Tell us more about Canadian opera.
The COC is actually in the top five largest opera companies in North America, and has very high subscription and attendance rates. The majority of our productions are either sold-out or come very close. And there’s a lot of openness here to less-familiar works: both last season’s The Nightingale and Other Short Fables and War and Peace from the season before generated a huge amount of interest. I’ve been saying for a while that Toronto is an excellent place to be an opera lover – there are several smaller companies besides the COC doing excellent and interesting work here as well, like Opera Atelier, Queen of Puddings, Opera Erratica, and Tapestry New Opera.
If your blog surpasses expectations, what will the blog be like/look like in two years?
COC's 2009 Midsummer Night's Dream by Britten
I think that depends very much on how the blog is received andwhat kind of content people enjoy reading the most, which is something we’ll get a feel for as the blog matures. One thing we’re hoping for is that over time there will be more entries written by people other than myself, both from inside and outside the company.
Did you get to choose the name yourself or was it a group decision?
A little bit of both, actually. I and two other people from the Communications department pulled up chairs in my office and bandied about a bunch of names. Some of the rejected names included “Blopera”, “Operog” “Cosi fan Blog”, and a couple of rather unseemly puns. We settled on the current name after consulting with an Italian-speaker who happened to be walking by at the time, and Parlando (another term for recitative) was born.
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Stop by Parlando and you can see costume sketches for Death in Venice, learn more about Sandra Sondra Radvanovsky, who will be sharing the title role in Aida with Michele Capalbo at the COC this fall, and noob rules for SRO crowds.
