TORONTO, ON – Today Opera 5 announces the 8 singers who will join the Portfolio Artist Internship Program for the 2025 Toronto Opera Festival, in partnership with Opera McGill and the Schulich School of Music. The Portfolio Artist Internship is an innovative new approach to artist training designed to support individuals pursuing a portfolio career: a multi-faceted path, artistic or otherwise, simultaneously. The internship provides three levels of learning opportunities: performance, professional skills development, and secondary artistic/administrative skills.
The 2025 interns include Kyle Briscoe, Jayden Burrows, Len Crino, Kate Fogg, Brenna McFarland, Maddelena Ohrbach, MacKenzie Sechi, and Emma Yee. For more information on these artists, click here.
“We could not be more excited to welcome this group of stupendous emerging artists from McGill and introduce them to opera professionals in Toronto and our amazing audiences. Not only are these artists all engaging and dynamic performers, but they are all eager to learn new skills, which will deepen their artistic engagement.”
– Rachel Krehm, General Director Opera 5.
The Toronto Opera Festival runs from June 12-21, 2025, kicking off with the Gala: A Night of Opera & Musical Theatre on June 12, 2025, where audiences will be introduced to all eight of our fabulous interns. Throughout the festival, six interns will take the stage in our main stage production of Elegies: A Song Cycle, with two interns assistant directing both Elegies and Come Closer. Additionally, two interns will cover roles in Come Closer and all the interns will be engaged in secondary skills assignments in administration, production, and/or design.
Interns will arrive in Toronto in early May for a professional development week before the start of rehearsals for festival productions. This will allow interns to focus on a range of learning opportunities geared to further develop their unique skill sets. This will include masterclasses, mock auditions, and panels with industry professionals such as Adrianne Pieczonka, Rebecca Townsend, Morgan Reid, and Kathy Domoney. Interns will further their professional skill sets through dedicated workshops and secondary learning assignments in production (assistant stage managing, assistant directing, lighting design, production management), admin (marketing, project ), and design (set and costume design). The Interns will learn more about these roles during the professional development week and will continue with hands-on learning in these areas throughout the rehearsal and production period.
“I’d like to shout from the rooftops to everyone in the opera world how fantastic this game-changing internship program is for my students who have participated! As someone who has run young artist training programs (Glimmerglass, Florida Grand Opera, Pittsburgh Opera), I’ve seen many programs come up short in delivering their promised training. Last year, Opera 5 far exceeded the stated goals and succeeded in creating a new way forward to expand the training young singers need in the coming decades of the 21st century. Beyond the particulars of this portfolio artistry internship, beyond the interns’ amazing performance I witnessed in Toronto, beyond the mentorships, and so many other specific achievements, the singers returned to Opera McGill vastly different singers, communicators, and artists singing the praises of the internship to everyone – faculty, students, and patrons of the Schulich School of Music. I can’t wait to see what this summer brings!”
– Patrick Hansen, Director of Opera McGill, Schulich School of Music
Opera 5 is an independent opera company in Toronto with over a decade of producing experience and is known for programming opera favourites in new fresh ways, bringing unknown operas that deserve to be heard to the stage, and commissioning new Canadian operas. Opera 5 is also known for our popular web series Opera Cheats, which deconstructs opera plots and opera-going rules with a humorous twist. You can watch the series at www.opera5.ca/opera-cheats and our web series Threepenny Submarine which combines puppetry, animation, and opera and is a winner of a 2024 Digital Excellence Award presented by Opera America.
Listing Information
June 2025 at Factory Theatre – Mainspace.
Tickets available by the end of January.
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Come Closer – June 13, 14, 18, 19, 21 all 7:30pm
Elegies: A Song Cycle – June 15 2:30 pm, June 17 and 20 7:30pm
Gala: A Night of Opera and Musical Theatre June 12, 7:30pm
Learn more about our fabulous 2025 interns:
https://www.opera5.ca/interns2025
