Forgive the grammar, you get the idea.
So at today’s COC season launch there was an exchange that went roughly like this:
Alexander Neef: Any questions?
Bald academic dude in jacket and tie: I’d like to ask about progress on the two commissions (unannounced) to Margaret Atwood and [somebody else] and more generally when are we going to see a Canadian opera on the Four Seasons stage? makes unflattering comparisons to the SF Opera announcement yesterday.
Clique of Canadian Academic Composers: Here, here, rhubarb etc.
Alexander Neef: That’s become a ritual question so I’ll give you my ritual answer “When we have something concrete to announce we’ll announce it”.
Grumpy female: Claims that there are “many” Canadian composers who could compose something better than L’Amour du Loin (though mentions no names).
More rhubarb etc.
In principle I can see that it’s part of the remit of a national opera company to produce operas by its nationals though to what extent the Canadian Opera Company is a national company is well open to question. It only plays in Toronto. It raises just about all its funding there and it gets next to no support from either the federal government or the hockey channel which masquerades as a national public broadcaster. That said, I doubt one Canadian in a million could name a Canadian opera composer and if they could it would likely be one that no sane opera house would consider working with. So there’s a problem. No company can afford to give a seventh of its season to a guaranteed flop and no-one in Canada is going to pay for a vanity production by an unknown composer even if the libretto is written by Atwood or Ondaatje. I don’t hear solutions. I just hear over-entitled academics demanding that someone else throw away a couple of million bucks.
Rant over. Normal service will now be resumed.
operaramblings 
This wasn’t the bald dude, by any chance? https://twitter.com/#!/roberteg_globe He occasionally raises this issue in his pieces.
WTF, somebody actually said that “many Canadian composers could compose something better than L’Amour du Loin”? The livestream video didn’t catch that. Bizarre, and not a small amount sad.
It does look like it was Everett-Green. The woman who made the Amour du Loin comment was right in front of me and she wasn’t articulating particularly clearly but it sounded something like “I was at the original production and I wasn’t impressed”.
My sympathies are with Neef on this. It looks to me like the Academy sitting back and waiting for a fat commission. If there were a bunch of Canadian composers doing one acters with limited resources with small companies I’d be more inclined to listen. Sokolovic is the only one I can think of who is doing that. I’ve heard a couple of her “operas” as you know. I don’t hear the basis for a fully orchestrated three acter in her music at this point. At least not one that would stand comparison with work by Adams or Birtwistle or Weir or Reimann.
And I don’t think Sokolovic would care for such a huge scale. Though who knows, I’m sure REG & comp would argue “we never have the chance to find out” how many living Canadian composers really want to make a full orchestra + chorus opera.
There are a few small companies that commission or stage new work — I wish there were more, but the Toronto audiences are NOT clamouring for new commissioned works, sad fact of the matter is. There’s the Toronto Masque Theatre, The Queen of Puddings, and Tapestry. Worldstage sometimes does interdisciplinary pieces that could be called operas. And that’s it. Now I’d rather see this level of ecosystem grow and multiply and each of these companies move from 3-a-season to 5-a-season and more, instead of investing a whack of money into one big COC production once every five years.
I don’t think audiences anywhere are clamouring for new works. Some composers though are interested in working with smaller companies even if the big bucks aren’t on offer. Adams wrote The Flowering Tree for a bunch of anarchists in Berlin. Our “composers” won’t stir from their tenured university posts without cash up front. I don’t have much sympathy for them.
The more I dig into Bradshaw’s legacy commissions the more I sympathise with any effort to bury them. I think the last thing the COC (or anyone else) needs is a pseudo Broadway show based on the life of a Canadian poet.
..and of course, here we go… https://twitter.com/#!/RobertEG_Globe/status/159767584529584128