A new podcast is giving Canadian classical music fans new insight into one of the country’s most revered operatic voices.
Louis Quilico was one of the 20th century’s leading baritones, sharing performances all over the world and garnering great acclaim for his portrayals of the characters of Giuseppe Verdi, in particular. His partner, the celebrated pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico, is now sharing new insights into her husband’s life and career through archival recordings of conversations the couple had before Louis’s passing in 2000. Those recordings are being turned into a 23-part podcast entitled Opera Stories: Speaking Personally.
“We were collaborating on a book,” Petrowska Quilico shares about how the conversations were first made. “We did maybe two weeks of conversations, just asking questions that popped into my head at a time. This way, there were conversations in his words and exactly what he wanted to say about music.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=/TqcCy9giny4
Petrowska Quilico adds that because the conversations were between a husband and wife, the podcast reads less as a biography and more as an unfiltered window into their careers with the trust that can only come from partners. “There was no fakery about it,” she says, adding that there was no concept of sharing recordings through something like a podcast since the medium did not yet exist. “We weren’t putting out any kind of mood or whatever. We were just talking.”
Over the course of these conversations, the couple revisits famous performances in places like San Francisco and New York City and speak about music through their own artistic lenses, each very distinct from the other. Petrowska Quilico made her name on the keyboards with interpretations of contemporary classical compositions from composers like Ann Southam while her husband’s career was defined by performances of characters in the operatic canon. Despite these differences, they each remained appreciative and supportive of each other’s work and inspired each other along the way.
“When I was doing the Liszt transcriptions – there were Rigoletto and Lucia [di Lammermoor] and I did some others – we as pianists tend to think of the fast notes and everything,” Petrowska Quilico recalls, “and he said, ‘It’s too fast.’ I said, ‘No, it’s got to be. Every pianist plays it like this,’… and he said, ‘No, breathe, breathe, feel the phrase,’ so that was wonderful. And with the contemporary music, he was such a good supporter. I know he didn’t like much contemporary music, but he found things in it.”
Although Quilico has been gone now for a quarter century, Petrowska Quilico says that she preserves his musical legacy through the lessons he shared with her as she continues to teach. “He used to talk about ‘trust your own voice’,” she recalls. “When he won the Metropolitan Opera auditions in his late 20’s… they wanted to turn him into a bass. He said no, and then they said, ‘Well, we’d like you to sing Mozart,’ and Louis said, ‘No, I’m a Verdi baritone. That’s what my voice is,’ and he quit and he went to Covent Garden.”
Amidst the professional remembrances in Opera Stories: Speaking Personally are personal remembrances that show what the couple were like as people, not just musicians. It’s something that Petrowska Quilico remembers whenever she puts on one of his recordings.
“He loved to sing right up until the end,” she smiles in memory. “You take him to an Italian restaurant, and that’s it. He’ll be singing songs all night with accompaniment if there was no piano there. And in Venice on the gondola, singing songs to me. Just that love of singing and not worrying so much about perfection.”
Episodes of Opera Stories: Speaking Personally are now available on Christina Petrowska Quilico’s YouTube channel.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source classic107.com ’
