Emma Pennell joins the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio this fall.Supplied
Emma Pennell grew up in poverty in Northern Ontario’s South River. (Not even − the family’s cabin, with no plumbing or electricity, was 45 minutes outside the village.) The future singer heard CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on a battery-powered radio.
“I would listen to it and close my eyes, imagining the big concert halls and the big orchestras,” recalls the 27-year-old lyric soprano with Mi’kmaw roots. “I had no idea what these things looked like.”
Pennell has a much better idea today. The recent graduate from the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School has performed with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, won the $25,000 RBC Emerging Artist Award at this year’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards and this fall will join the Canadian Opera Company’s Ensemble Studio.
Emma PennellKarmen Grubišić/Supplied
But first, Pennell takes part in the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity’s upcoming production of The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1998 operatic adaptation by composer Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic 1985 novel. The presentation, with a new arrangement commissioned by the Banff Centre, takes place July 26, at the Jenny Belzberg Theatre.
Pennell sings the role of Ofglen.
“She’s a warrior and she’s a rebel,” says the non-binary singer/activist who founded the Don Wright Faculty of Music Indigenous Leadership Initiative at Western University. “My character is moving through this world knowing that it’s dangerous but knowing she has a responsibility.”
A lonely little petunia in an onion patch
Pennell was a self-described “bad fiddler” who put down the bow to sing instead in their grandmother’s country and western band. The repertoire: You Are My Sunshine and I’m a Lonely Little Petunia (In an Onion Patch), classics of the pipsqueak set. Later, the 10-year-old won first prize with Cole Porter’s Don’t Fence Me In at the Sundridge Sunflower Festival.
“Singing was therapy to make myself less lonely,” Pennell says. “I would sing in the woods and shake the limbs of the trees, pretending they were my fans.”
Pennell studied voice performance at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ont. The music program for underprivileged students was later eliminated because of lack of funding. Pennell’s subsequent bachelor’s degree from Western led to acceptance at Glenn Gould School.
There, the singer sought a mentor.
“This is an industry where they value straightness and whiteness and thinness, which are things that I’m not,” Pennell says. “I needed to find a teacher who supported me not despite of who I am, but because of who I am.”
Enter Stephanie Bogle, an accomplished soprano and respected Glenn Gould School faculty member.
“Emma brings an Indigenous sense to classical music,” Bogle says. “Artists are complex. Where they come from is important in this business.”
Pennell recently sang arias by Métis composer Ian Cusson and selections from Harry Somers’s opera Louis Riel at the lakeside Music Garden, not far from the Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.
“Airplanes were going by and Emma was singing so beautifully,” Bogle says. “This is an expressive, communicative artist. The audience was enraptured − so was I, and I’m the teacher!”
Wagging The Handmaid’s Tale
Though we think of opera divas as leading a jet-style lifestyle, Pennell’s trip to Banff Centre last year represented the singer’s first time in an airplane. The soprano participated in a workshop for the new comic opera Indians on Vacation, an adaptation of Thomas King’s 2020 novel composed by Ian Cusson with a libretto by Royce Vavrek, co-commissioned by Edmonton Opera and Against the Grain Theatre.
(The opera premieres Feb. 6, 2026, at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium in Edmonton. Because of the upcoming Canadian Opera Company job, Pennell will not take part.)
The focus in today’s opera world is newer works. While the unfamiliarity of any modern opera can be testing for singers, The Handmaid’s Tale is particularly challenging musically.
“There aren’t a lot melodies you can hum,” says Joel Ivany, artistic director for both Edmonton Opera and the Banff Centre’s opera program. “It’s been a huge learning curve for Emma and everybody else in the cast.”
The curve continues in August when Pennell joins the COC’s Ensemble Studio, the leading development program for opera in the country. But where Banff Centre is a school, the Canadian Opera Company is professional.
“It will be a different experience for Emma at the COC in terms of expectations,” Ivany says. “The route to being a professional opera singer is incredibly difficult if you live in Canada. There’s less work in North America and there’s more singers than ever. You need that marriage of incredible talent and an incredible work ethic.”
Operatunity
More than 100 Canadian singers sent in video applications for entry into the COC’s Ensemble Studio. Those who made the cut auditioned live on stages in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Only seven of the singers made it to the annual Centre Stage competition and gala at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts last fall.
Backstage, Pennell watched her introduction and wept.
“It was a glamourous night, with gowns and donors,” says the soprano. “It was surreal.”
Pennell won second prize and was later accepted into the Ensemble Studio. The singer’s first COC production will be as an understudy in Verdi’s Rigoletto, which happens to be the first COC opera Pennell ever saw, in 2017.
“The thing that strikes you first is Emma’s voice,” says Ensemble Studio director Dorian Cox. “It is a sizable instrument that can really project well. There’s a clarity in tone that can cut, without harshness, and there’s also an agility in the voice.”
More than the voice, what appraisers see in Pennell is a tough, determined artist with a sense of purpose and an understanding of the role to be played as a storyteller with a platform.
“I feel I represent not just myself but my family, my community, Indigenous people, queer people and fat people in this art form,” says Pennell. “There’s more than enough opera singers around − the world really doesn’t need more. But there will always be enough room for artists. What do you want to say from your unique perspective? I think I have a pretty good sense of that.”
