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“God, what a view,” Lisette Oropesa exclaims at the top of Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain.
The internationally acclaimed soprano is just one of the faculty members that the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity has boasted of in the last couple of years. Oropesa was a member of the faculty for the centre’s Interplay program in 2024 for all of two days in between performances at Carnegie Hall and a tour of Japan with New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Amid this busyness, Oropesa, like so many other artists, found grounding and rejuvenation in the Banff Centre’s natural surroundings.
“The scent of the pine,” she says. “Fresh air, less cars, less noise. What could inspire you more to creativity than being in a place like this?”
Oropesa is an artist who needs to live in the moment more than most people. Constantly dashing from one city to the next with hardly a moment of rest, her life is disciplined out of a necessity to always be in peak performance readiness.
“Singers are probably the most controlling people on earth,” Oropesa admits, while also noting that the nature of operatic performance means that singers must be okay with being out of control as well. “They say acting is reacting. Singing is also reacting. You can’t control the allergens in your environment. You can’t control the humidity, the elevation,” she adds, gesturing at the air around her.
These are all elements that add to Oropesa’s notion that opera is, as she said in the New York Times, “the last truly human art form, the last art form that resonates in acoustic ways in natural spaces”. This humanity is something that she is dedicated to preserving at all costs.
Listen to Lisette talk about the role her family has played in making her a star here.
“Our art form is always being threatened,” she explains. “Threats to cutting the arts or dropping them completely from schools. It’s always the first thing on the chopping block. It makes me more passionately want to be a part of it because I want to keep it alive.”
The question of preserving the opera traditions that Oropesa performs in theatres all over the world or innovating as artists at the Banff Centre are doing is an existential one. For her part, Oropesa holds both with balance. “If you only ever do the chestnuts, your canon of God knows ten major operas that everybody has seen and has heard of themselves, you’ll never break out of that. Those pieces aren’t enough,” she elaborates. “If you only ever do modern opera and you never ever play Rigoletto again, that’s not the answer, either.”
Listen to Lisette talk about the state of the opera industry here.
Ultimately, Oropesa’s ideal future for the opera industry is one that involves as many aspiring artists contributing to the artistic ecosystem. “I want people who have a desire to create to have a space to create and an ability to create without having to think that if they’re not making money from it or making it into a career that it’s not worth doing,” she says. “I want people to have a chance.”