Toronto – The Canadian Opera Company unveiled a stellar artistic line-up for its 2012/2013 season today at a press conference at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. The company’s 63rd season is a celebration of opera’s greatest masterpieces and features the return of works both long absent and familiar to the COC stage. The COC presents Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus in a new COC production, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’sLa clemenza di Tito, Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Richard Strauss’s Salome and Francis Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.
A dazzling array of the opera world’s leading artists will appear with the COC in 12/13. No less than 33 singers, conductors, directors and designers make their company debuts, including singers Anna Christy,Stephen Costello, Melanie Diener, Elza van den Heever, Isabel Leonard, Brian Mulligan, Franz-Josef Selig and Erika Sunnegårdh; conductor Jiří Bělohlávek; director Peter Sellars; and visual artists Jean-Noël Lavesvre and Bill Viola. Returning artists include singers Isabel Bayrakdarian,Russell Braun, Judith Forst, Alan Held, Ben Heppner, Richard Margison, Adrianne Pieczonka,Michael Schade, Ramón Vargas and Tamara Wilson; conductor Stephen Lord; directors Christopher Alden, David Alden, Robert Carsen and Atom Egoyan; and designer Michael Levine. All performances take place in the company’s home, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, and feature the renowned COC Orchestra and Chorus.
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Toronto – The Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, Canada’s premier training program for young opera professionals, welcomes four outstanding new artists for the 2012/2013 season. SopranoSasha Djihanian, soprano Claire de Sévigné, tenor Owen McCausland and baritone Cameron McPhail were among 10 finalists who competed for the highly coveted Ensemble Studio positions at the inaugural Ensemble Studio Competition in November 2011. They now join an illustrious program that, since its inception in 1980, has launched the careers of over 150 Canadian singers, opera coaches, stage directors and conductors, including Ben Heppner, Isabel Bayrakdarian, John Fanning, Wendy Nielsen, David Pomeroy, Joseph Kaiser, Lauren Segal and Krisztina Szabó.
Prior to starting with the COC in the 12/13 season, the four new Ensemble Studio members are finishing major projects at home and abroad. Montreal soprano Sasha Djihanian, first-place winner of the Ensemble Studio Competition, is currently performing Micaëla in Carmen at the Teatro Petruzzelli in Bari, Italy, with Lorin Maazel conducting. Second-place winner soprano Claire de Sévigné, also from Montreal, appears as Cleopatra in Handel’s Giulio Cesare with Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings Orchestra in April 2012. New Brunswick tenor Owen McCausland, who placed third in the competition, recently performed the role of Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni at the Centre for Opera Studies in Italy and is working on completing his bachelor of arts in music at Dalhousie University. Manitoba baritone Cameron McPhail, who is currently completing his masters of arts in music at the Yale Opera Studio, will be making a role debut with Yale Opera as Tarquinius in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia this spring.
Toronto – One of the most popular operas of all time, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, opens the Canadian Opera Company’s 2011/2012 winter season. The COC brings back its lavish 2008 production by director Paul Curran, showcasing renowned Canadian soprano Adrianne Pieczonka in her COC role debut as the passionate and fiery heroine. Italian conductor Paolo Carignani, former general music director of Oper Frankfurt, makes his company debut leading the COC Orchestra and Chorus. Tosca runs for 14 performances on Jan. 21, 25, 29, 31, Feb. 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 21, 23 and 25, 2012 at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts and is sung in Italian with English SURTITLES™.
Tosca’s fast-paced plot is full of romance and intrigue. Set in Rome in 1800, Tosca is a famed opera singer whose lover has revolutionary sympathies. In trying to protect the man she loves from a blood-thirsty chief of police, Tosca finds herself caught in a web of corruption, lust and betrayal and ultimately commits an act of murder. The title role is one of the composer’s most complex and fascinating heroines, fit for great operatic actresses. Pieczonka, most recently with the COC last spring in the title role of Ariadne auf Naxos, calls Tosca her “dream role” and has drawn high praise for her portrayal since making her role debut in 2008: “She was radiant,” says the Los Angeles Times, and “Pieczonka’s Tosca is the quintessential diva, rendering her signature arias with ease and verve” describes SF Weekly. Sharing opera’s hallmark “diva” role is American soprano Julie Makerov, whose vocalism and dramatic intensity as Tosca has made her “every inch the imperious diva, moving from flashing-eyed jealous lover to abused woman to penitent murder,” says the Florida Sun Sentinel. Makerov returns to the COC following outstanding acclaim for lead performances in 2010’s The Flying Dutchman and 2008’s Rusalka.