Throughout August, the City Opera Vancouver’s Summer Serenades series has been offering free outdoor matineé performances on Fridays and weekends at the Sun Yat-Sen Courtyard in Chinatown, Milton Wong Plaza in Olympic Village and Roundhouse Turntable Plaza in Yaletown.
Alongside the casual settings for these performances, the repertoire — which bridges Eastern and Western music, as well as classical, popular and avant-garde styles — aims to create an accessible listening experience. It exposes audiences to a different side of art music, shedding common associations with seriousness, elitism and whiteness.
Among the performers are UBC music alumni Yenny Yeeun Lee, Alyssa Nicole Samson and Dr. Wang Yuhui, who shared their thoughts on their performances in light of their own musical journeys.
All three singers expressed enthusiasm about the accessibility of these performances.
Lee’s duet performance, Donizetti and the ‘inis alongside fellow UBC music alum Spencer Britten, ran from August 11–13 and featured performances of songs by Italian opera composers Donizetti, Rossini and Bellini. As outdoor concerts became more prevalent after the beginning of the pandemic, Lee realized that they are great for “just grab[bing] random people's attention” — “a good approach to attracting new audiences.
This sentiment was echoed by Samson and Wang, who will perform Filipino and Chinese art songs in their joint set Manila to Beijing Direct during the last week of the concert series.
For Samson, the opportunity to leave the concert hall and head outdoors presents a “chance to bring the music out into the public in a space where it's uncommon to find classical music.” She noted that often “people feel scared to explore [classical music] just because it has this ... characteristic of being only for the rich or only for people who are educated in that kind of field.” Making the performance public and “[inviting] anyone to come and enjoy this music” can help break down those perceptions.
Apart from their visibility and financial accessibility, public outdoor performances also offer a potentially more inclusive atmosphere compared to a conventional theatre setting. Lee noted how standard concert etiquette makes audience members hesitant to applaud at inappropriate times, while outdoor performances “have less pressure,” so “they kind of just go for it because it's already loud anyway” — something she appreciates because “when the audience claps, it just gives so much energy to the performers.”
For all three interviewees, the visibility of the performances offers potential to achieve more than simply promoting this style of music. As racialized artists of colour in a traditionally white-European dominated field, they are aiming to promote cultural diversity in terms of repertoire and performers.
Samson, who is Filipino-Canadian, will perform a program consisting of Kundiman, a genre of romantic Tagalog art songs similar to German Lieder in musical form and lyrical content.
As someone who can understand but not speak Tagalog, Samson finds that “being able to sing it is really important to me, because it allows me to connect to a part of my heritage that I haven't been able to connect to.” She notes that she “never really gets to explore [her] heritage and [her] culture in the standard repertoire, opera series or concerts,” and only had peripheral familial exposure to Filipino music growing up.
Samson also discussed the significance the performance will have for the wider community. After “centuries of feeling like you don't fit in,” she believes that “hearing the music of the Philippines in Canada” provides an unprecedented, exciting level of exposure to Filipino music for “not just the Filipino community, but the world in general.”
“If I was on the street, and I heard the music of my country in the language that my family speaks just being sung on the street, that would be so exciting to me, because I don't [normally] hear it,” said Samson. As many Kundiman have been remade into pop songs or the opening credits for soap operas, Samson expects this to be a simultaneously novel and familiar listening experience for Filipinos in the audience, who may be hearing well-known tunes in their original art song form for the first time.
Wang, who said that he had never seen anyone else give public performances of Chinese art songs since he first arrived in Canada eight years ago, expressed a similar enthusiasm at the opportunity to bring this music to new audiences. Born in Chengdu, Wang wrote his doctoral thesis at UBC on introducing Chinese art song pedagogy to Western universities, and has a longstanding passion for promoting the genre. He expressed disappointment that most people’s understanding of ‘Chinese music’ does not extend past folk songs or operatic traditions. However, his past experiences introducing people to Chinese art songs made him confident in audiences’ openness to novel musical styles.
During this performance, Wang aims to provide a broad range of songs — from intimately familiar classics to avant-garde contemporary works — that will appeal to older first-generation immigrants, non-Chinese listeners and younger audiences. Wang recalls performing for “老爺爺” (old grandpas), who “come to [him] and say, ‘I knew this piece when I was young.’”
For Lee, who presented pieces from the Western canon as a Korean-born mezzo-soprano, her performance doubled as an assertion that she belongs in an opera world that still excludes and discriminates against Asian performers. She noted that “there is a lack of diversity of models in opera [and] it’s really hard to find an Asian mezzo-soprano in big theatres” — in Lee’s experience, she has often been seen as “too petite” to play the more assertive roles that typically sit in that vocal range.
“You think that, ‘I can be the next Carmen,’ ‘I can be the next Delilah,’ but then when you are actually in the scene when you're auditioning, they tell you, ‘I think you can be Suzuki from Madame Butterfly, but I cannot really imagine you being sexy Carmen,’” said Lee.
Lee appreciates new, contemporary operas which tend to have more inclusive casting, and strongly supports creating new works “where more diverse talents can be shown.” However, she finds the exclusionary reality of casting for classical operas "really sad," as the roles in them are the ones she grew up watching when [she] was a student.
Lee tries to use social media to promote a more diverse and inclusive view of opera singers, and believes that presenting these kinds of performances will help “deliver more of this diversity and variety in opera” to the public.