Regarding Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the most interesting thing about performing a Shakespeare-based opera here, is that the connection to Shakespeare is so much stronger than in a non-English speaking country. It's much more part of the culture, like performing Faust in Germany, where most people are familiar with Goethe's play, on which that opera was based.

I saw our production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Houston recently, where it was a huge success. Even though a Texan audience isn't the same as a Toronto audience—it was interesting to see how people approached the production, and it felt different from the way they would approach a foreign-language opera. The English-speaking audience seems to have Shakespeare in its genes. With A Midsummer Night's Dream, you have an English composer writing in English, setting to music one of the most well-loved and well-known plays in the English language, by its greatest playwright.

But this is not Shakespeare just set to music. It's the work of one great artist, interpreted by another great artist. The final result is something new.