I realize I use the adjective intense quite often. It seems to describe my life as General Director of the COC most adequately.

So, when I was thinking about how to write of this first week of January the first phrase that came to my mind was: It is an intense first week back at work.

Our two productions of the winter run are in rehearsal now, Carmen in its second and Otello in its first week. All principals, our two conductors and our two directors have arrived and work intensely all day, joined in the evenings by our wonderful chorus.

Our Marketing and Public Relations departments get increasingly busy with our season announcement which will take place on Jan. 20. Documents need final approval, speeches need to be written; we even turned a little welcome video (photos of this session will be posted here soon) and produced a short mashup (until a few days ago I didn't even know what that was; if you don't know either you will learn about it soon).

Today, we had a very special event in our Free Concert Series at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre: the first joint concert of the COC Ensemble Studio and the Atelier lyrique from the Opéra de Montréal. Four members of the Atelier lyrique have participated in the activities of our young artists for the past week and we will send a few of our artists to Montreal in March. I believe these exchanges are useful to enlarge the horizon of our young artists and I hope we will be able to do more of them with the programs of other major North American companies in the future.

This afternoon, at a meeting of the Luminato Advisory Board I saw Atom Egoyan who told me that he had thought about a project that I had proposed to him a while ago and that he was now ready to go. You can imagine how delighted I am. This really makes for a great start of my artistic year.

And tomorrow, I am off for my first travel of the new year to New York for the Met's new production of Carmen, conducted by Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Please don't ask me when he will come back to the COC. Ask him! We would be delighted to have him and really try very hard. You will find my performance report here late tomorrow evening or on Saturday morning.