Gino Quilico grew up in an itinerant household, listening to his mother Lina, an accomplished pianist and coach, and his famous dad, Louis—known as “Mr. Rigoletto” for his signature Verdi role—prepare his roles. The opera singer’s life took the family from their New York home to London and then Paris and then Rome, and back to New York, and on to Toronto, with his sister and him in tow.
During his formative years, Gino saw his father perform. He was shaken when the baritone was killed in Don Carlos. “I cried when he died on stage,” he said. Gino met opera stars in his father’s orbit. He remembers the big kiss he got from Leontyne Price, but Louis was just his dad, and the celebrities “were just people to me.” He didn’t appreciate their place in his father’s world, and although he heard a lot of opera around the house, he had no designs on an opera career.
Musically, Gino beganfamily business, but a paying gig as an adjunct chorus member in a Canadian Opera Company (COC) production flicked a switch. It wasn’t the singing, though, that turned him toward opera. It was opera’s theatricality: “What seduced me then was when I finally went to rehearsals, put the makeup on and the costumes on, and went on stage, I felt that magic, I got that bug. I was suddenly very much in love with what was happening. And that’s when I went to my father and said, ‘Can you teach me how to sing?’”
