ize: 12pt; font-family: Arial; color: windowtext;">Bradshaw has a knack for bringing in top conductors for the repetoire, like Rossini specialist Will Crutchfield for this month’s Tancredi, and early music specialist Harry Bicket for Rodelinda next year.

“I have done a lot of Handel opera in the past, but now I’d rather have specialists like Bickett do it –that’s their world. What I would like to do again are the big Handel oratorios, with the sort of exciting forces that Handel originally used. ...
The early music movement has made us rethink - it has taught us a lot. On the other hand, from my deeply old-fashioned standpoint about some things, we’ve lost in the performance of Bach and Handel a certain grandeur - not heaviness, but sonority. The first Messiahs that we know about used enormous forces. There is something about the grandeur of a big Messiah which we neglect at our peril. Sometime I’ll dare to go back to conducting that repertoire, but the sort of St. Matthew Passion I’d do would be deeply anachronistic.”

One of the most exciting impacts of the new house is on programming. Bradshaw promises lots of Mozart. “I gave up on Mozart in the Hummingbird – it needs intimacy and quicksilver, especially in the ensembles. If I wouldn’t conduct it myself in there, why should I ask somebody else to?”

When I mention the Magic Flute from years back at the Elgin, Bradshaw gasps. “That was the worst thing we ever did, just because it was so incompetent for all sorts of reasons. Our Queen of the Night just made it worse. That Queen had won an international Mozart competition in Toronto. But she turned up from day one totally unable to sing the part - it was a catastrophe. We did try to replace her but the replacement wasn’t very good either...So that one got away.”

Asked about his favourite opera of all, he says, “If I had to say one I would say Pelléas et Mélisande.” In fact, Bradshaw was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters of France for his commitment to French music. Yet major works of the French operatic repertoire have been long missing from the COC seasons. Faust is planned, but Manon, which is one of his favourite French pieces, is prohibitively expensive. His next dream project is Les Troyens. “When you’ve done the Ring, that’s the next Everest.”

Canadian opera remains a priority. “I desperately think we need to produce more Canadian operas. Randolph Peters, who is working on Innana’s Dream, based on Sumerian legends, is enormously talented, and I’m very interested in what he’s going to do for us.”

Bradshaw has done a remarkable job of bringing internationally successful Canadian singers back to the COC. But he’s still trying to work things out with Ben Heppner, who hasn’t sung with the COC since 1996. “We regularly ask him. I think he’s a very great singer and I wish he were doing more here. I would almost say that if we did Die Meistersinger, which is probably our favourite Wagner opera, I can’t imagine doing it with anyone else - I think it would be a tragedy.”

If things aren’t working in a production, can he step in? “I think I should have stepped in with the recent Lucia, but I was so concerned with The Handmaid’s Tale. I would be more involved next time.”

“But once you’ve hired someone you have a responsibility to help them realize their vision, especially if you’re working with someone like François Girard, who has the most extraordinary ability to see with his ears. Oedipus Rex was such a crazy piece to stage. Once I made my commitment to François, and we got through the design stage, he needed my support.”

While Bradshaw eagerly offers productions with non-traditional sets and adventurous stagings – the imaginatively beautiful Rigoletto from 1992 comes to my mind – he avoids the controversial excesses of European directors like Peter Konwitschny. He even cheerfully admits to booing “very loudly” at a recent performance of Don Carlos in Vienna, where part of the action took place in the washrooms and foyers of the Staatsoper.

“I’m skeptical of concept-driven opera. If it works, that’s great. But the trend of directors reinterpreting an opera by saying, ‘What is my concept?’ and then come hell or high water making it work, is regrettable. We had a production here once which was so illogical that the stage director was trying to change the supertitles so that they did not say what was being sung.”

“I think the important thing for a director is to listen to the music, and then work from that. I remember an image in Erwartung, for example, when the dead body very slowly rolled, rolled, rolled into the pool of blood which had been created by the previous opera, Bluebeard’s Castle. The director, Robert Lepage, had come into rehearsal not knowing what he was going to do in that section, and he asked me to play the music again. We played it three times - there is no singing and no text, and almost nothing happens but a reiterated phrase. The idea of that body rolling came right out of the music.”

“I’m thinking, as we go into Il Trovatore, that in any operatic production, although you are dealing with big myths and passions, you’re also bringing the unconscious to consciousness. You have to allow the music to point the way rather than imposing on it a structure.”

Also upcoming this month is Tancredi. Over the years Bradshaw has treated Toronto audiences to a number of Rossini comedies. “It was important to do a serious Rossini,” he says. So, although Rossini wrote two alternative endings for Tancredi, they are doing the tragic ending. “Tancredi is such a very strong piece dramatically, and for me the tragic ending works.”

“With Rossini, you are unashamedly doing it for the voices. In the end, we’re doing this as a vehicle for Ewa Podles. I think she’s one of the great artists in the world today, a singer of fantastic vocal temerity. She takes all those risks, and she has remarkable charisma when she’s on stage.”

The COC is in the remarkable position of operating with a basically sold-out house. But future planning remains difficult.

“We’re at last a stable company financially and that’s taken a long time. But if we are going to make commitments down the road we have to have an idea we can pay for them. We never know if the money’s there, sometimes until too late. I hope the government keeps all its promises for us in the new house. But who knows?”

“To fund the arts properly is nothing. We have an opera company which works at an international level - we’re the only company that’s been invited three times to the Edinburgh Festival, and we’re being invited everywhere else. I know what I’m doing elsewhere in 2008 but I’m only partially sure what I’m doing here. We have plans, but I need some indication of what the federal government is really going to be giving us before we make final commitments. That’s our greatest problem.”

From my conversation with Bradshaw, it’s clear why the COC ranks with the most vibrant and interesting opera companies today. He is involved everywhere in the company, and willing to take ultimate responsibility for what happens, even on stage. His vision, patience and determination have already paid off with the new house, and he could even succeed where no-one ever has, and wrangle ongoing government support. He makes you feel that if anyone can pull it off, he can.

Soon after we talked, Bradshaw e-mailed me, thrilled that they had snagged Eszter Sümegi, who sang Tosca here two seasons ago, as their Leonora. Another crisis solved.