News

The Canadian Opera Company is usually tight-lipped about its plans beyond the current season. I thought the tradition would continue under Alexander Neef, the diplomatic young German who took over as the Toronto company's general director last year.

Boy, was I wrong. Neef's blog on the COC website is chock full of hints, tips and informal announcements about his agenda for future seasons, including the following:

• Canadian star tenor Ben Heppner, who hasn't appeared in a dramatic role with the COC since 1996, is lined up for “confirmed projects” (note the plural) with the company. Neef doesn't name the roles, but clues in his blog, and comments he has made elsewhere, tell me that Parsifal and Tristan are pretty good bets.
• The COC will give the North American premiere of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin , in a co-production with the English National Opera and Flemish Opera. The shows will be conducted by COC music director Johannes Debus and directed by Daniele Finzi Pasca, best known for his circus productions for the likes of Cirque du Soleil.
• Two Gluck operas, Orphéeet Eurydice and Iphigénie en Tauride , are coming up for COC productions. The superb American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham will star in one of them, probably Iphigénie.
• Two eminent American singers, soprano Catherine Malfitano and baritone Dale Duesing, will work with the COC in coming seasons, not as singers but as stage directors.

Neef began his blog last November, and wrote sparsely till after the COC season ended in May. The flow of tidbits about future plans begins when he sets off for a summer working trip to Europe.

“He's interested in giving some hints along the way,” says COC director of public relations Claudine Domingue, who usually tries to keep the lid on insider tips about the company's plans. “I think he enjoys letting people see a little behind the scenes.”

Neef's prolific July entries are sprinkled with names of the eminent singers, directors and talent agents he encounters at lunch or at performances in Paris and London. The name-dropping is often followed by a more or less direct statement of that person's role in future COC seasons.

You often have to fill in a few blanks to get what he's hinting at. My guesses as to the Heppner roles are based on Neef's account of the tenor's performance as Tristan in Paris in September. Neef recalls being at the Paris Opera when Heppner sang the role there in 2005, and says “I realized what I have been missing with all other singers ever since.” As for Parsifal, Neef has made no secret of his desire to stage its COC premiere. Heppner made his much-awaited debut in the title role in 2006 at the Met.

In a September entry, Neef writes that “a very famous international opera star, based in Toronto, will make her COC debut” in a new production directed by COC veteran Tim Albery. Neef could be referring to Measha Brueggergosman, who has yet to sing a staged production with the COC; but she's mainly a concert singer, with very few stage roles to her credit. The only other possible candidate would be soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, who lives in Oakville and whose international career has exploded since I heard her steal the show in Puccini's Suor Angelica at the Los Angeles Opera last year.

As for the opera, Neef says that Albery will work on a “piece that has been more corrupted by its fame than many others and often received a shabby and superficial treatment.” That doesn't really sound like any of the several big Verdi roles in Radvanovsky's repertoire (her specialty is Il Trovatore 's Leonora), but it could describe Tosca, which she will be singing at the Met two years from now.

Neef's post about his plans to bring Gluck's music to the COC doesn't mention the names of the operas; he told me those when I saw him last weekend at an Opera Atelier performance of Iphigénie en Tauride . Susan Graham, who is named in the blog as a definite catch, has just had a huge success singing Iphigénie at the Met and three other major houses, so I expect she'll sing it in Toronto too.

Neef put Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin on his wish-list in an interview with me last year, and his blog leaves no doubt that the COC will reprise the production premiered in July by the English National Opera (“one of our most important partners for future endeavours”). Anthony Tommasini wrote a favourable review of the show in The New York Times; the British critics were less enthusiastic. L'Amour de Loin will be the COC's first main-stage opera by a living composer since Hans Werner Henze's Venus und Adonis in 2001.

Neef's blog isn't all opera. He also visits art galleries, writes thumbnail restaurant reviews, and says he plans to get through Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (in French). Stay tuned for his thoughts on Vinteuil, the fictional composer of “ la petite phrase ” that obsesses Proust's Swann.