Live from the Banff

In the over-nine decades since the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity has been in operation, one of its core artistic pillars has been chamber music. That pillar is being maintained this month by new collaborations between faculty and students from the Interplay program on beloved pieces of the Western classical music canon and new commissions that will see their first performances at the Banff Centre. 

Anastasia St. Amand’s work at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity this month is something of a return to her roots.  

“Some of the first intimacy directing classes I took [were] actually here,” she laughs. 

“I absolutely thought it was the most boring thing I’d ever heard.” 

“It’s so funny to be called a trailblazer because it’s not how I see what I do,” muses Patricia Yates about the uniqueness of her artistry, “but I understand that for other people, my experience and my existence in this industry and in this world is something that’s really new.” 

“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. 

One of the most foundational programs at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity is opera, which has been around for the vast majority of the centre’s nine-decade history. Now, that legacy continues with new productions that seek to innovate, explore and imagine a distinctly Canadian iteration of the genre. 

The latest opera program at the Banff Centre is called Interplay, a cross-pollination between opera and chamber music that aims to tell stories on a smaller scale with just as much impact as its mainstage counterparts. 

A longtime member of Winnipeg’s music community has been tapped to be the next musical leadership at one of Canada’s most prestigious arts institutions.