Inside Vancouver Opera

There are few characters in opera quite like Floria Tosca: a celebrated singer, a passionate lover, a woman of faith, and someone whose world collapses in under a day.

Host Ashley Daniel Foot sits down with internationally acclaimed Lebanese-Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury, who sings the title role in Vancouver Opera’s new co-production with Pacific Opera Victoria. They talk about her grandfather, a village church singer know...

Maestro Jacques Lacombe has extended his tenure as Vancouver Opera’s Music Director for three more seasons. Ahead of Puccini’s Tosca, host Ashley Daniel Foot sits down with him to talk about power, listening and the music between the notes.

Jacques remembers assisting Leonard Bernstein in Vienna in his final year. He recalls watching Carlos Kleiber conduct Der Rosenkavalier and seeing Herbert von Karajan live. He explain...

Marion Newman is a mezzo-soprano, a teacher, and the voice you hear on CBC's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Kwagiulth and Stó:lō, born in Bella Coola and raised in Sooke, she spent more than twenty years in Toronto before coming home to teach voice at the University of Victoria, where she once studied piano.

Recorded in her office at UVic, this conversation moves from a piano lesson in a castle tower to a rehearsal at the Orpheum,...

In February 1948, an eighteen-year-old Jean Orr danced Giselle in Ottawa — the first full production this country had ever seen, with a full orchestra in the pit. She went on to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and decades later became a founder and the first president of Ballet BC.

Ashley Daniel Foot sat down with her in her West Vancouver living room, alongside Joshua Beamish, who has just founded Ballet Vancouver and opens its fi...

Stage Manager Theresa Tsang celebrates 30 seasons with Vancouver Opera.

Every performance you have ever seen at Vancouver Opera, every blackout, every curtain, every entrance, every burst of light exactly on the downbeat happened because one voice on a headset in the dark said a single word, ‘go.’

She says it hundreds of times a night. She has said it for 30 seasons across almost 100 productions. The orchestra follows the...

Stanis Smith has spent his career designing the spaces people move through — airports, terminals, thresholds. This September, he becomes Board Chair of Vancouver Opera. He's also a clarinettist who self-produced a chamber music album of Brahms and Nino Rota. He's the person who will tell you, with complete conviction, that Frank Lloyd Wright was wrong: the mother art isn't architecture. It's opera.

In this episode, Ash Foot si...

Soprano Jonelle Sills came into the world already steeped in music — her mother Desiree sang through her entire pregnancy.

In this Mother's Day conversation, the two of them sit down together for the first time to talk about gospel choirs and opera stages, about coming to Canada with nothing, about the voice Jonelle wanted to keep only for herself, and about what it means to watch someone you love become who they were always ...

Mimì is one of opera's most beloved heroines. Gentle. Luminous. Dying beautifully in a Parisian garret while the orchestra swells around her.

She was also, in Henri Murger's source novel, a fickle, materialistic flirt her lover described as being "wedded to a thunderstorm." A gadabout. Complicated. Inconvenient. Not particularly easy to mourn.

Puccini made a decision. You've been feeling the consequences ever since.

In this episode, h...

Maestro Jonathan Darlington on Puccini, broken batons, being mistaken for Richard Gere in Italian lifts, and why La Bohème will undo you — every time.

Jonathan Darlington led Vancouver Opera for nearly twenty years. He's since conducted at the Vienna State Opera, the Semperoper Dresden, the Paris Opera Ballet, the Royal Swedish Opera, and the Nürnberger Symphoniker, where he's now Chief Conductor. He lives in Paris — ten...

Today we are joined by the Vancouver Opera Orchestra's Principal Harpist, Janelle Nadeau. In this episode we explore the versatile and ancient art of the harp, Janelle's journey with the instrument, and the unique beauty of live performance.

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Episode Credits:

Janelle Nadeau - Principal Harpist, Vancouver Opera Orchestra

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host & Creator, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancou...

She walks onto the stage, acknowledges the audience, and gestures toward the piano. There is no one there.

Soprano and pianist Rachel Fenlon has spent the last several years doing something almost unthinkable in classical music — accompanying herself. Singing and playing at once. Not as a gimmick, but as a complete artistic philosophy that has taken her from Vancouver to Berlin to the stages of Europe, and to a debut album &md...

Nicole Lamb is Vancouver Opera’s Director of Artistic and Production. For the last few seasons, she’s been one of the key people deciding what you see on stage and how it all comes together, from season planning and artistic teams to the thousand invisible choices about budget, time, and people that make an opera actually happen.

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Episode Credits:

Nicole Lamb - Guest, Director of Artistic and Production at Van...

Veteran Canadian journalist Paul Wells joins Inside Vancouver Opera for a wide-ranging conversation about journalism, politics, and the role the arts play in shaping public life.

For decades, Wells has been one of the country’s most thoughtful political writers, known for his long-form analysis and deep historical perspective on Canadian politics. In this conversation, he reflects on his early days writing ...

Today we’re joined by Canadian composer Dean Burry, whose operas for young audiences have been performed across Canada and beyond. His works include The Brothers Grimm, The Hobbit, and today’s focus, The Brementown Musicians, an immersive opera created especially for elementary students.

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Episode Credits:

Dean Burry - Guest

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Van...

In this special episode we delve into the intricate dynamics of Così fan tutte and its portrayal of women. We explore the role of Despina as a voice of realism amidst the comedic facade and how the opera reflects societal attitudes towards women and relationships during the Enlightenment era.

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Episode Credits:

Jane Potter - Writer and Narrator

Mack McGillivray - Audio Editor

Ashley Daniel Foot - Producer

Barry Ekko - Cover Il...