Inside Vancouver Opera

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 explains why Karajan compared conducting to riding a horse over a fence, and why the perfect orchestra is one that can sing.

We also get into the tritone hidden in Scarpia’s three chords and why the “easiest” Puccini is the hardest to conduct. There’s an unexpected lesson in silence from The Manhattan Transfer, and Jacques’s theory of the “talented audience.”

In this episode:
– Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, and the conductor as a figure of authority– Karajan, Kleiber and Bernstein: three kinds of genius– Tosca, Joseph Kerman’s “shabby little shocker,” and Jacques’s first opera LP– The devil in music: Scarpia’s chords and Puccini’s leitmotifs– Wagner’s On Conducting and finding the singing line– How to conduct silence– What age gives a conductor– Building sound from the bottom up: the organist’s ear

See it live:
Tosca, October 24 – November 1, 2026, Queen Elizabeth Theatre
La Traviata, April 24 – May 2, 2027
Tickets: vancouveropera.ca

00:00 — The conductor is not a king

02:06 — Three more seasons & an orchestra that can sing

04:39 — Karajan, Kleiber and Bernstein

07:37 — What Jacques learned from Lenny

09:25 — Tosca and the "shabby little shocker"

13:05 — Three chords and the devil

15:03 — Wagner and the art of listening

16:53 — How do you conduct silence?

20:01 — What age gives a conductor

21:54 — From the bottom up: the Lacombe sound

23:14 — Looking ahead: Tosca and La Traviata

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, where the late Bramwell Tovey stopped to ask her how she wanted to sing his music. Marion talks about the "quiet choir" of family who made her a musician, a childhood homeschooled on Vancouver Island, why leaders need to learn how to apologize and mean it, why she no longer capitalizes the word reconciliation, and the name she carries: Nege'ga, she who is like a mountain.

Marion served as a senior advisor on Vancouver Opera's report on Indigenous mentorship in opera, co-authored by Ashley Daniel Foot and Asitha Tennekoon, out later this fall. Midway through, host Ashley Daniel Foot asks her what an institution owes people after it asks them to talk.

Chapter markers (from the recording)

• 00:00 — "Stop talking. Just pay us."
• 02:50 — Ancestors, and where the fight comes from
• 04:18 — Welcome
• 05:57 — The first music: potlatch, the kitchen radio, and a grandparents' piano
• 10:11 — Mary Jackson and the tower room at Craigdarroch
• 12:17 — From pianist to singer
• 14:06 — The quiet choir, and being homeschooled
• 17:56 — Teaching where she once studied
• 20:28 — Bramwell Tovey: "How would you like to do this?"
• 23:17 — What an institution owes the people it asks to talk
• 27:48 — The problem with the repertoire
• 29:31 — On the word "reconciliation"
• 32:02 — Ancestors, Nulis, and the big house
• 38:28 — Nege'ga: she who is like a mountain

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 first season this month. Jean describes choosing to die by the sword rather than of a heart attack, because at eighteen she wanted to die dramatically. She remembers touring Nova Scotia with no backdrop and running around the outside of the theatre mid-performance. And she explains, almost in passing, the night she put her mortgage-free house up as collateral so a choreographer would be paid and the show could go on.

Josh had never heard any of it. You can hear him find out.

Ballet Vancouver's Balanchine's Apollo & Other Works plays the Vancouver Playhouse September 11 and 12, with pre-show talks before all three performances. The season closes with @giselle, May 13–15, 2027. balletvancouver.com

Chapters

• 00:00 — Two people, forty years apart
• 01:04 — Highland dancing on the prairies
• 01:34 — A land grant, a motorcycle, and the Qu'Appelle Valley
• 02:04 — "My absolute lifesaver of life"
• 03:00 — Josh starts tap dancing at two
• 04:00 — Nesta Toumine and the Ballets Russes
• 04:47 — Ottawa, February 1948
• 06:35 — Nobody called it the first — until Toronto did
• 07:16 — "I wanted to die dramatically"
• 08:49 — Josh hears the story for the first time
• 10:33 — Winnipeg, no bus fare, and Pincher Creek
• 12:54 — Building Ballet BC with David Y. H. Lui
• 14:30 — The car raffle, and the house
• 16:12 — The 2026 equivalent
• 17:13 — Is dance the most fragile art?
• 17:45 — Balanchine's Apollo, and Heather Ogden comes home
• 19:08 — Seventy-eight years apart

Guests
Jean Orr — dancer; founder and first president of Ballet BC
Joshua Beamish — choreographer; founder and Artistic Director, Ballet Vancouver

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 conductor, everyone else in the building follows her. Today we are joined by Stage Manager, Theresa Tsang.

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Episode Credits:

Theresa Sang - Stage Manager, Vancouver Opera

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host & Creator, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

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 sits down with Stanis to talk about standing-room tickets at Covent Garden, what it takes to convert a first-time opera-goer into a lifelong addict, and why he built a 50-piece art program into the bones of the new $4.2 billion Terminal 6 at JFK. They also discuss Vancouver Opera's upcoming season, the state of the art form in 2026, and the Vancouver Cultural Precinct — an initiative that could transform the city's performing arts landscape within a decade.

A conversation about art, architecture, and what happens when someone walks into a room and feels something they weren't expecting.

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 going to be.

Bring a tissue.

Today we're joined by a legendary member of the Vancouver Opera Chorus, Don Wright. We discuss his family's legacy, the life of a chorus singer, the importance of opera in education, and memorable moments from a lifetime in the art form.

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Episode Credits:

Don Wright - Chorister, Vancouver Opera Chorus

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host & Creator, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera

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, host Ashley Daniel Foot sits down with Vancouver Opera's researcher and editor Jane Potter — the creative force behind our composer series for the past three years — to pull apart the opera everyone thinks they know. They cover the missing act that explains Rodolfo's jealous rage. The real woman Puccini erased to create his heroine. The two source characters — Francine and Mademoiselle Mimì — whose DNA got merged into the figure we recognize. The Viscount nobody talks about.

They also go deep on Kevin Ng's essay Beautiful Deaths: How La Bohème Transformed Tuberculosis into Art — tracking how consumption went from epidemic catastrophe to aristocratic beauty standard, from Lord Byron to Rent to Moulin Rouge!, and how Puccini wrote the disease's physical reality directly into the music itself.

Plus: the 1896 premiere critics who called it "a momentary error" and suggested Puccini return to the straight road before further damage was done. The audience that sold out 24 performances that same month. And Benjamin Britten, who in 1951 delivered the greatest backhanded opera critique of the 20th century.

La Bohème runs April 25 through May 3 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets at vancouveropera.ca. Kevin Ng's essay Beautiful Deaths is available now on the Inside Vancouver Opera Substack.

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 minutes from the neighbourhood where La Bohème is actually set. And he keeps coming back to Vancouver.

This week he's back in the pit at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for La Bohème — Puccini's love story about young artists in Paris trying to stay warm, fall in love, and stay alive. It's the fastest-selling production in Vancouver Opera's sixty-six year history.

In this conversation, Ashley Daniel Foot asks Darlington what's actually going through his mind in the sixteen bars before the curtain rises, how the streets of Vancouver have changed the way he hears Puccini, why he still wants to conduct one specific opera just to erase a humiliation from thirty years ago, and what it felt like to open Sweeney Todd surrounded by a large metal contraption on stage while trying to frighten the audience — a task made easier, he admits, by the fact that he was already terrified himself.

Plus: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Carlos Kleiber, Mirella Freni, four piccolos playing fortissimo, a Vancouver harpsichord builder who makes his batons by hand, and the pre-show meal of champions.

La Bohème runs April 25 to May 3 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre. Tickets at vancouveropera.ca.

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.

Full Article

Episode Credits:

Janelle Nadeau - Principal Harpist, Vancouver Opera Orchestra

Ashley Daniel Foot - Host & Creator, Inside Vancouver Opera

Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera