Opera Atelier has announced its 2019/20 season. As usual there are two main stage shows. The first is a revival of their 2011 production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It runs from October 31st to November 9th, 2019, in the Ed Mirvish Theatre. It’s a production that plays up the comedy and the elements of the commedia dell’arte in the piece while pretty much eschewing anything deeper or darker. The cast includes Douglas Williams as the Don with Stephen Hegedus as Leporello, Colin Ainsworth, as Don Ottavio, Meghan Lindsay as Donna Anna, Carla Huhtanen as Donna Elvira, Mireille Asselin as Zerlina, Olivier Laquerre as Masetto, and Gustav Andreassen as Commendatore. beautiful Ed Mirvish Theatre. David Fallis conducts.
Those season announcements just keep on coming. This time it’s the TSO. Here are my top picks.
It’s that time when I go through the ultimately pointless exercise of trying to predict what the COC season for 2019/20 will be. In some ways it’s an interesting intellectual enterprise not unlike what an Intelligence Officer would do. What do past patterns reveal? What can we glean from published sources? What have prisoners told us? (No I don’t really interrogate captured opera singers tempting as it might be).
Here are a few more February items of interest in addition to those mentioned 
Jessye Norman is this year’s winner of the Glenn Gould prize. I knew that a while ago but I had no idea of the scale of events being arranged to honour the fact. TL;DR there are tons. So, I’m going to do what I almost never do, which is to reproduce the press release with the event schedule verbatim. Here goes: 
There are some interesting things coming up at the UoT Faculty of Music. On January 17th at 7.30pm there’s an opera double bill in Walter Hall featuring Toshio Hosokawa’s The Raven and The Maiden from the Sea (Futari Shizuka). Kristina Szabó features in the first piece with Xin Wang in the second. 
It’s recently been announced that Canadian soprano and snow shoveler Adrianne Pieczonka OC will join the Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School as its first Vocal Chair in May 2019. While my first thought was that a “vocal chair” sounded like something out of a Terry Pratchett novel, more serious consideration has convinced that this is a very good move indeed. There are a handful, but only a handful, of current Canadian singers who are enjoying as distinguished a career as Adrienne so she knows how the business works at its highest levels. She’s also a very grounded, down to earth, person so besides contributing to developing the vocal and dramatic talents of the GGS students I can’t think of too many people better able to coach/guide students around the snakes and ladders board of an opera career. Smart move Glenn Gould School.
There have been a series of interesting announcements about composers and commissions from the Canadian Opera Company recently. First is the announcement that Ian Cusson is to become composer-in-residence from August 2019. Cusson is part Métis and, readers may recall, featured as half of 
Here’s what’s coming up over the holidays and into January.
operaramblings 