So the COC is set to release details of the 2024/25 season some time in late February so in the interests of tradition I’ll have a go at guessing what we will hear. I have to admit that i have very little confidence in my predictions as the combination of COVID and new management has disrupted old patterns and new ones are not yet very apparent. Even the sacrificial goat liver (see left) isn’t helping much. There have been two complete seasons since COVID. One featured five revivals and the other five “new to Toronto” productions sourced from other houses. COC commissions, new productions or co-pros were noticeably absent. It’s probably also fair to say that there was a distinctly conservative vibe to the productions. I’m not saying horned helmets and crinolines but it’s noticeable that the revivals haven’t included any of the COC’s edgier efforts.
COC 2024/25 predictions
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The COC unveils its 2020/2021 season next Monday so, as in previous years I took a go at predicting what it might look like. This year operaramblings has abandoned traditional predictive methods such as animal sacrifice and hallucinogenic drugs in favour of handing all the data over to Cambridge Analytica. That didn’t work too well as they predicted a new opera based on Brexit and Putin being elected President of the USA. So it was back to the methodology we data scientists call “small data” where basically we make stuff up based on far too few data points. Here’s what emerged.
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).
operaramblings 