This year’s Toronto Summer Music Festival reported a 28% increase in attendance over the previous year with the under 35 segment up 11%.  Obviously this is a good thing but I’m also interested because it tends to reinforce my view that the assumption that there’s no market for classical music in the summer months is based on a very outdated view of behaviour.  Most of us don’t decamp to the cottage for the summer.  The  model of the non-working wife taking the children to the cottage for the summer where father joins them on the weekend is right up there with the idea that schools should close for the summer because the kids are needed on the farm.

I think there’s a real opportunity for a summer opera venture in Toronto.  Maybe it’s where we could slot in our (missing) equivalent of Chicago Opera Theatre that does more obscure and/or edgier stuff than the big kids at the COC?  One can hope, I guess.