To say that COC General Director Perryn Leech has had a challenging inaugural year is an understatement.
After a 35-year career working with companies in the UK and US, Leech took over the helm of the Canadian Opera Company in March 2021, right in the middle of the pandemic. With live performances out of the question for months, the COC nonetheless stayed active with a series of streaming performances, and a free digital membership in fall 2021. Those online initiatives were aided by a federal funding program that granted just under $645K in funding for digital infrastructure at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.
The COC returned to the stage in early March 2022 with the premiere of Ian Cusson’s Fantasma, an opera for younger audiences. We caught up with Leech as the company prepares for La Traviata in April.
You joined the COC in mid-pandemic in March 2021. How have you adjusted to a new city and position in such difficult times?
The answer is that it’s been a truly weird time. Running the company via Zoom until September 2021 was what everyone was doing at the time, so I tried to treat it, as best we could, as “business as usual”. But not getting a chance to physically meet anyone on my brand new team was another layer that took some getting used to. I’m happy to say that everyone was really welcoming from the start, and so it soon felt as though we weren’t actually working through little boxes on a screen.
Have you been able to form any impressions of the city, or Toronto audiences, despite the unusual situation?
Since I have been here I have tried to explore what I can, as regulations have allowed, but I have yet to really “know” the city the way that I like to – on foot, and just able to wander in and out of spots that catch my eye. Last fall, I was utterly thrilled when we had people back in the opera house for The National Ballet’s The Nutcracker, and so sad that the run was cut short with the emergence of Omicron.
However, just this month, the COC finally got to host our world premiere of the COC-commissioned Fantasma, at our Canadian Opera Company Theatre, and it was wonderful to meet some of our opera patrons there. I can’t wait for the opening of our spring season with La Traviata and The Magic Flute!
The COC took a prudent course of sticking with online offerings until 2022. As it turns out, it was the wisest choice, but was there pressure to attempt a return to the live stage earlier?
There’s always pressure, but that’s what managing a large non-profit brings. But there is also pressure to keep people as safe as possible and make good decisions based on the information that you have in the moment. I have a wonderful team and the support of our board of directors to advise and implement the most balanced plan in this fast-changing environment.
The COC received a grant to upgrade its audiovisual capabilities. It’s a given that, during the pandemic, it provided a means of offering digital programming. Will those digital efforts continue now that live audiences are back? It would be lovely to have a comprehensive digital archive of COC performances.
The grant provided us with a wonderful opportunity to expand into more digital offerings through improvements to the excellent facilities we now have. I am so grateful to our union colleagues for their flexibility this year in allowing us to maintain and, in fact, grow our audiences with through digitally streamed performances. We will definitely need to sit down together and ensure that we can continue doing this into the future; it’s opened up a whole new audience of people who are excited by and now curious about opera.
Now that live audiences are back, is there anything in particular you are looking forward to this season?
I can’t overstate how much we all need to get back to live performances and what a huge role that the arts plays in the healing process for our communities. Our artists have been in a creative desert for nearly two years and have been desperate to get back to the thing they love — and all our indications and patron feedback tells us that our audiences can’t wait to return. The first night back at the Four Seasons Centre promises to be electric.
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