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Maestro Jacques Lacombe has extended his tenure as Vancouver Opera’s Music Director for three more seasons. Ahead of Puccini’s Tosca, host Ashley Daniel Foot sits down with him to talk about power, listening and the music between the notes.
Jacques remembers assisting Leonard Bernstein in Vienna in his final year. He recalls watching Carlos Kleiber conduct Der Rosenkavalier and seeing Herbert von Karajan live. He explains why Karajan compared conducting to riding a horse over a fence, and why the perfect orchestra is one that can sing.
We also get into the tritone hidden in Scarpia’s three chords and why the “easiest” Puccini is the hardest to conduct. There’s an unexpected lesson in silence from The Manhattan Transfer, and Jacques’s theory of the “talented audience.”
In this episode:
– Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, and the conductor as a figure of authority– Karajan, Kleiber and Bernstein: three kinds of genius– Tosca, Joseph Kerman’s “shabby little shocker,” and Jacques’s first opera LP– The devil in music: Scarpia’s chords and Puccini’s leitmotifs– Wagner’s On Conducting and finding the singing line– How to conduct silence– What age gives a conductor– Building sound from the bottom up: the organist’s ear
See it live:
Tosca, October 24 – November 1, 2026, Queen Elizabeth Theatre
La Traviata, April 24 – May 2, 2027
Tickets: vancouveropera.ca
00:00 — The conductor is not a king
02:06 — Three more seasons & an orchestra that can sing
04:39 — Karajan, Kleiber and Bernstein
07:37 — What Jacques learned from Lenny
09:25 — Tosca and the "shabby little shocker"
13:05 — Three chords and the devil
15:03 — Wagner and the art of listening
16:53 — How do you conduct silence?
20:01 — What age gives a conductor
21:54 — From the bottom up: the Lacombe sound
23:14 — Looking ahead: Tosca and La Traviata
