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Edmonton Opera announces new season

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There were fears that the restructuring of Edmonton Opera two years ago would mean an operatic diet of the safe and over-familiar.

The final opera in the current season suggested otherwise: Donizetti’s marvellous but little-known Maria Stuarda will open in April. And any lingering assumptions are now demolished with the company’s 2016-2017 season, announced Saturday.

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The season opens on Oct 22 with one of the classics of the repertoire, Puccini’s last – and many would say greatest – opera, Turandot. That magnificent work, set in a mythical China dominated by the ice-cold princess Turandot, is on the grandest scale, and is always a major undertaking for any company.

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Turandot will be played by Canadian-born Othalie Graham, making her Edmonton Opera debut. She has specialized in Wagnerian roles, but has also made Turandot her own, singing it with no fewer than 15 companies in the U.S. and Mexico.

Calif, the suitor who eventually wins her hand, will be sung by Canadian tenor, David Pomeroy, who has appeared regularly with Edmonton Opera, most recently playing Hoffmann in Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann in 2013. The director will be another familiar visitor to Alberta, Robert Herriot, who directed The Magic Flute at the Jubilee last year. American David Stern, currently music director of Israel Opera, will conduct.

The sets and costumes for Turandot will come from Nashville Opera, but the other two works in the season are completely new productions, created in-house in Edmonton Opera’s northside facility.

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Robert Herriot is again the director of one of Rossini’s most attractive operas. La Cenerentola (Feb. 4 -9, 2017) is the Cinderella story, but retold as a marvellous, fast-paced dramatic comedy, taking a swipe at society’s pretentions and airs with, of course, the prince and princess story at its heart.

The music is totally infectious, and makes considerable demands of the singers. The Hungarian-Canadian mezzo-soprano Krisztina Szabó will take the title role alongside an all-Canadian cast. She was recently named by the Toronto writer Jon Kaplan as one of the Top 10 theatre artists of 2015, and she also appeared in Edmonton Opera’s Les contes d’Hoffman. Tenor John Tessier, a regular performer with Edmonton Opera, will sing the role of the Prince, and the company’s resident conductor Peter Dala  will take the podium.

The really exciting announcement, though, is that the season will end (March 11-16, 2017) with one of Richard Strauss’s most explosive and emotionally harrowing operas, Elektra. It was Strauss’s first collaboration with his greatest librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and is a retelling of the Greek myth best known from Sophocles’s tragedy.

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The opera is a psychological and musical study of Elektra and her obsession with avenging the murder of her father. It has never been performed in Alberta, perhaps because the soprano title role is one of the most demanding in all opera. It will be sung here by Elizabeth Blancke-Biggs, one of the most exciting international singers of the last decade, who once said “I obviously enjoy playing women on the edge.” She has sung Violetta and Tosca at the Met, and will being singing Elektra in Italy later this year.

Michael Kavanagh will direct, and the conductor will be the mercurial 23-year old Alexander Prior from Britain, making his Canadian operatic debut. He has already appeared with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (and will be conducting Bruckner for them this May). Elektra will, I suspect, stretch the orchestra to its limits, but it is wonderful that Alberta will finally get the chance to experience Strauss’s masterpiece.

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