It wasn’t love at first sight when Barb and Doug Hughes met in Calgary in 1954.
But a love of music has been woven through their marriage, which began in 1956.
It is also a critical factor in Salmar’s live-via-satellite presentations of opera from New York’s Metropolitan Opera, as well as ballet, often from the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow.
The couple met through mutual friends, who knew both Barb and Doug shared a love of skiing as well as music.
“Doug had studied voice and thought he’d like to be an opera singer, but he didn’t think he had the voice,” says Barb. “And from my youth, I wanted to be a ballet dancer, but I didn’t have the physique. I was a bit too short.”
Instead, the couple enjoyed their passion for opera and ballet by attending concerts in Canada and abroad.
“We went to a lot of concerts in Calgary, the Celebrity series,” says Barb smiling at the memory of the chill in the old Stampede Corral Concert Hall where wood covered the ice below. “We saw numerous famous people like violinist (Ruvin) Heifetz, (Artur) Rubinstein in the late ’50s and Joan Sutherland in 1967.”
The Hughes moved to Vancouver in 1958 and Barb describes the city of the time as being provincial and without an appreciation for opera.
Canadian Jon Vickers, considered by many to be one of the greatest heroic tenors of all time, would sell out in England’s prestigious Covent Garden, but only drew a small audience in Vancouver, Barb says.
“Canadians at that time didn’t think Canadians were good enough,” she says.
Leafing through a bouquet of old programs, treasured reminders of evenings spent at the theatre, Barb says she first saw the Bolshoi Ballet in Vancouver in 1963.
She rhapsodizes about hearing famous coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland sing the tragic opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
In 1967, the couple travelled to Montreal for the World’s Fair and to hear celebrated Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson sing in Richard Strauss’ Elektra.
“She was a big name in the opera world; she gave a lot of money to artists like Placido Domingo because he did so much for young people in the opera world,” Barb says, adding a memory she will never forget is the moment of silence at the end of Nilsson’s performance, followed by an audible whoosh that filled the theatre as everyone stood up to applaud.
Over the years, the couple joined music tours to San Francisco and New York, attending as many as five operas on each tour.
“In order to get tickets, you had to go on a tour,” she says. “In New York, there was sometimes a combination of ballet, opera and symphony, and sometimes individual concerts...”
Barb and Doug were introduced to opera at an early age, with both of them growing up in families that enjoyed CBC’s Saturday Afternoons at the Opera.
The couple moved to Salmon Arm in 1973 and when live-via-satellite productions became available, the Hughes approached Salmar general manager Daila Duford to see about bringing them to the big screen.
“Doug suggested why can’t we get the Met productions,” Barb laughs. “He knew I liked ballet, so I said ‘which one?’ and he said ‘Bolshoi’ and I said get them.”
With Salmar board approval the live-via-satellite programs began in 2007 and audiences have been growing ever since.
Duford lets the Hughes know which operas will be available in the upcoming season and Barb and Doug go over them with her to choose ones they know are excellent and are likely to appeal to the Salmon Arm audience.
Doug has a list of about 200 people he phones prior to every production, and while Barb is happy with the opera program that consistently attracts about 60 people, she would like to see larger ballet audiences.
“I thought this is important; that’s why I’d like younger people to go. That’s our future audience,” she says, noting the program is a ShuGo participant in which youths between the ages of 12 and 21 can buy tickets for $5.
The next Met Live in HD performance is a double bill – Pagliaci and Cavallaria Rusticana at 9:30 a.m. this Saturday, April 25 at the Salmar Classic. Run time is three hours and 30 minutes.