Cabaret singer fuses pop and classical

Cabaret singer fuses pop and classical. Patricia O'Callaghan will perform in a show called the Masques of Love: Romance and Heartbreak through the Ages is being staged at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, 106 Trinity St. at 8 p.m. Feb. 3 and 4. Photo/COURTESY

As a teen, she fancied herself a rock star, studied opera and now is a renowned cabaret singer.

O'Callaghan lives in south Parkdale now. She studied classical piano as a teenager, but said she always wanted to be a rock singer - that is until she actually started to learn to sing.

The remote towns she and her family called home didn't have voice coaches nearby. When she was 16, her high school guidance counsellor found O'Callaghan a singing teacher about a hour away in Timmins, ON.

"I started travelling there for choir and private lessons," she said.

She would make the trek once a week for choir and once every two weeks for private lessons.

"That introduced me to a whole world and repertoire of music that I didn't know before," she said, including opera, which she fell in love with.

"I would travel on the train to Toronto, it was like a 12-hour train ride, and I would go to Sam The Record Man to the third floor and I would buy all these crazy opera albums and jazz albums," she said. "Anything I could get my hands on."

The availability of music wasn't what it is today, so every record was spun many times.

"The depth at which I listened to the music up north, there is just no comparison here because of the isolation up there - everything was so precious."

O'Callaghan said she surprised her family when she announced she was going to apply to the University of Toronto for the classical voice program. She completed her degree, then went on to study at The Banff Centre for the arts and was the recipient of a grant to further her studies in Austria.

But her rocker side began to rear its head in what she called the rigid world of opera.

"I felt so hemmed-in in that world," O'Callaghan said. "It is in another century essentially, and I felt like I wanted to do something now."

Cabaret helped her bridge the world between popular and classical music. She said she could sing songs by composers such as Erik Satie and Kurt Weill, who were serious writers with satisfying songs, but which were written for the cabaret.

"I had a desire to communicate with a larger audience and show them how great this music was that I discovered," O'Callaghan said. "I wanted to do it in clubs and bars, so that is what I started doing."

That was just more than 10 years ago, when cabaret wasn't quite as common. She found an audience for her music, released a CD and got a record contract.

Now in her early 40s, O'Callaghan has released five solo CDs and a few collaborations. Her latest, MATADOR: The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was released in November.

"He is another one that, for me, bridged that gap between popular and classical music because he is such a sophisticated poet," she said.

O'Callaghan sings a range of songs across all genres, and said she is attracted to the song more then the singer.

"It doesn't really matter what genre they are written in, if they are good songs they can translate," she said.

O'Callaghan will be featured in an evening of music fusion called Masques of Love: Romance and Heartbreak through the Ages, presented by Toronto Masque Theatre (TMT).

Toronto Masque Theatre was founded in 2003 as a multi-disciplinary performing arts organization dedicated to the revival of works of music theatre from the 16th to 18th centuries and the commissioning of new works in the spirit of the masque from Canadian creative artists.

"It's a Valentine's Day show," O'Callaghan said. "We are going to sing a bunch of love songs from the Elizabethan time right up to the present time."

Also performing is blues guitarist Ken Whiteley and lutenist Terry McKenna. A quartet of classical singers, soprano Teri Dunn, alto Vicki St. Pierre, tenor Michiel Schrey and baritone Giles Tomkins.

O'Callaghan will sing songs by Edith Piaf, Sonny Bono, Kurt Weill and Leonard Cohen.

Throughout the musical sets are selections of poetry and prose in keeping with the theme of love by William Shakespeare, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Gwendolyn MacEwen, performed by actor Martin Julien.

Also being performed is a piece set to the love poetry of Pablo Neruda called 'Neruda Canciones' by Canadian composer Omar Daniel.

Masques of Love: Romance and Heartbreak through the Ages is being staged at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, 106 Trinity St. at 8 p.m. Feb. 3 and 4.

There will be a pre-show chat with TMT artistic director Larry Beckwith and composer Omar Daniel each night at 7:15 p.m.