“Toronto needs a second opera stage” is , in some ways, a very weird thing to write.  There’s no lack of opera companies or opera performing spaces in Toronto.  Besides the 800 pound gorilla of the COC we have a specialist “baroque” company, innovative indies like Opera 5 and Against the Grain and a surprisingly flourishing Canadian contemporary opera scene with Tapestry and Soundstreams.  We also have two very decent student programs and any number of companies competing for the “concert peformance of mainstream rep with piano accompaniment and journeyman singers in a hall of questionable acoustics” market.  So what am I talking about?  I’m talking about the lack of opportunity to see staged performances with orchestra of less known works, even fairly mainstream 20th/21st century works plus contemporary opera from outside Canada.  The COC seems to have settled into a pattern of doing one “modern” work per season for some definition of “modern” that covers anything post Puccini basically.  Given the need to sell 15,000 tickets per run that tends to translate into fairly safe fare like Britten and Richard Strauss most of the time.  I’m not grumbling (much).  It’s an economic imperative but it means that works as mainstream as Wozzeck or Lulu come around about once every twenty years at best.

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