You may recall that Bicycle Opera Project’s film Sweat won a major award at the Digital Excellence in Opera Awards. The film is now being streamed for free at the Opera America website until June.
FWIW here are links to my reviews of the film and the show it was based on.
Two Canadian projects scooped first prizes at Opera America’s Digital Excellence in Opera awards earlier this week. Sweat from Jenn Nichols, Larissa Koniuk and the Bicycle Opera gang won the big one; “Artistic Creation”. What can I say? I loved the stage show and I loved the film. Well deserved.
The other winner was the very cute kids’ series Threepenny Submarine from Rachel Krehm and Opera5. This was joint winner in the “Noteworthy Projects” category.
So two out of four of the top prizes went to Canadian projects. Not bad eh?
The panel discussion follow up to the presentation I described in an earlier post took place yesterday afternoon. It was an interesting panel; a dramaturg, a lighting designer, a couple of directors, a singer, the head of a small regional opera company etc. They were all interesting, thoughtful and well, nice, people but what was clearly missing was anyone who had ever held a position of influence in a major North American opera company or even anyone of contrarian views so the discussion did feel a bit tame.
Yesterday saw the first part of Opera America’s webinar Managing the Inherited Repertoire. It consisted of a half hour talk by Bernard Foccroulle, formerly boss at La Monnaie and the Aix Festival and will be followed up by a panel discussion tomorrow at 3pm. I think you can still view the talk on Opera America’s Youtube channel.
We are starting to see full length, made for streaming content appearing rather than the rather variable quality, mainly amateur efforts of a few months ago. Here a couple of examples:
Opera America recently awarded a series of grants to opera companies for audience development. Most of these grants went to mainstream opera companies; usually “the big guy in town”. $35000 though went to Toronto’s Tapestry Opera. Yesterday I met with artistic director Michael Mori to find out what it was all about.
operaramblings 