Squamish’s Lyndon Ladeur is on a quest to bring opera back to its former glory.
The 23-year-old tenor is enrolled in the Vancouver Academy of Music and is performing his first recital next Friday.
“Opera amplifies on real emotions, especially with tragedies – those emotions are very real to society,” says Ladeur, whose previous surname was Jhuty. “It’s very dramatic and intense.”
The Howe Sound Secondary grad first wanted to be a pop singer, then went onto musical theatre playing the leads in his school’s renditions of Fiddler on the Roof and All Shook Up before heading to study math at university in Ontario.
Opera was beckoning and he realized math wasn’t a good fit.
“Music is actually very similar to math, which I love. It’s in music theory. Bach, Beethoven… they all used it,” says Ladeur, who commutes from his home in Dentville to Vancouver to attend school.
His first recital is for Evening, Morning, Night, written by Benjamin Britten. He sings the majority of the music, and has a duet with a friend and is accompanied by two pianists.
Ladeur, who is also a reparatory young artist for Opera Mariposa, is seeing his young opera career pickup.
Besides his talent, he says “there aren’t a lot of tenors. This gives me an advantage because they’re in short supply.”
And he is hoping to revive the opera scene in the Lower Mainland, and bring his music back home to Squamish.
“Not as many people go to the opera anymore. It’s important to introduce opera to kids at a young age while they’re in school,” he says, adding that one day he would like to bring opera to communities that aren’t exposed to it often.
“It’s also good to support the young up-and-comers. There are a lot of people with real talent here in the Lower Mainland.”
Evening, Morning, Night is on April 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Vancouver Academy of Music’s Koerner Recital Hall.
Following that, he is a soloist at the Pacifica Singers Concert at St. Helen’s Anglican Church on June 13 and at Opera Opulenza’s The Tales of Hoffmann by Offenbach on July 21 and 22.
Then he will be performing ViVace’s Cosi fan tutte by Mozart at Bethlehem Lutheran Church on Aug. 6, the same day as his 24th birthday. For exact times see www.facebook.com/lyndonladeurtenor.
