You ask a fascinating question, there…
The Canadian Children’s Opera Company has its roots in what used to be called the Children’s Chorus. There are a number of shows where a chorus of children is called for - off the top of my head, “Boheme”, “Carmen”, “Rosenkavalier”, and “Tosca” spring to mind, and there are a couple of dozen others as well.
There are also a surprising number of operas in the standard rep that call for a child soloist, however briefly. In “Boheme”, Act II, a whiny voiced child has to sing 'Vo una tromba, un cavalin", ideally on pitch enough that we recognize that the kid is singing the same ‘melody’ that Parpignol the toy monger sang as he came onstage about 30 bars earlier. There’s a shepherd boy in Act III of “Tosca”, there’s the bratty kid in “Gianni Schicchi”, there’s the substantial role of Yniold in “Peléas et Mélisande”, and I’m sure I can add more to the list if I sit down and think about it. Sometimes these roles are sung by a young soprano who can pass for a child; often they’re sung by children. Amahl in “Amahl and the Night Visitors” is a feature role written for a child - my dear friend, the late Graham Campbell, sang that role at the age of 10 in the Australian premiere of the show.
I just saw the opening night of “The Cunning Little Vixen” by Janàcek last night, and there was an extensive chorus and many solo roles for children as some of the forest animals. In particular, The Frog (sung by the son of a friend) has one of the most crucial lines in the show - in the final scene, when The Forester returns to the spot where he first met Sharp Ears the Vixen, he sees a frog and says “You again, my slimy friend!”, to which the frog replies “No, you’re thinking of my grandfather - he told me about you.”, at which the Forester laughs, and we all contemplate mortality and the passage of time.
Now, those roles are not subject to the same kind of heavy orchestration that the adult voices have to sing over, and in the modern age, micing them is always an option. They often come from the ranks of Catholic or Anglican choirboys, or from other similar children’s ensembles.
So that’s more the idea of what’s going on with the CCOC - if you thought of it as a really well organized children’s choir where the kids occasionally do solo passages, that’d be closer to the mark. The boys tend to be pre-pubescent, the girls can be slightly older.
They’re projecting in the same way that adult singers would - breath support, a tension free vocal mechanism that allows the voice, and a well developed sense of pitch, rhythm, and diction - but the music has been written to accommodate a developing rather than a fully developed voice.
One of the things we’ve been talking about with this production is doing a kind of follow-up ‘where are they now?’ kind of article about kids that have been through the CCOC. My guitar student’s older brother is still an active singer, the young fellow who sang Thorin Oakenshield in 2016 is now a student at UBC, mostly interested in fresh water ecology, but still pursuing music. One of the young women who was in that 2016 production is now a conductor, and the list goes ever on and on…
I’ll keep you posted - we start rehearsals in April, and the shows are in late May/early June.
