RIGOLETTO THE ABDUCTION FROM THE SERAGLIO PROGRAM WINTER 2018 CONTENTS NEW YEAR, NEW WEBSITE! 5 A MESSAGE FROM ALEXANDER NEEF 8 WHAT’S PLAYING: RIGOLETTO coc.ca 20 RIGOLETTO AT A GLANCE 22 GET TO KNOW STEPHEN LORD Great opera 24 Q&A WITH ALEXANDER NEEF 26 WHAT’S PLAYING: THE ABDUCTION FROM lives here. THE SERAGLIO 38 JANE ARCHIBALD AND You can still find the same rich content and ABDUCTION media, but we’ve used your input to make some important changes: 42 BACKSTAGE AND BEYOND a contemporary look and feel w a responsive design 52 MANY THANKS TO accessible from any device OUR SUPPORTERS w find performances, Free Concert Series PATRON INFORMATION dates, Special Events, and Education events 62 all in one calendar AND POLICIES w learn.coc.ca — a dedicated online presence to explore the COC’s Education and Outreach programs, the COC Academy, and to learn more about the operatic art form! Correction: There was an error in our fall 2017 program. In the article about the Canadian Children’s We’re excited to share our new site with Opera Company (page 38), we stated that David Fallis you all, as we continue to make your online founded the Toronto Consort. The founder was in fact experience with the Canadian Opera Timothy McGee. Our apologies for the oversight. Company even better! Front cover: Inside a coaching studio at the COC COC Program is published three times a year by the Canadian Opera Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written GO SCENT FREE. consent is prohibited. Contents copyright Canadian We’re proud to be the In consideration of patrons Opera Company. with allergies, please avoid Program edited by Kristin McKinnon, Publicist and Canadian Opera Company’s using perfumed beauty Publications Co-ordinator; and, Gianna Wichelow, products and fragrances. Senior Manager, Creative and Publications. Layout by Gianna Wichelow. All information is correct at time of 2017/2018 Season Sponsor. printing. Photo credits are on page 61. CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY 2017/2018 3 17-1801 Canadian Opera Company Program Ad_Ev1.indd 1 2017-09-01 9:47 AM A MESSAGE FROM GENERAL DIRECTOR ALEXANDER NEEF Art that’s truly about something has a way of addressing us in the present tense, regardless of when it was composed. Rigoletto (1851)—based on a Victor Hugo play that had already been banned in its native France when Verdi selected it as his source material for an opera—was immediately seen as a problem by state authorities. As Singing. Verdi worked on the score, censors in Venice refused to grant the opera permission for performance and only allowed it to move Bidding. forward once the setting was changed from the royal court to a provincial duchy. By displacing the opera’s subject matter in this Cheers-ing. way—resituating Rigoletto’s searing critique from the very centre of power to a far-flung All in support of young province—censors sought to minimize the Canadian artists. incendiary nature of Verdi’s drama. hopeful voice, in so far as she gains what the $ But encountering the opera in 2018, in contemporary writer Rebecca Solnit identifies TICKETS 100 the era of #MeToo, invites us to approach in her book of essays, Men Explain Things Rigoletto on its own terms, those that elicited to Me, as a small but essential victory in coc.ca/Wine an allergic reaction from the powerful. By women’s ongoing struggle for equality: “The taking the opera seriously, in other words, one ability to tell your own story.” discovers at its centre a woman destroyed 6 p.m. not simply by a man, but by a world that Indeed, the brilliance of Wajdi Mouawad’s Cocktail Reception authorizes unchecked male privilege and production is in granting the opera’s female whitewashes it with laughter, or dismisses characters a new audibility and ownership & Silent Auction the worst examples of its predation as merely in the narrative: complex, fully human isolated phenomena. voices to share their perspectives on what 7:30 p.m. the ostensible culture clash of an East/West Ensemble Studio Verdi was far from what we would call a binary looks like from their lived experience Performance & Live Auction feminist, but with Rigoletto he reacted of it. strongly against this world of kings and jesters—a world with a contemporary iteration This deeply affecting production achieves in our own day, peopled with powerful CEOs an equilibrium of speech and music that lets and moguls. us enter into the profound ambivalence of Presenting Sponsor Mozart’s singspiel in a new way, to meet there If Gilda in 1850 can be easily imagined in a sense of urgency and wisdom that are as GRAYWOOD 2018 as one of Harvey Weinstein’s victims, undeniable as they are indispensable to our D E V E L O P M E N T S Konstanze in Mozart’s The Abduction from cultural moment, vexed as it is about who gets the Seraglio (1782) prefigures as a more to speak and who gets to be heard. Supporting Sponsor CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY 2017/2018 5 Date: Jan 10, 2018 Filename_ Version# COC171612_FWA_HousePrgrmAd_FNL.indd Client: COC Artist: JS Desc: House Progrm Ad Acct. Mgr: CC Trim: 6.5" x 9.25" COLORS 4/0 559 College Street, Suite 401 Bleed: +0.125" Toronto, ON M6G 1A9 Visible Open: -- process CMYK 416-323-3282 Safety/Live: -0.25" File Built at: 100% (1:1) DISCOVER OUR NEW SEASON OPERA TRANSFORMS HOW WE PERCEIVE THE WORLD EUGENE ONEGIN HADRIAN Tchaikovsky Rufus Wainwright In 2018/2019 we’re challenging ourselves to look at the fundamental human experience ELEKTRA COSÌ FAN TUTTE of love through an unexpected array of Richard Strauss Mozart works that have the capacity to reshape LA BOHÈME OTELLO our understanding of our hearts and minds. Puccini Verdi Date: Jan 10, 2018 Approvals: Date: Signature: Filename_ Version# Proofreader: COC171792_BTS_HousePrgrmAd_DPS_FNLr1 Acct Mngr: Client: COC Artist (build): Alexis Studio Mngr: Desc: Renewal Brochure Artist (edits): Josh Preflighter Supplier: Wellington Acct. Mgr: Caitlin Copywriter: Trim: 7.5" x 10" # Colours: 4/0 Art Director: 559 College Street, Suite 401 Toronto, ON M6G 1A9 Bleed: +0.25" 4 Col Process 416-323-3282 Safety/Live: -0.5" Client: File Built at: 100% (1:1) PMS PMS BY GIUSEPPE VERDI Melodrama in three acts w Libretto by Francesco Maria Piave First performance: Teatro La Fenice, Venice, Italy, March 11, 1851 RIGOLETTO COC PRODUCTION A co-production with English National Opera Last performed by the COC in 2011 Jan. 20, 27, Feb. 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 17, 21, 23, 2018 Sung in Italian with English SURTITLES™ THE CAST AND CREATIVE TEAM (in order of vocal appearance) The Duke Sparafucile Stephen Costello Goderdzi JanelidzeD Conductor Joshua GuerreroD* Stephen Lord Gilda Borsa Anna Christy Director John Kriter Christopher Alden Giovanna Countess Ceprano Megan Latham Set and Costume Designer Lauren Eberwein† Michael Levine Page Rigoletto Simone McIntosh†D Lighting Designer Roland Wood Duane Schuler Usher Marullo Samuel Chan†D Price Family Chorus Master Bruno Roy† Sandra Horst^ Maddalena Count Ceprano Carolyn SprouleD Stage Manager Neil Craighead^ Jenifer Kowal Monterone SURTITLES™ Producer Robert Pomakov Gunta Dreifelds * Feb. 11, 17, 23 PRODUCTION ORIGINALLY MADE POSSIBLE IN PART BY TIM & FRANCES PRICE, JUDY & WILMOT MATTHEWS, AND GAIL & BOB FARQUHARSON Bruno Roy’s performance is generously sponsored by Catherine Fauquier Lauren Eberwein’s performance is generously sponsored by Brian Wilks, Marjorie & Roy Linden Samuel Chan’s performance is generously sponsored by June Shaw Simone McIntosh’s performance is generously sponsored by David & Kristin Ferguson Sandra Horst and the COC Chorus are generously underwritten by Tim & Frances Price D COC mainstage debut † Current member of the COC Ensemble Studio ^ Graduate of COC Ensemble Studio Program information is correct at time of printing. All casting is subject to change. Performance time is approximately two hours and 25 minutes, including one intermission. Ekaterina Sadovnikova was Gilda and Quinn Kelsey was Rigoletto when this COC production premiered in 2011. ACT I: 55 minutes INTERMISSION 25 minutes ACTS II and III: 65 minutes 8 CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY 2017/2018 CANADIAN OPERA COMPANY 2017/2018 9 NOTES Rigoletto is an incendiary work. Its dramatic he has climbed to the top of the ladder of dog Darwinian jungle. Gilda is an image of there. The trump card he holds over the source, Victor Hugo’s play Le roi s’amuse, power by dint of his malicious wit. Mocked Rigoletto’s soul, kept pure and uncorrupted, men of his court is that at any moment, in was banned after its first performance at the by others because of his physical deformity, far from the soulless marketplace. Rigoletto’s full view and fully within his feudal rights, Comédie Française and not performed again he has achieved success as a brilliant mistake is in thinking he can neatly he could seduce their women and humiliate for half a century. Although set in the mocker. In his private life, Rigoletto reveals divide himself into these two separate them in the process. Renaissance, it deals with the inequalities of a positively schizophrenic new personality, compartments. When the barriers between the social structure in Hugo’s and Verdi’s sweetly sentimental in his desire to keep them come crashing down, Rigoletto Hugo’s play offered Verdi the golden own time. Written in a heightened melodramatic his daughter pure and uncorrupted by the unwittingly kills the thing he loves. opportunity to move beyond the mode, it is pointedly accusatory regarding the outside world. conventional tenor/soprano/baritone clichés abuses of monarchy. It is a nightmare about an In this production, instead of moving from of the era.