Neef brings a touch of Europe with standing room tix

Wow, who knew that hiring a GD from Europe would be so great for inexpensive opera? Starting in October, the COC will be doing $12 standing room tickets to "make the opera even more accessible and affordable." $12? So it's now officially cheaper to go to opera in downtown Toronto than it is to go to the movies. Fantastic!

Vancouver Opera creating a pretty cool position

VO has come up with some pretty great ideas over the last couple of years: Magna/cartoons, Blogger Night at the Opera, their video contest, and more. If fact, they've been one of my favourite companies to write about because they always seem to be doing something new.

Well they've just announced today that they're going to try to stay on the cutting edge of things by appointing Ling Chan (who came up with the Blogger nights, as well as being the person in charge of their Twitter feed and their lead blogger on their site,) to the newly created position of Social Media Manager. From what I gather, this means that she'll be continuing to create new ways to market VO as well as making her already active social media stuff a full time job.

I like it. I'm not a huge fan of "Social Media" as a concept general, (oh, the irony, it pains me,) but only because of the way that it's been abused by corporations as they try to stay"hip." Chan and VO have been doing a great job so far of staying on top of things without looking like my dad trying to pull of skinny jeans just because GQ says so. I think that they've picked the right person for the job - it's a tough one to pull off but she's done well so far. Here's to more great ideas coming soon!

Free Classical Singer subscription

Alright, I suck. It's kind of been a busy month and the blog's fallen by the wayside but at least I'm back with something good:

Classical Singer magazine, which started out life as The New York Opera Newsletter and was really the only place to get opera audition listing for a very long time (until Yap Tracker,) and who's forum spawned NFCS after some bad blood between some members, has a pretty great deal surfacing via their Twitter account: A free subscription to the web service.

By going to www.ClassicalSinger.com/onefree.php and signing up you get access to a number of things but most importantly the Audition Listings and the Magazine Archive. The audition listings are great because, although they're not as thorough as Yap Tracker's they are purely company submitted so you know when you send a package off to a company listed that they want to receive it. The catch is that it's only for the first month after which it's $12/year (regularly $52/year so there's that).

But for my money, the real gem is the magazine archive (which doesn't go away after a "trial" period). Here's why:

For a long, long time, before the Opera America Career Guide books (if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should!) everyone who was anyone who wrote articles for auditioning singers wrote them here. To be honest, most of it was before my day but in the short time that I've been looking through them, there are some really great thoughts put to paper from people who know what they're talking about.

Long story short, use the link. Sign up. It couldn't get any easier!

Happy New Year and the Top Posts of '09

Here's wishing you all an opera-filled new year. It's time for the obligatory end of year Top Posts blog post: Here are the top five posts of 2009 - This blog's first year!

1. Scores! All The Scores You Could Want - Free!
2. COC Chorus Audition Time Again
3. The Best Free Options For Listening To Opera Online
4. To Equity Or Not To Equity
5. Working With Living Composers

This site seems to do two different types of blog posts: The agregating of Canadian Opera news (for those of you who just can't wait for your Opera Canada subscriptions to arrive,) and some original posts with either original research or insights into Canadian Opera. I guess it's no surprise that the most popular posts are those that you can't see anywhere else - after all, you can set up Google alerts for content as easily as I can. I guess that this blog's New Year's resolution is going to be coming up with more original ideas for posts where either I find things that people want (like lots and lots of free stuff, or singing grants) or getting off my duff and doing a couple of more interviews, like the TSMAF post where they told me that not all is lost for their opera program (I still have my doubts,) or even the Battlestar Galactica/Vancouver Opera post where I actually asked VO's Selina Rajani to comment on the Twitter posts that lead to a BSG/VO opera rumour (nothing more to report on this yet, btw).

It's been a fun '09 and I hope you stick around to do some reading in 2010. Is there anything in particular that you'd like to see from me next year?

Happy Holidays

It's been a very busy month as I'm sure you've noticed in the volume (but not the quality!) of this blog's posts. Between Messiahs, Hanukkah, and this whole week, it's been a little slow. Things will pick up though after Christmas.

Let me wish you a happy holidays - posts will resume at a regular pace again next week.

And, because I'm a bass, and because it's my blog:

CD/DVDs of Canadian performances/performers on sale

Hey all, an online store that I've blogged about before, Premiere Opera, is having a sale where all of their CD and DVD sets are on for $5/disc. It's a fantastic source for CDs but a really neat source for DVDs as they carry a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't normally be able to see otherwise. Plenty of Canadian content too, with 60 or so Jon Vickers performances on CD and DVD, 40 with Heppner, a handful of COC performances and some of the old Vancouver Opera performances. It's worth checking out, at least.

Premiere Opera

note: I receive nothing from them for this posts. Just like anything I mention on this blog, I post them because I think that they're a good idea, or at least an idea that won't (in all likelihood,) bring you, my readers, harm.

It's not that I'm above such things though, it's just that no one's offered yet.

Vancouver Symphony turns down sham Olympic gig

Bramwell Tovey and some members of the Vancouver Symphony have turned down a contract from the Vancouver Olympics to pre-record music for the opening ceremonies that would have other people mime the performance, including the conducting. From the Vancouver Sun:

“My participation at the opening ceremonies was dependent upon my agreeing that music I recorded would be mimed by another individual and I regarded that as fraudulent and withdrew,” Tovey told The Vancouver Sun."

The worst part in that the explanation that VANOC doesn't even make sense:

"The artists and ensembles at the ceremonies will be performing live and all of them will participate in the recording sessions, but “some sections of the pre-recorded music will understandably feature a larger ensemble than appears on stage,” Atkins said in a statement given to The Sun."

I would sort of understand then why then they would have the whole VSO record the music and then have only some of them on stage, with Tovey conducting, if there were space issues, but there's no excuse to bring in musicians who didn't even play on the recording.

Good for Tovey and the members who refused to be a part of this. This Brave New World of "safe" performances is no fun for anyone involved.