Comment (CBC opera broadcasts).

SUMMER IS THE OFF-SEASON FOR OPERA companies in North America and Europe, so about your only opportunity to experience live opera is if you are lucky enough to get to one of the many festivals on either continent. But if that's not in the cards this year, at least you know that you can spend any sunny Saturday afternoon near a radio and hear exciting performances from leading stages. It's a good bet that Saturday Afternoon at the Opera broadcasts are fixtures in the weekly diaries of this magazine's readers, not just during the Metropolitan Opera season but also during the summer, when the CBC treats us to performances taped in Canada and abroad. It's like having a virtual, year-round opera season--and getting a free ticket to boot. True, the view is, as it were, obstructed, but then again, it's nice just to concentrate on the music and the voices without any visual distractions. Recognizing the important role of these CBC broadcasts in our opera lives, one of the features in this issue takes us to the studio to meet Howard Dyck, our Saturday-afternoon host and commentator in Canada for more than a decade. An accomplished musician himself, he's had the rare good fortune of a career in which he not only talks about music, he makes it too.

Opera-lovers are also indebted to the CBC for its on-going series of recordings of Canadian singers. One of these--Soiree francaise, featuring tenor Michael Schade and baritone Russell Braun with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra under Richard Bradshaw--has been honored with a Juno award in Canada and also the Gabriel Faure Award from France's Academie du disque lyrique (plaudits, too, to the record-project's producer, Neil Crory, who is a frequent contributor to this magazine). Schade was the subject of a feature in our Winter, 1997, issue, and it's appropriate that Braun makes a welcome appearance in this one. I was fortunate to see both singers at last year's Salzburg summer festival, Schade in Die Zauberflote and Braun in Pelleas et Melisande. From the Debussy, I won't soon forget the fluent beauty of Braun's singing, nor his remarkable ability to effect director Robert Wilson's spare, eclectic stage movements. As Braun performed it, the death of Pelleas was both a triumph of vocal artistry and of slow-motion acrobatics that seemed to defy gravity.

Our third feature continues our discussion of the hard economics of opera in any season. Here we take a closer look at the growing trend for companies to band together to stage new productions. These joint ventures, which increasingly have involved larger numbers of Canadian and U.S. companies, are one important response to the double whammy of mounting costs and harder-to-find revenues. As Robert Everett-Green points out, there are some drawbacks to co-productions, but bottom-line considerations override these. And in the end, there is no reason why a co-production shouldn't be every bit as innovative and rewarding as one that an individual company can call its own.