John Hess was born in Kitchener, Ont., to a Mennonite family, and grew up in Toronto, where his minister father was sent on an inner-city mission. Dairine Ni Mheadhra was born in Cork to Irish-nationalist parents who spoke Gaelic as a first language. Both began studying piano at age four. Hess laughingly

says that the strong tradition of Mennonite singing is a vicarious form of expression for all things forbidden. Ni Mheadhra points out that singing in Ireland is a way of life. Separated by the Atlantic in their formative years, the couple would find their future careers converging in Banff, Alta., in 1993. Two years later, they married and settled in Toronto, where they fused their love of contemporary music and voice by founding the experimental Queen of Puddings Music Theatre, named after Ni Mheadhra's favorite Irish dessert. (See www.queenofpuddingsmusictheatre.com/recipe.htm)

QofP's mandate is the development of original Canadian opera, filtered through the Hess/Ni Mheadhra aesthetic. They choose material that can be produced in intimate venues in order to create a strong, visceral connection between the audience and performers. Although the couple revere the classically trained voice, their productions are specifically designed to negate the ritual of traditional opera, and they work only with performers who are willing to take chances vocally and dramatically. In particular, Hess and Ni Mheadhra love discovering talent Among their former proteges are Measha Bruggergosman, Jane Archibald and Gregory Dahl. At the heart of QofP's uniqueness, however, is the total dramatic integration of singers and musicians into music theatre. The costumed musicians participate in the staging, which is set in striking visual-arts installations, another QofP hallmark. Ni Mheadhra credits Banff staff member Richard Armstrong with pointing out to her the dramatic possibilities of musicians. "When I h eard him tell a player that moving a bow across a string is also theatre, the penny dropped," she says.

The goal of dramatically integrated music theatre can be seen from the onset of the company. Mad for All Reasons (1996) wove four short operas about madness together in one seamless spectacle. At one point, the costumed musicians performed a court dance and one was even dressed as a bird. The second production, Elemental (1997), set six short vocal works dealing with air, fire and water into magical installations that conjured up the fantastic. Flautist Louis Papachristos had to memorize his music because he was part of the fantasy. Echoes (2001) went one

step further. In this piece, where seven conjoined works represented the seasons as a metaphor for life, the stage manager and lighting designer were staged as meticulously as the singers and pianist.

Even in Beatrice Chancy, the most conventional opera in the QofP repertoire, the instrumentalists performed a ring shout in the beginning, and left their instruments at the end to join the singers in a spiritual. This acclaimed 1998 James Rolfe/ George Elliott Clarke opus was a retelling of the tragic 16th-century Italian Cenci family through African-Canadian slaves and their white masters. Perhaps the most innovative QofP music theatre was Sirens/Sirenes (2000), in which the all-female cast performed seven integrated works, singing a cappella with no conductor. Says Ni Mheadhra: "What other music-theatre company has ever asked singers to fly completely solo with no time source?"

Hess, now 51, studied piano at the University of Toronto, but his vocal art-song class with John Coveart resonated the most. After obtaining his masters in piano performance, he began teaching at the University of Calgary. Although he had a solo career, the demand for his work as an accompanist for instrumentalists and singers influenced the direction of his life, alongside his doctorate in musical arts with Martin Katz, the legendary accompanist/coach at the University of Michigan.

Returning to Toronto, Hess found his skills in great demand. "If singers find out you're a singer-friendly coach," he says, "the phone never stops ringing." He also got called by Comus Music Theatre to be a rehearsal pianist for that late, lamented company's original operas. His next career step was to take over Coveart's post at UofT when the latter retired. In short order his long association with the Banff Centre began, where he served as assoc-iate artistic director of the 20th-century opera and song program. Hess now heads the University of Western Ontario's masters program in collaborative piano. In his distinguished career, he has worked with every Toronto company that presents contemporary opera.

Ni Mheadhra, 44, began studying the cello and drama at age 11, and, by 17, she was a musical prodigy. She auditioned for the Irish National Symphony Orchestra and London's Royal College of Music, and was accepted by both. She chose the orchestra, Dublin and the co-principal cello chair. However, after four years, she became restless, and stimulated her orchestra career by pursuing advanced cello studies abroad, which included a Banff winter session, as well as training in conducting. Back in Ireland, she realized foreign sojourns had broadened her musical perspective. "I noticed that we'd spend three days rehearsing the standard repertoire," she says, "and allocate 90 minutes at the end for the token contemporary piece. No wonder audiences thought these works were rubbish and the composers were traumatized." It became Ni Mheadhra's mission to produce well-rehearsed, thoughtfully interpreted contemporary music, and she founded the award-winning, new-music ensemble Nua Nos. The group's first foray into music theatre was Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, and Ni Mheadhra, with her dual background in music and drama, was hooked.

Enter Welsh baritone Richard Morris. Ni Mheadhra had met Morris during her stay at Banff and the two became friends. Hess met Morris when Banff co-produced Andrew Toovey's Ubi with Music Theatre Wales. The singer suggested to Hess that his Irish friend would be a good candidate for the staff of the music-director/conductor training program at Banff Hess interviewed Ni Mheadhra, and the rest is history. When Ni Mheadhra proved inept at skiing, the couple got married instead, after a nine-month courtship. Rather than exchange wedding bands, they bought each other cowboy boots. Ni Mheadhra's current full-time job is as QofP's managing artistic director and resident conductor, which involves overseeing works-in-development. Upcoming projects include a new opera by Rolfe and librettist Jeremy Podeswa about 1930s German-Jewish visual artist Charlotte Salomon, and The Midnight Court by Ana Sokolovic, which uses a wickedly funny 1780 poem by Irish Gaelic writer Brian Merriman to make fun of marriage and chastity. As well, playwright Anne Fenn is wilting an all-Canadian satirical revue using diverse music sources, while Michael Oesterle is composing a piece of music theatre for the talented South Asian singer, Suba Shankaran.

An important off-shoot of the couple's focus on integrating the arts is QofP's unique, three-week summer artists training program, Contemporary Techniques for Classical Singers. Very little traditional singing gets done in this course. The curriculum includes theatrical-performance techniques, with the emphasis on training without the pressure of a session-end stage presentation. They accept only eight participants, whose tuition is fully covered by QofP. Beside coaching in contemporary singing, classes include movement, acting, West African drumming and dancing, South Indian singing and Feldenkrais training, which helps in motor development and stress management. "We create works from scratch," say Ni Mheadhra, "and part of our mission must be to produce singers who can perform to our standards." Hess adds: "Our works are performer-based, physical, singing theatre. That, in a nutshell, is Queen of Puddings." *

Paula Citron is an associate editor of Opera Canada