Artistic and General Director, Tapestry Opera
Chair, Association for Opera in Canada
Adjunct Professor, University of British Columbia

Highlights

Michael Hidetoshi Mori has been called “a shot of adrenaline to opera”. As both an artist and administrator, Michael is a leading international voice in socially and artistically progressive opera and music theatre. An acclaimed and award-winning Canadian/American stage director and the General Director of Tapestry Opera in Toronto, he is frequently sought as a speaker, consultant, producer, director and dramaturge. In his role with Tapestry Opera he has commissioned, developed, and premiered many world premieres, guiding them from early concept to full realization. For Tapestry he has cultivated an entirely new and diverse audience base, eliminated a longstanding deficit and dramatically expanded its subscriber and donor base.


Advocacy and Opera Sector Leadership
Michael is a noted organizational leader, fundraiser, strategic planner and mentor. He is a regular speaker and presenter on equity, diversity and inclusion in opera; new works development; and independent opera.

He is the current Chair of the Association for Opera in Canada, Canada’s association of professional opera companies. As an energetic executive member of the board of directors, he initiated the association’s first two annual Opera Summits in Montreal and Vancouver, bringing together universities, professional companies, and independent artists to take on and discuss the most pressing issues in opera in Canada today. Through these efforts, the association’s membership experienced unprecedented growth and its first major surge in fundraising in ten years.

Michael is the founder of Indie Opera TO, a group of small-to-medium companies in Toronto. A strong believer in Toronto’s ecosystem of opera, he felt the smaller companies could benefit from a forum to share ideas and challenges and discuss resourcing, issues pertinent to the sector and to support one another’s initiatives.

In 2018 he was selected by Opera America to speak and represent Canada at the first annual World Opera Forum in Madrid, and was recently invited to speak on the closing panel of Opera America’s 2020 Annual Conference. He is a frequently sought-after speaker, panel participant and discussion moderator at Opera America. In fall 2020 Michael was tapped by Opera Europa to introduce the all-star lineup of the World Opera Day concert featuring appearances by Ai Weiwei, Peter Sellars, Isabel Leonard and others. 


Artistic Background
Michael began his journey in opera as a child performer in New York City. He holds a Master’s degree in opera performance from the University of British Columbia with a German minor, and diplomas from Die Wiener Meisterkurse, Vienna, and Die Universität Mozarteum Sommerakademie, Salzburg. A  passionate student of language, he is fluent in German and Swiss-German, and conversant in Italian, French, Spanish, Czech and Japanese. 

An early interest and aptitude for dramaturgy and directing led him to pursue a career of direction and music direction, leading to mentorships with several notable directors including Tim Albery, Tom Diamond, and Wayne Strongman.

In his freelance career, Michael is the winner of a West Coast Music Award for Classical Music and the 2017 Outstanding Direction Dora Mavor Moore Award for Opera/Musical Theatre. He has been nominated for a JUNO as a performing artist and led Tapestry to be nominated for a JUNO under his artistic direction.


General and Artistic Director of Tapestry Opera
Under Michael’s leadership, Tapestry has been named “the leader of the Canadian opera pack” by the Globe and Mail. Personally he has been praised as “one of ten artists changing the artistic landscape of Canada” by the CBC and “one of ten Torontonians to watch” by the Toronto Star. Since taking over the company, Michael has more than doubled its productions, spearheading new projects and partnerships with Scottish Opera, Vancouver Opera, The Luminato Festival, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canadian Stage, Pride Toronto and Opera on the Avalon. Audience sizes have grown on average between 15% - 35% per year with corresponding increases in fundraising, leading to significant budget growth and in 2020, the elimination of a 30-year-long accumulated deficit and the establishment of an endowment.

In recent years Tapestry Opera has on average out-performed all other opera companies at Toronto’s Dora Mavor Moore Awards in either nominations or awards. In 2017, Tapestry’s world premiere of Gareth Williams’ and Anna Chatterton’s Rocking Horse Winner garnered nine nominations and five awards at the Dora Mavor Moore awards, including Outstanding Production with Michael receiving the award for Outstanding Direction, honouring his vision that brought this remarkable new work to life and acknowledging the challenging task of making a new work attractive and resonant to a broad audience.

More recently at Tapestry, Michael created two large scale collaborative initiatives that are now national partnerships. Due to his strong performance as a fundraiser, both initiatives have received multiyear core funding and are moving past the initial stages. They include:

COR (the Canadian Opera Resource), is a three-year project to create the first smart database of all Canadian operas, partnering with hundreds of Canadian opera creators, all major commissioners of Canadian operas, and most major university opera programs.

Women in Musical Leadership is a five-year fellowship program to develop equity in conducting and musical direction. Partnering with most major opera companies and symphony orchestras across Canada, the initiative will develop and advance female conductors in leadership positions.


Stage Director and Creative Artist
Michael is a versatile stage director, working both in site-specific settings and conventional theatres. His recent work ranges from cutting edge explorations in presentation with Augmented Opera at Sidewalk Labs, to neo-classical settings of Rigoletto at Sacramento Opera and Il Trittico at West Bay Opera, to community integrated story development and a co-direction of Indigenous-Beothuk history in Shanawdithit in Toronto and St. John’s, Newfoundland and of Maada’ookii Songlines for the Closing Ceremony of Luminato’s 2019 Festival.

A highlight among Michael’s most innovative initiatives is Tapestry Explorations (Tap:Ex), an annual concert experience that collides opera with other artistic forms. The series has experimented with fully choreographed art-music (Revolutions), synthesized cut-film, track, turn-table, live soprano and percussion (Tables-Turned), a collaboration with punk band Fu*ked Up (Metallurgy), and a mash-up of opera, Persian music and hip-hop dealing with gender and sexual politics (Forbidden). The series has attracted a great deal of attention. In early 2018 BBC World profiled Michael’s direction of Forbidden as an example of barrier-breaking in opera and as early as 2015 VICE was exclaiming that Tap:Ex “gives a glimpse as to what opera can offer us in our multimedia savvy world.”


COVID-19 Response Leadership
Since the occurrence of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown of performing arts venues and offices, Michael has been one of the fastest and most resourceful arts leaders in Canada.

Tapestry’s March 2020 production of Songbook X, an emerging artist masterclass and performance, was quickly converted into a livestream featuring Krisztina Szabo and Christopher Foley. Songbook X was the first pandemic-related livestreamed performance in Canada, due to the fact that the pivot in planning happened before the full lockdown. Tapestry had over 5 times as many viewers as would normally be expected, and in the one hour of livestream, received more in organic donations than the company would typically generate from ticket sales for an in-person performance of this program.

With Michael’s leadership, Tapestry was able to make a commitment that all artist fees for the remainder of the season would be honoured, converting them to other activities. The return of the acclaimed production of Rocking Horse Winner was transitioned into a remote rehearsing process, which accomplished two goals: rehearsing the music with a new cast, and learning how to leverage remote technologies for rehearsal. The balance of the original contract fees were directed towards an album recording that Michael negotiated with the CBC to broadcast on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.

In May 2020, Tapestry announced a 2020-2021 season titled “Immune to Cancellation”, consisting of four new major works in development, a monthly livestream concert series broadcast from the Tapestry studio, equipping said studio to be a classical music broadcast hub (featuring the company’s rare Bosendorfer Imperial grand piano), producing newly commissioned digital opera shorts, and culminating in June 2021 with Dragon’s Tale, a major world premiere in partnership with Soundstreams and The Luminato Festival to be performed outdoors on the lake, free for the public, and under new, safe artist and audience guidelines.

In the face of the evolving demands that COVID-19 was placing on society and the understanding of screen fatigue, Michael conceived and developed Box Concerts, a new initiative between Soulpepper Theatre and Tapestry Opera to design and build a compact trailer stage that can travel to long-term care homes, hospitals and private residences in Toronto to provide socially distanced performances. Over the course of the summer the initiative brought 74 concerts to the community.

Michael also led an adaptation of Tapestry’s infrastructure by developing safety measures for its studio, which culminated in the safe and successful recording of Rocking Horse Winner using limited artists per session and incorporated remote technologies to work with US-based music director, Kamna Gupta.

In his work as Chair of Opera in Canada (formerly opera.ca), Michael helped establish and fund an emergency fund for opera artists a month before the government program of CERB was released.


Personal Life
Michael lives in Toronto with his wife Caitlin Coull and their two young daughters. Together Michael and Caitlin share a deep commitment to the artistic and cultural landscape of the city, and a strong social and professional network.