Opera NUOVA

Twenty years ago, Kim Mattice Wanat was an aspiring opera singer and voice teacher. She’d attended summer programs in Europe and the U.S., while intermittently taking lessons with Nico and Carol Castel in New York. On one trip, she and the Castels met in Metropolitan Opera’s cafeteria, and Mattice Wanat proposed a project to them—she wanted to start an emerging artists summer program in Edmonton. With their many years of experience training singers, and Nico’s reputation as a veteran performer and lyric diction coach at the Met, the couple seemed like the perfect pair to approach for advice on the project. Mattice Wanat knew they had seen the best and the worst of such programs, and believed they could devise a winning formula to get the idea off the ground.

The Castels were immediately on board, but Carol admits she was skeptical at first. She’d seen far too many great ideas like Mattice Wanat’s wither before they had a chance. In Edmonton for the 20 anniversary of what is now a six-week NUOVA Opera & Music Theatre Festival, Carol recalls that within a mere four months of that cafeteria conversation, Mattice Wanat called to say she’d secured a theatre and funds for the rights to Ravel’s ; a place near the