Volume 21 Issue 9 - Summer 2016

understanding of the context in which he and SSM must operate. If he
does his job right, around 65,000 people every season, who make it to
Stratford for something else, will “happen across” SSM, and remember
the fact that they did.
“How do you plan for people to stumble across you and how do you
ensure that, no matter how long they stick around for, they go away
appreciating the scope of the whole thing and the deftness of the
weave?” I ask.
“It’s very interesting,” he says. “I am always running into people
who say ‘I didn’t know there was a music festival here’ and then I’ll
say ‘Well, did you hear the Andrew Collins Trio; did you hear the bluegrass?’
and they’ll say ‘Oh yeah I heard the bluegrass music down
on that wonderful floating stage, downtown,’ but they just sort of
thought it happened somehow.”
“But that’s the big challenge, isn’t it?” I ask. “Because your passers
through, your Stratford Festival attendees, even your SSM regulars,
are only going to get a tiny taste of it all, unless they are coming back
every weekend or staying the week, which I would think isn’t easy to
do given how busy the town is in theatre high-season.”
He pushes back a bit at that: “Well I suppose. But if you went to
the Edinburgh Festival, or Ravinia, or any of these places, even if you
come for the Stratford Theatre, you know, you don’t get it all at one
time. You have to come back, or you take your chance on what has
been programmed by some artistic director for the dates when you’re
going to be there. That’s the way it is, and as the artistic director you
have to understand that. My responsibility is to present you with a
cultural smorgasbord at any given moment, so that you can pick and
choose from it.”
The trick, he says, is to make sure that there is always a representative
mix of ingredients so you come away with a sense of the whole.
Beyond Concertizing: Stratford Summer Music is also becoming
an increasingly interesting educational destination, for public and
students alike, most notably its TorQ Percussion Quartet residency,
now in its fifth year, and a robust Vocal Academy which offers a jawdroppingly
fine ten-day residency to career-edge artists.
“The Vocal Academy is expanded this year,” Miller says, “with new
faculty – Krisztina Szabó, Nathalie Poulin and Alison Pybus.” Pybus,
he says, is a particularly significant addition. “We felt it was important
that these edge-of-career singers have guidance in areas additional to
voice. And management is something they need to understand and
have insight into. Alison Pybus used to be the director of the vocal
division at IMG. So she’s at the top of her field and will join [Michael]
Schade and Phillip Addis and Emily Hamper, and Howard Dyck who
lectures on oratorio, and Geraint Wynn-Davies who speaks to them
about acting.”
Getting in is via a rigorous application process involving submission
of recordings and CVs so they can be shipped to Schade, Hamper
and Addis wherever they may be; at this point applicants come in
from all over Canada, and elsewhere – “The furthest this year was New
Zealand” he says. “And we sent posters to every music faculty in the
country back in January.” It’s not a full scholarship opportunity but
the ten days end up costing around $500, with billeting opportunities
and/or housing in the nurses’ residence in town as options. “And of
course while they are with us they get tickets to the theatre and everything
else that’s going on in the Stratford environment.” The great
thing, he adds, is that most of those vocal master classes are open to
the public – “Alison Pybus will, for example conduct mock auditions,
and then spend private time afterwards, giving feedback and going
over each student’s promotional materials.”
Tellingly, the subsidizing of student participation in the Vocal
Academy comes from the community itself – a grass roots initiative.
“What is extraordinary to me,” Miller says, “is how the community
buys in. After all this time, living in Stratford, you understand how
important the arts are, not just for the pocket book but for your own
soul. Artists love to come here - 35,000 population, extraordinary
restaurants and neighbours. I’m having fun. One heck of a good place,
it really is. I am just happy to be lucky enough to do what I do.”
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com
Summer Of Our
Discontent?
LYDIA PEROVIC
A
peculiar thing happens each year around mid-May in the
largest, busiest city of Canada, the fifth largest North American
city: mainstream Toronto opera life all but shuts down, give or
take an intrepid indie daring a short early June run. And the season
stays shut until the latter half of September. This year there’s an exception,
a chamber opera at the Winter Garden in July thanks to the
Toronto Summer Music Festival, but it’s likelier to be a one-off than
a harbinger. Classical music lovers are somewhat luckier, with the
TSO working full steam until the end of June, though it too starts the
season late in September. Berlin, on the other hand, goes to the opera
until early August and happily returns to it first week of September.
Opera in Paris runs parallel with ballet until mid-July. London goes
strong until mid-July and effectively has no respite with the Proms
taking over from then on till mid-September.
Even regional European houses in small cities beat us in quantity
and length. The opera house in Liège (population 200,000)
has an eight-production season that runs until the end of June.
Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam (population 780,000) starts its
12-production season early September and dovetails with Holland
Festival on the other end to finish in early July.
What do the artists who make opera do in those four months that
Toronto doesn’t do opera? And how do they explain our long break?
Soprano Ambur Braid recently returned home to Toronto after a
Magic Flute run at the English National Opera in London, where she
sang a wheelchair-bound Queen of the Night, and subsequently a
very different, glammed-up Maleficent-like version of the same role
at the Calgary Opera. “Evil royalty,” as she puts it, dramatic coloratura
roles are becoming her calling card and one of her great historical
research interests: those who attended the Canadian Art Song Project
recital “The Living Spectacle” last winter were treated to a standup
quality introduction to the wives of Henry VIII before her exceptional
rendering of Try Me, Good King by Libby Larsen. She could not
confirm or deny if she will return to the ENO in the near future, but
I would bet on Yes, and on Verdi, the composer she’s starting to sing
more, including the recital with Toronto Concert Orchestra at Casa
Loma this May.
The voracious intellect whose interests range from Anne Boleyn to
painter Stephen Appleby-Barr to Wes Anderson to caftans (if anybody
will make them glamourous, it’ll be this statuesque soprano), Braid
will combine work, study and travel this summer. “I’ll be singing the
bitchy maid Dalinda in Richard Jones’ new Ariodante at the COC in
September, so my June will be all Ariodante prep, all the time,” she
says. She’ll also travel to Puglia to brush up her Italian, and try out
agriturismo (“And eat and gain my preparatory weight,” she adds).
“On August 6 I’m singing a recital of Rachmaninoff and Sibelius in
Niagara-on-the-Lake, two new singing languages for me, and will be
coaching all of that in July.” The COC rehearsals start on September 9.
We mull over possible reasons for the shortness of Toronto opera
season, and wonder if it’s still presumed that since a lot of people of a
certain class are out of town every weekend from May long weekend
until Labour Day that everybody else is—or that they’re the only
ones going to the opera. Opera tickets as a luxury item, opera audiences
upper middle class? Sad state of affairs, if true, we agree. “Even
in real estate,” she muses, “and in sales of clothes and jewellery, not
a lot of people with buying power are in town in the summer, so that
activity slows down.” The massive influx of tourists helps refill the
audiences of London, Paris and Berlin during summer, she says after
I bring up the European seasons. Is it about our habits, do we only do
culture October to May? “It could be because we’re so young. Unlike
Europeans, we are not brought up with it…And here, because it’s less
subsidized and more expensive to go to the opera, you don’t go as
12 | June 1, 2016 - September 7, 2016 thewholenote.com