Dangerous Mezzo Productions

My, how quickly a year passes. Tomorrow HSOW 2008 starts up — this year we have almost 40 participants singing in two operas: Menotti’s The Consul and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. That’s quite a contrast, eh?

Since I started the workshop (founded in 2004, first workshop in 2005) we’ve grown so much I almost don’t recognize it. We’ve come a long way from the nine wonderful people who sang with us in 2005’s Cosi fan tutte — tomorrow morning there will be almost 40 singers and over a dozen technical/creative staff assembled in the basement of the Dal Arts Centre. As impossible as it always seems to me, by the end of this week, both operas will have been blocked. We open with The Consul on the 25th, and Figaro on the 26th!

I’m so proud of this workshop, and I’m really excited to get down to work on my opera this year, The Consul. I picked it partly because it has such wonderful memories for me as a performer. I sang The Secretary in the first Consul in about 30 years in Toronto in 1996. That was a magical production for me and for my company, Opera Anonymous — a cast that included Adele Kozak, Lenard Whiting, Ross Darlington, Gisele Kulak, Karen Olinyk and Ellen Vesterdal, all directed by Ed Franko. I fell in love with the work then, and it’s remained one of the most powerful and potent operas I know.

Until tomorrow, then.