Opera to the power of 50 Manitoba Opera celebrates half century of high notes with classics from Il Trovatore to Madama Butterfly By: Alan Small Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Feb. 23, 2023 Last Modified: 4:48 PM CST Friday, Feb. 24, 2023 Updates

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Manitoba Opera has never needed a reason to sing, yet 2023 offers it an ideal occasion to raise the roof.

The company celebrates its 50th anniversary during the 2022-23 season, and the milestone reaches a climax Saturday night with a special concert of opera classics at the Centennial Concert Hall, including famous arias from Il Trovatore, the Giuseppe Verdi opera that launched the company in 1972.

The staff, chorus members and soloists who’ve grown up with the company and those who have gone on to international success have many reasons to celebrate.

Without Manitoba Opera’s appearance on Winnipeg’s art scene in 1972, five decades of sopranos, mezzos, contraltos, tenors and baritones might not have begun opera careers that have sent them to famous concert halls around the world and back again to earn bravos from fans at home.

Among those are Monica Huisman, a soprano who caught the opera bug in 1974 as a pre-schooler, when she tagged along with her mother, Anna, who was part of the Manitoba Opera Chorus at a dress rehearsal for Carmen.

“I can’t believe Manitoba Opera is turning 50 years young because it feels like yesterday that I just started,” says Huisman, who co-hosts Saturday’s gala with James McLennan. “I have a long history with this company and it feels like it’s gone by so fast.”

Huisman would join her mother in the chorus and would later return to Manitoba Opera as a soloist, performing in 10 productions as lead.

“My mom sang in the chorus for 27 years, so between the two of us, I joke we have 47 of the 50 years covered,” she says.

Without Manitoba Opera and its children’s chorus, it’s difficult to imagine that Winnipeg’s Michael Cavanagh would have followed an incredible career path doing almost every job with the company, including raffling sports cars at shopping malls, to where he is today, artistic director of the Royal Swedish Opera, a 250-year-old organization that hosts 200 shows annually.

Cavanagh was part of the children’s chorus during a 1974 performance of Tosca, and he was hooked.

“I felt like I was going to a party when we were going to the rehearsals,” Cavanagh says from his office in Stockholm. “I remember really clearly that energy of excitement, people laughing and slapping each other on the back.

“I thought I was going to a serious opera rehearsal but it was more like a big family barbecue or something. It was super-fun.”

In an instant, the mood changed considerably as the artists would get down to business.

“I remember thinking, ‘This is an intense environment,’ but in a good way,” he says. “The choristers, the soloists, all the support staff, the stage managers, they had a great time when they weren’t working and when they were working it was an intense time.”

Perhaps most importantly, without Manitoba Opera, Winnipeggers young and old might never have had the chance to experience classic works such as The Marriage of Figaro and Carmen, nor witness the power an opera star creates in the middle of an emotional solo.

Peter George began his relationship with Manitoba Opera in 1979, singing in the chorus for Turandot, the Puccini classic. He remembers how awestruck he was during his early rehearsals by soloists’ voices.

“Opera is a little bit like sports. When you see a great golfer hit a fantastic shot there’s a thrill. When you see a quarterback throw a perfect pass for a 40-yard touchdown, there’s a thrill,” he says. “When an opera singer hits a high note or sings that phrase beautifully, there’s a thrill.

“It’s a really athletic endeavour as well as an artistic endeavour, and for people who are passionate about it, it has the same kind of thrill.”

The company began with a bang thanks to Irving Guttman, an impresario who led the company from its beginnings, including in 1973 directing Madama Butterfly, Manitoba Opera’s first fully staged production.

He was an intense personality who would be demanding at rehearsals, Cavanagh says, but also had a keen sense of who could transform talent into operatic greatness.

“He had a great ear. He could hear potential,” he says. “He would actually hear what people could sing like if they were given the right chances and the right training.”

Among those he noticed were a young Tracy Dahl, who had her sights set on a musical-theatre career but has since become one of Canada’s top sopranos.

She started with Manitoba Opera school shows and made her concert hall debut in 1982 as Barberina in The Marriage of Figaro later that year.

She wasn’t an opera nerd then, but she became one later, a career that launched from the Centennial Concert Hall to La Scala, the famed Milan opera house, and dozens of famous auditoriums and performances in between.

“I didn’t have my heart set on being an opera singer. I was performing at the Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse in Side by Side by Sondheim at night and rehearsing the opera during the day,” she says.

Like many operas, Manitoba Opera has had its own upswings and downturns. In its case, grand moments on stage were interspersed with a financial drama at the turn of the century that threatened to draw the curtain on the company for good.

Larry Desrochers, Manitoba Opera’s general director and chief executive officer, says running an opera company is like walking on a tightrope without a safety net, and there were questions if the company could survive the budgetary high-wire act.

“When I came here in 2000, we had a staff of three. We had an enormous debt, it was over 50 per cent of the budget, we didn’t have our own space,” he says.

“Jump forward 23 years and we have a staff of 11, we have our own space. Not only do we hold the three stage productions, we have a lot of educational programming in schools. The debt was retired in 2019 and we (are building a) $10-million endowment fund for the organization.

George, who has since become the chief executive officer of the McKim Communications Group, returned to the Manitoba Opera world in 2001, joining its board shortly after Desrochers began his tenure at the company’s top job.

“It’s not unusual in cultural organizations to almost constantly be just about going out of business,” says George, who’s made his own unlikely leap within the company, from a chorus debut in Turandot in 1979 to its board chair from 2004 to 2011.

“Larry took over at a time when the company was really in dire straits. It had fallen on hard times. He was able to manoeuvre through the community and connect himself to people who could help us and he kept the opera company going.”

Manitoba Opera hits the high notes once again, on and off the stage, and Saturday’s concert will offer nods to its 50 years of rich history.

Dahl, who is often linked to the company, sadly will be among the singers who will be missed. A previous engagement with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra — she performs Carmina Burana the same night as the Manitoba Opera anniversary concert — means she’ll only be there in spirit.

Dahl is among several Manitoba Opera singers who are on staff at the Desautels Faculty of Music at the University of Manitoba, and one of her proteges, soprano Andriana Chuchman, will be performing at the concert, a link to Dahl’s history with the company.

“It’s such a joy to see my students going on and becoming my colleagues. I don’t think of Andriana as my student any more, she’s my colleague,” Dahl says.

Other performers joining Chuchman on stage at the concert are Lara Ciekiewicz, another Winnipeg soprano; Bulgarian mezzo-soprano Nadia Krasteva, who has starred at some of the world’s greatest companies, including La Scala and the Vienna State Opera; and three cast members from Manitoba Opera’s 2017 production of Madama Butterfly: Japanese soprano Hiromi Omura, Winnipeg baritone Gregory Dahl and Newfoundland-born tenor David Pomeroy.

Besides sections of Il Trovatore, the concert will include works from Turandot, Madama Butterfly and Roméo et Juliette, accompanied by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Tyrone Paterson.

The show will also signal the return of the full complement of the Manitoba Opera Chorus, which was forced to the sidelines by the COVID-19 pandemic.

For the next half-century, or at least the years while he’s in charge, Desrochers wants Manitoba Opera to continue striving for greater diversity, such as it did in 2018 when it cast American star Angel Blue to portray Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata.

“The role is not normally sung by Black artists, and earlier in her career she was told she would never have the opportunity to sing that part, and we were able to do that,” Desrochers says.

“The art form is changing, becoming more accessible to a wider variety of people and we’ll see more of that in our company and other companies going forward.”

It will continue committing to Manitoba opera stars, creating future opportunities in the art form in the same way that sent Cavanagh to Stockholm.

“Lucky me, I was lucky enough to be in a city with a company like Manitoba Opera, that not only did great shows at a really high level but they gave people like me opportunities to learn. I’m forever grateful,” he says.

“There’s just no way I would be here, doing what I’m doing if it wasn’t for the fact that I grew up in Winnipeg and Manitoba Opera was what it was.”

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @AlanDSmall