As the lights went up on the first of three performances of new opera scenes at Toronto’s Distillery District on Thursday night, artistic director Wayne Strongman sent out an email announcing that he is leaving the company he founded 34 years ago.
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Strongman’s departure caps two years of significant accomplishments — including the premiere of a new full-length opera in Edmonton last season — as well as major internal turmoil at the company that included a mass resignation of the company’s staff.
Following the postponent of an opera premiere and the launch of an emergency $100,000 fundraising campaign last spring, Strongman abruptly took a leave of absence from Tapestry in June.
The final planning for the 2013-14 season as well as the summer’s composer-librettist workshops were left to associate artistic director Michael Mori, who now has the title of artistic director designate.
“It is very satisfying to hand over the artistic reigns of Tapestry to a colleague of like aesthetic and human values,” Strongman wrote in his short email announcement. “It is with great pride that I watch the work I began being continued with fresh energy and insight. Tapestry would not be where it is today without the able contributions of so many talented artists, generous friends, government and corporate partners, dedicated board members and staff with whom I worked during my tenure at Tapestry.”
Strongman has ignored my requests for comment on his and the company’s progress for several months.
Despite being run on a shoestring budget, Tapestry has international, not just national, significance. When the company really got going in the early 1980s, the art and craft of birthing new works happened on a one-off basis, where composer, librettist and producer(s) would bring operas to life in whatever way worked for each individual circumstance.
Very often, a composer would learn the art of writing a score on the fly — as would the librettist for the book. Once the work was done, everyone, producer included, would move on to the next project, wherever or whenever that might come along.
Strongman and Tapestry found a way to turn this process into an ongoing cycle that would help nurture writers and composers interested in the artform at one end, and provide a platform for workshopping full works at the other — a continuum that with Tapestry as with every one-off project anywhere in the world, takes many, many years.
Along the way, the talents of directors, accompanists, orchestra players and young singers were also introduced to the very special needs and demands of opera.
In the last decade-and-a-half, incubators like Tapestry have popped up in other countries. In the meantime, the Toronto company continues to encourage artists from a variety of backgrounds to explore the creative possibilities still waiting to be pulled and stretched in a 400-year-old artform.
Besides Opera Briefs — short operatic scenes created by bringing together writers and composers in a workshop setting — Tapestry’s 2013-14 season includes an evening of best-of excerpts from current and previous shows (the company has 30 commissions and premieres under its collective belt), entitled Tapestry Songbook, in February, two evening of multidisciplinary work in April, and the Toronto premiere of Shelter by Juliet Palmer and Julie Salversen at the Berkeley Street Theatre in June.
You’ll find all the details here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
