As a singer, I perform across North America as a soloist in concert and opera.
I got my start singing Handel, Britten, and Bach’s Evangelists (Lincoln Center, the Edinburgh Festival, Carnegie Hall, Toronto Symphony) and recently, as my voice has continued to evolve, my repertoire and artistic niche have begun to expand.
I’ve especially enjoyed the immersive creative work of premiering roles written for me. I created the role of Antinous, lover to Thomas Hampson’s Roman emperor, in Rufus Wainwright and Daniel MacIvor’s Hadrian at the Canadian Opera Company, and I’ll return to the COC in 2025 to remount La Reine-garçon (Bilodeau/Bouchard), one year after we first premiered it at Opéra de Montréal. My character in that opera is extravagant and evil, and I loved the space the part gave me for dramatic singing and creative physicality.
It is literally my job to
blow my own horn,
but don’t take it from me!
Reviews have highlighted singing of:
“uncommon warmth”
“smooth-as-silk coloratura”
and with an:
“elegant sense
of phrasing”
“strong, glorious voice with heroic, oratorio-style
ring”
“A voice that balances tenderness and sweetness with power and urgency.”
It’s genre-defying, funny, and occasionally shockingly candid(!), and it’s been overwhelming to feel and hear warm responses from wildly diverse audiences: “impossibly beautiful” … “broke my heart wide open with the pure honesty, raw vulnerability and humanity of it” ... “I honestly thought this was one of the most compelling shows I've ever seen.”
My artistic identity has never been confined to just one corner of the discipline, and in addition to performing I also write and compose for the theatre.
Most notable in this arena has been the chamber-opera/cabaret-theatre solo show The Book of My Shames. I co-created this piece with director Sean Guist around my own words and music, and we’ve toured it across Canada in versions for piano, chamber ensemble, and orchestra.
PROJECTS
Some recent and ongoing projects, most involving a combination of music, writing, and theatre
A fully staged solo theatre show, co-created with director Sean Guist, based on my words and music. The Book of My Shames has been presented all over Canada in cabaret, chamber, and orchestral arrangements.
The Book of My Shames
For 200 days during COVID lockdowns, I created and posted daily art projects based on original haiku. What started as a simple hobby project quickly escalated into increasingly elaborate conceptual territory: time-lapse videos, songs, puppets, epic long-form linked haiku, and many, many craft projects. The results can be seen on Instagram @isaiahisaiahisaiahisaiahisaiah, and I sell prints of some of the highlights as handmade greeting cards, and in a photo book. The songs also appear in Let Us Turn Aside.
The Haiku Project
An unorthodox recital based around Robert Schumann’s Liederkreis, op. 39. The Schumann cycle is interwoven with folk songs, art songs, and original music on themes of distance and alienation, longing and return. This project involves piano-voice music as well as a few numbers with non-piano instruments that I play, and a fun four-hands piano duet. It’s a carefully constructed, colourful, intimate through-composed piece (just over an hour long) that works beautifully in small halls — we’ve even done this as a house concert.
The Traveller
Banned from
the Concert Hall
This wild project, commissioned by Victoria Baroque in 2023, has already been brought back twice by popular demand (once to Early Music Vancouver, and once as a Victoria Baroque encore). Based on a concept by Victoria Baroque’s Soile Stratkauskas, I built this raucous event for and with colleagues Benjamin Butterfield and Timothy Carter (tenors) and music director/harpsichordist Mark McDonald. It’s anchored around some of Henry Purcell’s bawdier catches, and it also features music from some of Purcell’s contemporaries, as well as some surprising modern music — all threaded together by a depraved common sensibility. I have never experienced so much laughter at a classical music event…
An experimental program built around Erik Satie’s Socrate. The movements of Satie’s “monodrama” are offset by work from other composers (including a few songs of my own) that shares its sensibility — a way of being present in the world that has been called ‘haiku consciousness’, and which I manifest here in a music-embodying physical language.
Let Us Turn Aside
My original translation and modernized, queer adaptation of Poulenc’s La voix humaine, set in a shuttered theatre during COVID. A semi-staged version was filmed for City Opera Vancouver in 2020. It’s a musically idiomatic English translation that I’m very proud of, and a piece I would love to produce and perform live.