Volume 24 Issue 8 - May 2019

GAETZ PHOTOGRAPHY
Liz Upchurch with the 2018/2019 COC Ensemble Studio
By the time the first round of taped submissions for the Ensemble
Studio auditions arrives, Upchurch will have heard a good number of
applicants already. She spends a chunk of her year travelling to vocal
programs and festivals. “By the end of a summer, I’ve heard between
50 and 80 Canadian singers from undergraduate level up, and several
pianists. That allows me not just to hear young people with a lot of
potential and watch them and be at the significant point to guide
them over the next few steps, but also to interact with their teachers
and people that they are with. So: there are no real surprises, honestly.
The talented people rise. It’s important to have that big radar.”
You can have a wonderful voice and not
know how to communicate. You’ve got to
sort of have it all and then you’ve got to
really want it. It has to be a calling. It’s a
very hard discipline, singing.
What is she looking for in the 130-plus submissions that they get?
“Extraordinariness. Beauty. People with amazing sense of message:
communicators. You can have a wonderful voice and not know how
to communicate. You’ve got to sort of have it all and then you’ve got to
really want it. It has to be a calling. It’s a very hard discipline, singing.
It looks incredibly glamorous, but the fact is it’s a very difficult life.”
The international success of Canadian singers thrills her, but she’s
not entirely sure how to explain it. “It’s a miracle. I’ve said it for years:
for a country this size, how is it conceivable that everywhere you go,
any of the major opera houses right now, you will fall over a Canadian
on the stage. Frankfurt’s now become a mini-Toronto, in a way.” There
are Canadians in Berlin, and Paris, and across France. Doesn’t it also
speak to the quality of training here? “Yes. When you have such a
plethora of amazing training, there’s not necessarily work of a certain
type for everybody,” she adds, and the singers travel abroad.
What about the training program, developed over the years, at the
COC that she now heads up? “I have a small army, basically,” she
says. Because it’s a large art form, it can be broken down and taught
in separate ways. “You’ll do movement in one room, you do German
diction over here, you have a vocal session here, you have coaching
over there, everything is silo’d in boxes. For the singers who’re trying
to put it all together, if there wasn’t a unified language, they are
starting to ping pong.” She is first and foremost a pianist and she plays
for all the trainers that she brings in, which means that she can see
first-hand whether this trainer is a good fit for that particular group
of singers. “It took me a long time to find this team. I have people like
Wendy Nielsen, and Tom Diamond, and Jennifer Swan whom I met in
Italy ten years ago, who’s an expert on breathing and physicality. It’s
taken years to develop a sort of language, an understanding, a philosophy,
and a method – a repeatable method. Sometimes we have four
trainers in the room. We’re very good at sharing who needs to go
when in the room, who needs to talk. The teamwork is essential. They
also teach them separately.”
The new Studio members are always introduced to the audience of
the noon-hour concert series as a group, but they say farewell individually,
in the Les Adieux concerts. Near the end the repertoire is
often ambitious. “They sometimes want to do big song cycles, and we
created space for them in the series for that. I’ve already spoken to
the incoming studio members about their Les Adieux concert. For a
Schubert concert like Samuel Chan just did, that is two years’ work.”
“The song aspect has been elevated during Liz’s tenure with the
Ensemble and that’s been a fantastic thing,” says Wendy Nielsen, the
head vocal consultant at the Ensemble Studio and the head of voice
at U of T. The two women did a recital together in 2011 in the RBA
and after meeting as teachers at the Ensemble Studio, Nielsen invited
Upchurch to come to her own summer program in St. Andrews in
New Brunswick. What is Upchurch after in a young singer? “She’s
primarily focused on helping them to develop their artistry,” says
Nielsen. “Obviously voice matters, that’s their instrument, but she has
a real ability to bring out the artist inside them.” And if that includes
singers or pianists who also compose, like Danika Lorèn and Stéphane
Mayer, she will find ways to bring forward their original work. “She
is very respectful of what each ensemble member needs, and aware
10 | May 2019 thewholenote.com