My BlackBerry let me down this morning. Even though I had set the alarm, it didn't sound and for the first time ever I missed a flight.

Luckily, I live close enough to the Island Airport, could rush there within half an hour for the next flight to Montreal, and I made it for my lunch in the city with only a five-minute delay.

My reason to rush to Montreal was to see the filmmaker and director François Girard, whom you might know as the director of the COC productions of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex and Wagner's Siegfried. With him as director and with a European and an American company as our partners, we will embark on producing an opera that hasn't been performed in Canada since 1905 and (consequently) never by the COC. You will probably have to wait until 2015 or later to see it reach the stage of the Four Seasons Centre, but it will be worth the wait. François has a fascinating concept and I am very excited to be part of the project.

In the further future there might even be another project with François, a work from a very different period, which would explore Toronto's past in a very unique way. This would put another piece on stage that the COC has never performed before.

As you can see, my day improved a lot from the really bad start this morning and now I'm already back home in Toronto for a full day at the office tomorrow.