Opera de Montreal’s rayonnement

In 2016, when Patrick Corrigan was appointed the new General Director of Opera de Montreal, he was inheriting a periodically troubled company, one that had finally found its feet again after several financially and artistically uncertain years in the early 2000s.

If there were ever any fears that a change in leadership would result in a new period of instability at OdeM—or that an Anglo from a West Coast company simply wouldn’t fit in—they dissipated quickly. Now two years into his tenure, Corrigan has established himself as a careful, collaboratively minded leader, whose innovative impulses are tempered with a ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broke’ mindset, and one who fully embraces Montreal’s culture as the next best thing to a native son.

Indeed, Corrigan, who speaks excellent French, was born in Toronto but spent his childhood in a Montreal suburb, with an Anglophone