Volume 5 Issue 8 - May 2000

45 MUSICIAN IN OUR M

45 MUSICIAN IN OUR M IDST Kelly Galbraith continued from page 45 way to help some one sing better," she says, acknowledging her debt to the discipline church choirs gave her. She longed, nevertheless, to have her own choir, where she could choose the repertoire and the singers and establish her own direction. In 1989 she got eight women friends together and established Cantores Celestes Women's Chamber Choir. "I knew where I wanted to take them, it has taken a while but we are getting there." The choir, which now has thirty-five members, prepares and presents four concerts with four separate thematic programs each season with an average attendance of 500. They donate a part of the ticket sales to charitable causes, and have made two CDs, Wassail and Bright Shining as the Sun paid We need a place to sing Cantores Celestes, PHOTO: STRUAN for completely by ticket sales. A Opera. She is also responsible third CD is planned for next for liaison between the Canadian year. She chooses her repertoire Broadcasting Corporation and very carefully, basing her other public broadcasters around decisions not only on the music the world. As we sat together in but also the quality and meaning her office at the CBC Broadcast of the text. Centre a fellow worker came in Kelly's day job is as a with about a dozen tapes from producer at CBC Radio Music, the Winnipeg New Music where she is part of the team Festival, which she would that produces Choral Concert forward to the European and Saturday Afternoon at the Broadcast Union for broadcast to about twenty countries in Europe. Another of her projects has been the CBC Choral Competition, the semi-finals of which will be broadcast live from the Glenn Gould Studio on May 16 and 17. "I love my CBC job" she says. "I am able to hear some of the best choral music there is, I can talk to the people behind it and my colleagues are terrific and very supportive." (Two of them, executive producer, Robert Cooper and Choral Concert host, Howard Dyck, are also among the ranks of Canada's elite choral conductors.) Cantores Celestes has two concerts left this season, the first, "Songs of Hope and Freedom, with guests, Sibongile the Spirit Healers of South Africa, takes place on April 29 at Runnymede United Church, the second, a benefit concert with the Cantabile Women's Choir from Kingston for "Out of the Cold," will be at Yorkminster Park Church on June 3. POSTSCRIPT: BEARS RE PEA Tl NG I BY RICHARD MARGISON have the privilege to be an opera singer who works on the international stage. As I write this, I am currently performing in Seville, Spain. In the last year, I have performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, in San Francisco and in Amsterdam -- internationally renowned cities, all proud to have first rate opera houses. In Beirut, in the midst of the chaos of reconstruction, one of the first major projects in the construction of a new opera house -- a symbol of the return to its former status as an important cultural centre. It is amazing to me that Toronto, which refers to itself as "worldclass," not only does not have an opera house but is debating whether or not it needs one! This is truly remarkable. While the necessity of specialized spaces for sports is recognized -- witness the recent construction of the Air Canada centre and the SkyDome -- there seems to be no recognition that opera, like sports, needs its own space. AlPiough I am not an athlete, I support the construction of sports facilities because they are part of a healthy public environment. Why are opera houses and concert halls not considered equally important? The issue of the "brain drain" has been mentioned frequently in the press in the last few years. But what of the "singer drain"? The opera gala staged at Roy Thomson hall on New Year's Eve proved without doubt that Canada has some of the world's great opera singers. They are respected and sought after by the leading opera houses, but where do they have to perform in Canada's major city? In an ill-fitted, inadequately designed, multipurpose hall, whose orchestra pit is so small that it restricts the type of opera that can be given, with acoustics so poor that many singers simply can't or won't reach the full audience at the risk of damaging their voices, and whose distance from the stage to the audience Richard Margison as Manrico in the CDC's I/ Trovatore, Hummingbird Centre for the Pe/forming Arts, April 6-24 1999. PHOTO: MICHAEL CooPER frustrates any attempt at theatrical intimacy. Renovating is not a solution -- constructing an entirely new opera house is. Canadian audiences and performers alike deserve the best. My fellow singer a and I are proud to be Canadian and want to sing in front of Canadian audiences -- we make performing at home a priority. However we need a real showcase, a hall that will allow us to perform at our very best, one whose stage will represent a goal for young singers. The Canadian Opera Company has been a major stepping stone for many of us who are now performing on the world's great opera stages. The company is regularly covered in the world press and is highly respected for its innovative productions. The COC, with its commitment to new opera, the hiring of young Canadian directors and designers, and the bringing together of Canadian and international singers, should be recognized as a national resource deserving of the best possible place on the world's stage. Speaking personally and on behalf of all my singer colleagues and friends, I ask all levels of government to work this out and give Toronto and Canada the first-class opera house they deserve. This commentary appeared first in the Globe and Mail, and is reprinted here by permission of the writer

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