“When I was at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, I was so startled that all the singers were running around and doing anything other than what I could see seems necessary,” Mark Sampson, a bass and the founder and artistic director of the Berlin Opera Academy (BOA), tells me. “And they were too tired for singing lessons, because they had some history paper to write about Schubert. I was like: ‘How does this help you? When you’re on stage you just have to sing and act well.’ So I decided to do my own version of things.”
Unlimited access to our
