Creative Team

Artistic Director - Jennifer Tung

Music Director - Ivan Jovanovic

Video - Kelley Mitchell

Production - Joseph Pepelnak

The ecstasies and agonies of human love, yearning for expression through the ever present third party of technology - our phones. The comedy and tragedy of our time, delicate and raw emotion.

New challenges to love are creatively solved in Menotti’s comic duet for two young lovers. The telephone is the third participant in a love triangle as the increasingly exasperated male suitor attempts to propose marriage. The Telephone, Or L'Amour à Trois, is juxtaposed with Poulenc’s powerful short opera which explores with extremely tender music the universal pain of abandonment.

La Voix Humaine is a technically demanding work for solo soprano which unforgivingly depicts desperation through one side of a fateful telephone call.
 
This new production was designed through wrestling with current 2020 issues with their myriad barriers to planning live opera, which is what TCO exists for. 'Recorded Live' in HD but without a live audience, we are pairing two short operas which have casts of 2 and 1, respectively. The Telephone is an English language opera which will be set in our 2020 pandemic times with the contemporary technology that has increasingly shaped our behaviour and our current societal reality. Poulenc [Les Dialogues des Carmélites] was very conscious of the effects of new technologies and La Voix Humaine will be set in the early 1930's highlighting similar feelings of the frustration with technology through time.  

Postponed

Nabucco

Giuseppe Verdi

“Golden harp of our prophets, why do you hang silently on the willow?” [Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves] 
 

The dynamic dramatic process from psychological and sociological states of terror to potent confidence in liberation. Inspirational idyllic contemplation and aspirational action. 

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Whether still mired in it or slowly moving past the pandemic in March, we want to be contemplating and celebrating Liberation. His third opera and first great success, composing Nabucco helped Verdi through severe personal tragedy. The Hebrew Old Testament’s universal narrative and expressions of longing for a Promised Land have eternal human significance. The solemn and inspirational choral prayer '"Va, pensiero, sull'ali dorate" [Fly, thought, on golden wings] is virtually an alternative Italian national anthem and was the first work sung by the Metropolitan Opera Chorus after 9/11. 

Nabucco is one of the 20 most performed operas in the world but it is infrequently performed in Toronto because of the scale and cost of a fully-staged production. TCO is able to present this opera-in-concert because of its commitment to having a 40 strong community chorus. 

Postponed

Cavalleria Rusticana

Pietro Mascagni

The love, betrayal and revenge of real people stretched to the limits of human feeling by real life. Intense and beautiful music.

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Great pathos and dramatic tension flow from Mascagni’s achingly beautiful score in this quintessential verismo opera about the fateful events that take place on an Easter Sunday under the Sicilian sun. After Turridu returns from the military to find betrayal, hot-blooded pursuits of love and jealousy spread, leading to the point of no return with inescapable acts of honour under the stunned gaze of the townspeople and the bewildered anguish of the young Santuzza. 
 
Our new production will remember that between 1951 and 1961, more than 300,000 Italians emigrated to Canada, primarily from the South of Italy, many of whom settled in ‘Little Italy’ on College St.

We will present Cavalleria Rusticana in Harbourfront’s intimate Fleck Dance Theatre on the Waterfront in the Spring. 

Tickets for our fully-staged production of Cavalleria Rusticana are planned to go on sale in early spring 2021.