there were notes beyond those notes, or people had written for singers beyond those notes. What a thing! So Dodi taught me Glitter and Be Gay.

That summer I was 17 years old, and she taught me how to sing it. She just sang it with me at every lesson until I was singing it. I was none the wiser. I went home and I went, “Okay, I want to sing these pieces,” and looked up Roberta Peters and just started getting very excited about that exploration of what that voice type could do.

I was in the musical theatre program at that time, so there’s not a lot of use for that in the musical theatre world. But in the classical world, I found lots more opportunity for that.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I would say so!

Your technique, speaking of it, has been praised for decades as crystalline, fearless, impeccably controlled. I would say all of those things are true, but I always am struck by what I imagine is thinking behind that technique. I’m wondering when you prepare for a role, is there a dialogue that goes on inside your head between the technician and the interpreter?

In the emotional world of character, is it something that arrives through technique or is it something that you have to infuse into it?

Tracy Dahl:

Before I did opera, I did straight theatre and musical theatre.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Do remember your first musical?

Tracy Dahl:

First full musical was Grease. I was Jan and had to eat coleslaw, a lot of coleslaw. But I was doing the play Tartuffe at MTC and had been accepted into the Merola Program. And I had turned down Rainbow Stage that summer because I wanted to explore opera. And I remember my colleagues in the theatre saying, “Aren’t you going to miss acting? Why are you leaving acting?” I’m not. I’m not.

I think that’s often a misconception and that there’s this place, you know, the practice of how many hours do you practice before it becomes this place where it’s something that you can do without thinking. Like James Ehnes on a violin. You practice sections of music where you need to know technically what you’re doing, but never, I would say almost never, aside from when you’re trying to decide if you can do a role or not, would I eliminate the emotional side of that character from my learning. It’s already there, because I’m already looking down in the score, looking for what emotions are possible, where there’s forte pianos, what kind of things, in formations in Bel Canto opera, what is my freedom here, what is the composer giving me. So that is a gift, that’s a dramaturgical gift to help me decide and make good choices for my character based in music. So to me, they’re inseparable.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Let’s talk about your experience with Despina and Così. Our researcher Jane Potter has this beautiful description of Despina. She calls her the woman who sees enough of the world to know its dangers and enough of people to know where the jokes stop being funny.

When you think about Despina’s energy, her sharpness, her pragmatism, her survival instincts, what resonates for you? Do you see her as cynical or is she simply truthful?

Tracy Dahl:

Despina has a function in the opera, right? Because all of this is based on commedia dell’arte. My function is not to be heavy, not to be pensive. That is Fiordiligi’s problem, right? She’s the one who’s conflicted. I’m not so much conflicted as I am manipulating and being manipulated, both, as we go through this. Bribed by money, if you will, by Don Alfonso to try to get the girls to say yes to these new suitors. Does she agree with that? I think she does. In principle, from where she is in this production.

I think she sees a lot of people travelling, on the road, affairs, doors opening and closing where that’s not the person who went in that door last night, right? So she’s seeing a lot of the flirtation that goes on at the bar. She understands all of this world and she’s encouraging that as, know, have a good time.

The cynical part of her is more about how the young women are holding up their men, holding them up and saying, but they’re this, they’re so amazing and they’re perfect and they never do anything wrong. So, no. Tell me you don’t believe that. Please tell me you don’t really believe that. And that is a fun energy to play because it’s little bit of it’s kind of leaning into laughter, laughing with, not at, and kind of trying to cajole people into another idea.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

When I think of Despina’s first aria, it’s always a lightning rod for audiences, advice to young women delivered with charm, but edged with, let’s just say, realism. How do you navigate between the aria’s breezy musical style and its worldview, which I would say is frank about predatory behaviour long before we had words for it? When you sing that aria today, what are you trying to show us about Despina?

Tracy Dahl:

I think in this production… I think you always have to take into consideration what production you’re in. You could be, and I have been, in a Così that was very dark. And I personally feel like that’s going the wrong way. That is not what Mozart’s intentions were. That’s not what the librettist’s intentions were.

So I feel like going towards the truth of the original intent is the better way to go. And so I feel like there’s a place in the aria… there’s two halves. And both of her arias have two halves. There’s a little tiny introduction and then she moves on to kind of a moral, if you will, or the larger lesson.

So the first aria, she’s saying “in soldiers and men, you think they’re faithful? don’t make me laugh. Please don’t make me laugh.” And then she goes on to say things like, Mozart has this gesture where she has to do an octave leap. “In noi non amano che ‘l lor diletto.” And I feel like that’s her going, “How absurd. This is what it’s like. This is truly what it’s like, girls. This is what it’s like.” And it’s just doing that with the voice. It’s just really come on.

I feel like he’s doing that with the music, but he does it in a light way. He doesn’t do it by slapping you in the face, he uses this light music. He uses a metaphor about the wind, which is constantly moving, is more stable than those guys. He uses ideas that would appeal, that would be humorous and evoke ideas. I think that’s where he goes with that.

In the end, she is talking about men being predatory and not trusting them. But at the same time, she then turns around the top of Act Two and says, “so why not just act like them? Right?” So it’s definitely an interesting person.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

You alluded to the genius of Mozart, being able to just somehow take all of these disparate pieces and put them to perfect musical symmetry. What human skill do you think Mozart demands that perhaps other composers don’t?

Tracy Dahl:

It’s funny, Mozart’s music is so detailed in a way that if you know his writing style, you can really hone in on what that character is fighting, struggling with. The semitones, the octave leaps, the bigger than an octave leap. Oh my goodness, they really are in trouble, “Come scoglio,” that’s really someone with large emotions when he takes something larger than an octave.

So I think that he’s trying to use his music to evoke those things that we all understand emotionally. in some ways it discusses, it depends on the audience’s knowledge in some ways woven into the craft of what’s happening on stage that helps us reveal that humanity.

Rob said something the other day, he said, “this scene is only going to be funny if it’s true.” And there are lots of physical gags in this show. It’s being done as a comedy, but there always trying to find a truth even behind that bit of slapstick.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And finding the truth, I want to think about the singers that you work with in your studio. You’ve taught hundreds of singers, many of whom now have notable careers of their own. And when a singer, or young singer, walks into your studio with a Mozart role, what do you hope that they learn that goes beyond just the notes?

Tracy Dahl:

I hope that they walk away knowing how much information is in the score. I hope they walk away knowing that they can’t only learn their own lines. They have to know what other people say about them. Because our perception of our self is very different than others’ perception of us. So if we read in the score that other people say this about that person, then we have to go, “Well, someone else sees me as flighty, but I don’t.”

There are so many ways to deepen our knowledge and our tools for that character development, but the score-work really, really delving deep into the small details. I’m hearing Mozart coming through the walls here now and my mind is thinking about how much homework they will have done to know exactly what is in the score and why that moment would happen and why it’s connected to their character, not because it’s a dynamic on the page, but there’s a reason for it. Motivate it, know why it’s there.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I love it. And we are listening to Mozart live as we’re having this interview here at Vancouver Opera. We’re literally inside Vancouver Opera with Tracy Dahl.

When you believe that you have connected to a piece, and whether that’s using metaphor or using the tools that you’ve talked about, when you have found a moment, and I guess we could say when you feel you’re singing well, what does that feel like for you?

Tracy Dahl:

Holistic, satisfying. It’s not necessarily something that has to break the fourth wall, but I feel like there aren’t walls. I’m not still trying to find the key, Alice in Wonderland with that key going, “Which frickin’ door do I go through?” Once you know how to get through that door and you can rely on that, that’s freeing. It’s very freeing to know that that’s reliable and you don’t have to struggle or be in that land of discovery anymore. actually have the tools to do that now.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

That’s beautiful. I have to argue that this is part of the reason why you are the way you are, that you’re just so open to this discovery process.

Tracy Dahl:

Oh I haven’t stopped, trust me. I’m still trying to figure things out, still looking for the best sound I can make and maintaining that and learning from my colleagues, listening to my colleagues. “Oh they do that, that’s really cool. How do they do that?” And so I’m fascinated as a teacher with how different and unique not only all our sounds are, but how different our faces are, how different the shapes of our faces are. And does that affect our sound? And it does.

So you find a Slavic singer who’s trying to sing with this long, narrow face. I say, why don’t you just sing with that big square face you have? Let’s use it. And all of a sudden they’re going, that’s easier. Yeah, because you’re singing to the shape of your face.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

But how do you get them to do that? That’s what I want to know. How do you connect to that square face, so to speak, in this particular singer?

Tracy Dahl:

I think it’s all observation, right? Watching them sing, listening to their sound, looking for where the space is not. What’s missing in the sound? Is it the cap of the sound? Is it the bottom of the sound?

There’s three partials in the sound. So right now I’m doing a gesture and if I use the middle finger, that’s just not really good. If you’re just at the pitch, that’s not so nice. So you want to have those partials around the sound. So you’re listening, I’m listening to see, do they have arc over the sound? Does it come back into their body? Are they abandoning their mouth trying to put the note up high?

So I’m just constantly in a landscape of sound and where it lives in their head, in their chest, in their back, to their toes, right? And I have some pretty tall students. So it’s fun, it’s very fun. It’s fun to explore and see how a long torso is different than something that’s short and compact. That’s me. So I feel things very uniquely quite differently than someone who’s tall. It’s going to feel different. It has to. It has to.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I’m curious. This is so fascinating. You just described the three partials. Is there any way that you can demonstrate that for us and explain through tone?

Tracy Dahl:

If you’re just using, that’s just my chest voice. Right. I’m using my mouth. right. Now, but if I want my…

Now I’m using that. That’s my third partial. Right. So now if I want all of them…Drop, drop, drop. I want all three. And not every note is meant to have that. My teacher would talk about ratios. She’d say, “Are you 60:40? Are you 70:30? What are you doing right now?”

Ashley Daniel Foot:

What would you be singing when she’d ask you this?

Tracy Dahl:

Some high note. I think you’re a little bit high without having, you’re not connecting back into your body. Think about where the bottom part is.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

And what would you do then to get the bottom partial?

Tracy Dahl:

I would look for vibration in a new place. When I’m singing super high, it feels like it’s going out the top of my head. Does it really? Yeah, can’t really feel it. It’s gone somewhere. Do you know Monty Python? open of Monty Python and it opens up and people walk out that head. That’s where my voice is going off the top of my head.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Like smoke? It’s surely not like… no? Okay, because I’ve heard that before and that scares me a little bit.

Tracy Dahl:

No, it’s not a sensation you can feel anymore because you’re no longer just vibrating in behind your sinuses. You’re way high, you’re much higher. But it’s coming back in. It’s coming back into the body so that it connects and has length, is in tune. But I think that those things are things that every singer has to find for themselves, to wear. Those little moments are in their voice and how they use them, how they can use them for colour.

If we think of it like a violin, violinists play in second or third position, they’re constantly moving their hands. So if they stay on the D string and play in third position, they’re playing on a thicker string further up so they get a different colour. They could easily have gone over to the A or the E, but they don’t because they want that warmer colour.

What colour do I want? How long I need to say this sentence in this moment in this piece of poetry? So having that accessibility to choice is really, really wonderful. So you can play with things and change the dynamics and do what you want because you have the capacity to change how you are inside those vibrations.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I am so excited for audiences to see this Despina and to see Così on stage. It’s on stage from February 7th to 15th. If you haven’t, get your tickets there at vancouveropera.ca.

How many colours are you painting with when you’re singing this Despina?

Tracy Dahl:

My gosh, so many. Despina asks probably the most of my voice of any role I ever do. No, different than Lucia, different than Gilda, very different than those.

But because you have to do two character voices where you’re in disguise. Like anybody’s not gonna know it’s me? This is a cast of people who are… the shortest person is 5’10”. And I’m 4’11”. So there’s no way you’re not gonna know it’s me, but I have to disguise my voice.

So I’m doing things to my vocal folds that I would never do, but it’s great fun. And it’s all in the arc of, “let’s bring Carol Burnett to the opera and have a good time. And that’s what’s asked of Despina. She really is truly commedia dell’arte and she’s meant to be there to bring a smile to your face and have a good time and kind of break a lot of rules. So I have to break a lot of my own singing technical rules to make this all happen.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

I have to ask... cartwheels. Tell me more.

Tracy Dahl:

I was a gymnast when I was growing up, not a good one. But I was a coach and I did gymnastics all the way through high school. And so I had that cartwheel in my arsenal of things. It was there. I mean, I know I could still do one now if someone asked me to. I can’t do the splits, but I can do a cartwheel.

It’s funny, I’m pretty sure that when I went back and did Valencienne at the Met, was because I could do a cartwheel, because it was in the blocking event. What singers out there have cartwheels in their arsenal?

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Tracy Dahl, everyone, is Despina, you have to come and see it to believe it. It’s been a joy and I thank you so much for all of your warmth and for bringing such depth to a role that I would say could be easily flattened if we’re not careful.

Tracy Dahl:

I think she’s very multi-dimensional and I think Rob has done a fantastic job. There’s a lot of talk in the rehearsal hall about trying to give the women as much agency as possible. I’ve done this production before and I found a new moment in this one to give them agency. There’s a place at the end where if the audience thinks, “I can’t believe that was just said.” Don’t worry, someone on stage is going to take care of the anger you feel. And it will be acknowledged. You can’t change the beast. The beast is what it is.

I think Rob is doing a fantastic job of helping us navigate this ancient peace and making it timely and making it fun.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Why should someone who’s never been to the opera, why should they take a chance on Così?

Tracy Dahl:

The music is beautiful. The singing is spectacular. And this production is hysterical.

Ashley Daniel Foot:

Tracy Dahl, really a force of nature. You can catch Tracy as Despina in Così fan tutte on stage from February 7th to 15th at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets and information are at vancouveropera.ca. You’ll definitely want to get your seat to see all of the hijinks that will ensue.

As always, I’d like to thank my trusty producer Mack McGillivray. I’m Ashley Daniel Foot and I’ll see you at the opera.

Tracy Dahl is a world-renowned coloratura soprano, acclaimed for her clear, high and flexible voice and her theatrical sensitivities. She has performed with many of the world’s most prestigious opera companies as well as with every major Canadian orchestra. A proud Winnipegger, she works tirelessly to nurture and develop the next generation of Canadian singers. Highly regarded as a kind and supportive teacher and mentor, she brings the best out of her students to the delight of their audiences. In 2017, for her accomplishments as a singer and her dedication to teaching, Tracy was appointed to the Order of Canada.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host, Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot bridges the gap between the stage and the city through insightful, deep-dive conversations. Currently serving as Director of Engagement and Civic Practice at Vancouver Opera, he curates the multidisciplinary TD VOICES series and leads the City of Vancouver’s Arts and Culture Advisory Committee, ensuring storytelling and civic responsibility remain at the heart of the opera.

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.

You can download this podcast on all major platforms including Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Article written by Kevin Ng

The American musicologist and critic Joseph Kerman famously called Cosi “Mozart’s most problematic work,” and from a 2026 perspective the opera’s misogyny seems problematic indeed. The issues start from the title itself: Così fan tutte translates as “so do they all”, and the use of the feminine “tutte” renders the meaning as something along the lines of “All women are like that.”

The plot begins with two young men, Ferrando and Guglielmo, making a chauvinistic bet on women’s fidelity. “Woman’s faithfulness is like the Arabian phoenix,” the cynical Don Alfonso tells them. “Everyone says it exists, but nobody knows where it is.” The men devise a plan to disguise themselves and seduce each other’s fiancées, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and over the course of the opera behave abysmally: they lie, deceive, threaten suicide, and refuse to take no for an answer.

The emotional climax of the opera sees a disguised Ferrando charge into Fiordiligi’s room where, to some of Mozart’s most sublime music, he threatens to kill himself as she begs him to leave. From a 2026 perspective, tricking someone into sex and refusing to accept refusal crosses every conceivable boundary of consent. And how do the men respond? With further sweeping generalizations about women’s supposed faithlessness. “My dear women, you treat us so poorly that when men complain I sympathize with them,” Guglielmo proclaims. “All women are like that,” Don Alfonso replies glibly, giving the opera its title.

“From a 2026 perspective, tricking someone into sex and refusing to accept refusal crosses every conceivable boundary of consent.”

The philosopher and ethicist Martha Nussbaum tackles this problem in her upcoming book, “The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom”, which will be published this April by Oxford University Press. “From the title onward, the piece announces itself as an unmasking of women’s pretenses of fidelity and nobility,” Nussbaum writes. “They are all cheats, and dupes into the bargain, ready to fall for the first set of false mustaches that come their way. This becomes especially clear when we consider the subtitle [La scuola degli amanti, or the school for lovers] alongside the title. Whereas ‘tutte’ is unambiguously feminine, ‘amanti’ could refer to the male lovers only, or to all lovers, male or female. However, in Don Alfonso’s world, it is men who do the learning, women who exhibit an unchanging nature”.’

“The idea of the opera being a “battle of the sexes” makes for a nice hook for marketing purposes,” comments musicologist Kristi Brown-Montesano, who wrote “Understanding the Women in Mozart’s Operas”, “but it suggests a progressiveness in the opera that simply isn’t there. For there to be an equal competition, both “teams” need to know the rules—and the rules need to be fair and consistent. And the official overseeing the game can’t be rigging things behind the scenes for a specific outcome.”

“It features some of the basest, most cynical machinations imaginable, coupled with some of Mozart’s most gorgeous music,” adds musicologist Susan McClary, best known for her work in combining musicology with feminist theory.

“For a long time, Mozart fans liked to argue that Mozart didn’t have a clue what Da Ponte was doing in the libretto. But they wrote this scenario in close collaboration. Only claiming Mozart as an idiot savant gets him off the hook. Cosí presents a version of the 18th century close to those of the Marquis de Sade or Les Liaisons dangereuses. It reveals the dark underbelly of the Enlightenment, with music that purports to simulate pure order”. In other words, the Classical symmetry of Mozart’s music can be seen as both weapon and balm.

“The Classical symmetry of Mozart’s music can function both as weapon and balm.”

So how do we, as a 21st-century audience, deal with this? The first is to grapple with the social and intellectual context of Così, and how Enlightenment-era thinking was used to exclude or suppress women. The central instigator of the opera, Don Alfonso, is described as a philosopher; his outlook most closely aligns with Rousseau, who in addition to his influence on economics, sociology, and fiction was also one of the first to formulate a philosophy of education. This parallels Mozart and Da Ponte's "school for lovers", where the men will only understand the duplicitous nature of women if they experience it first-hand.

But the sexism of this line of reasoning did not go unnoticed at the time: the early feminist author and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft directly countered Rousseau's arguments in her influential A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Così's Despina provides a direct foil to Don Alfonso's misogynistic stereotypic in the proto-feminist aria “In uomini, in soldati”. “You hope for faithfulness in men?” she asks. “They’re all cut from the same cloth: the fickle leaves and breezes are more stable…Let us women pay them back in the same way!”

Perhaps the greatest challenge to Don Alfonso’s conclusion that all women are the same lies in Mozart’s musical differentiation of the three characters. Vocal classifications have evolved since Mozart’s day — although Dorabella is typically performed by a mezzo-soprano today, all three roles are designated as “soprano” in Mozart’s score. Some singers have performed multiple roles within the same opera: Barbara Frittoli and Ana María Martinez have sung Fiordiligi and Despina, Anna Caterina Antonacci has sung Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and Cecilia Bartoli has sung all three roles.

But even if the interchangeability of voice types might support the conclusion that all women are the same, the musical language of the three characters could not be any more different. In line with the Enlightenment classicism of the opera, each is given one aria per act. These arias allow the three women to not just differentiate themselves from one another, but to show their independent paths of evolution. Despina’s music is distinguished on the basis of class: in line with other servant roles (think Mozart’s Susanna and Zerlina, or Paisello’s La serva padrona) her music evokes rustic and pastoral musical tropes, with prominent horns and bassoons and 6/8 rhythms.

Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s act one arias could scarcely be more different from one another. Faced with the departure of their fiancés and alarmed by the strange “Albanians” in their home, Dorabella’s “Smanie implacabili” is full of jerky, discontinuous phrases over turbulent strings: a musical representation of hyperventilation. Meanwhile, Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio” is aggressive, almost martial in tone, with extreme leaps in vocal register and fiendishly challenging triplet runs.

It’s their second-act arias, though, that differentiate the sisters’ evolution. Dorabella’s “È amore un ladroncello” is jaunty and flirtatious, reflecting her free-spirited approach to love and sex. Meanwhile, Fiordiligi’s “Per pietà” is eight minutes of torment and shame; here, Mozart gives extended solo lines to the clarinet and horns, instruments he frequently used for their expressive properties. But Mozart’s use of the horn has yet another meaning: they are also an extra-musical evocation of infidelity, with the ram’s horns symbolizing the cuckold. Through the music, Mozart seems to make the argument that women are in fact not the same at all: two sisters in identical circumstances have wildly different psychologies.

As Nussbaum writes, “The music doesn’t just render emotionally determinate texts that are indeterminate; it actually subverts the entire point of the libretto. No, Don Alfonso, emotions are not just a game, they are real, and people – men and women equally -- have deep, interesting, and highly individual emotional lives”.

But McClary notes that the same emotional and musical rhetoric can be used to conceal the misogynistic underbelly of the opera. On act one's sublime "Soave sia il vento" in her review of Edward Said's Said on Opera, McClary writes that "the lyrics describe only the benign seascape and their waves of desire, and the three voices sing together much of the time in almost hymn-like unity in one of the most gorgeous pieces Mozart ever wrote...But we know that this entire scenario is but part of Alfonso’s ruse, that he is leading the clueless women to their destruction. And we can do nothing about it except bear witness to this most beautiful of entrapments. What does it mean to deploy all the rhetorical strategies needed to produce such rapture for purposes we recognize in advance as deeply injurious and corrupt?”

Mozart’s musical differentiation of women can be seen throughout his operas, especially in his collaborations with Da Ponte. Le nozze di Figaro, which predates Così by four years, already contains many of the dramatic and psychological seeds: “Così fan tutte le belle,” says Don Basilio in light of Susanna’s apparent infidelity. Figaro’s last-act aria contains many of the misogynistic tropes rehashed in Così: “Open your eyes, you incautious and stupid men,” he sings, “look at these women and what they are!”

But it’s the women that run the show, with Susanna, the Countess, and even Barbarina and Marcellina ten steps ahead of the men. “Only we poor women, who love these men so much, have to put up with their treacherousness and cruelty,” Marcellina sings after her son Figaro’s sexist tirade. Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni contain some of Mozart’s most complex women, differentiated by situation, class, and age. Even Die Zauberflöte, which presents a misogyny and racism that goes even beyond that in Così, demarcates its women brilliantly, from Pamina’s melancholy to the Queen of the Night’s gleaming coloratura.

While Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Die Zauberflöte have happy endings with the triumph of good over evil, the ending of Così is far more ambiguous. The first decision any director has to make is how to stage the ending: do the couples return to their original pairs, or their new partners? Is a happy ending possible, given what the lovers have learned about each other and about themselves? More broadly, what is the right tone to take with the opera: is it a frothy sex comedy or a dark, cynical take on human infidelity? Can it be both?

“Così fan tutte invites us to confront not only the misogyny of the past, but its persistent echoes in the present.”

“After the revelations of systemic abuse, misogyny, and sexual misconduct that #MeToo revealed,” Brown-Montesano comments, “you’d think that any opera dramatizing an old, privileged guy telling young men about how women can’t think straight about love or sex would have a hard time making it on stage without some very thoughtful artistic work to reveal the major cultural cracks between then and now. But today, with the backlash against #MeToo and its legitimate claims—from the manosphere to MAGA to Donald Trump—I fear Don Alfonso’s basic premise of Così fan tutte (and its insinuation of “women can’t refuse”) is making a popular comeback.”

It’s precisely this complexity that has drawn directors to Così over the years. Nicholas Hytner, the British theatre director who led London’s National Theatre for over a decade, set the opera in 18th-century Italy for his 2006 Glyndebourne production. Here, the colourful petticoats and elegant, shaded gardens are a facade for the seriousness and ambiguity of the plot: the finale leaves the situation unresolved.

Other directors go even further: Austrian film director Michael Haneke, famous for Amour and The Piano Teacher, highlights the artifice of the partner-swapping by doing away with the men’s disguises entirely in his 2013 Madrid production.

The French director Christophe Honoré ups the violence of the opera by setting it in Italian-occupied Eritrea for his 2016 Aix-en-Provence production, adding a layer of colonialist racism to the sexism. Men manipulating sexual power, Honoré suggests, engenders intersectional layers of violence. Audiences were warned of its “provocative and sexually explicit” nature and some viewers were outraged, calling it “shocking” and “defamatory”. It’s miles away from the fizzy, comic romp that audiences have come to expect — but it’s a testament to Mozart and Da Ponte that Così can support such disparate approaches.

“Così fan tutte invites us to confront not only the misogyny of the past, but its persistent echoes in the present.”

That’s why Così continues to fascinate directors, singers, and audiences to this day. It’s both comedy and tragedy, cheerful and dark, old and modern. Our understanding of gender norms evolves with time, and we can glean from the history of Così the evolution of how we approach gender and morality. Beethoven found the opera immoral; Goethe found the subject simplistic and the characters underdeveloped; Victorian audiences found it risqué. And for us in 2026, watching Così invites us to confront the misogyny of the past and the present.

‘Così fan tutte’ in the Age of Consent
written by Kevin Ng
edited by Jane Potter
podcast hosted and produced by Ashley Daniel Foot
podcast editor and associate producer Mack McGillivray
original atwork created by Barry Ekko

Kevin Ng is a music journalist and critic, covering classical music and opera in New York, London, and Europe for The Times and The Financial Times. He has written about the intersection of music, politics, and technology for Brooklyn Rail, VAN Magazine, Bachtrack, and Parterre Box. Kevin was born and raised in Vancouver, and has fond memories of being introduced to opera during school trips to Vancouver Opera.

Jane Potter holds an MA in Critical and Creative writing from the University of Gloucestershire, and loves telling stories in all forms: She lives in Victoria, and when she isn’t busy reading and writing, she can be found running a small business, baking in the kitchen, or weeding the garden.

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host of Inside Vancouver Opera

Ashley is Vancouver Opera’s Director of Engagement and Civic Practice and host of Inside Vancouver Opera. Boundlessly creative and fascinated by the way that art is created and presented, Ashley has guided arts organizations across Canada to craft messages and tell unique stories.

Barry Ekko is a Vancouver-based illustrator and graphic designer whose work features retro-futuristic poster aesthetics. He collaborates with cultural institutions—including Vancouver Opera—and applies striking, nostalgic graphics to contemporary storytelling. His style evokes vintage cinema and bold geometry, reimagining dramatic narratives through modern visual language.

Mack McGillivray - Producer of Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack is a multimedia producer, creating shows for radio and podcast. He is passionate about cultivating local community and a lifelong lover of opera.