Interview: Daniel McGrew On Making His Canadian Debut in Opera Atelier’s THE DESCENT OF ORPHEUS

Opera Atelier opens its 2026/27 Season of Heroes with Canada’s first fully staged production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s THE DESCENT OF ORPHEUS, now playing through October 25, 2026 at Koerner Hall in Toronto’s TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning. Staged and choreographed by Founding Co-Artistic Directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg, the intimate Baroque opera tells the story of Orpheus’s journey into the underworld following the death of his beloved Eurydice, armed only with his music and driven by love. The production features Mireille Asselin as Eurydice, David Witczak as Pluto, Olivier Bergeron as Apollo, and Mireille Lebel as Persephone, with the Artists of Atelier Ballet, soloists from Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and members of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir under the direction of Christopher Bagan.

Making his Opera Atelier and Canadian debut in the title role is American tenor Daniel McGrew, a winner of the 2021 Young Concert Artist Auditions whose repertoire spans opera, early music, contemporary music, and music theatre. McGrew has sung the role of Orphée before, along with Orfeo in Monteverdi’s L’ORFEO, and performed in the American premiere of George Benjamin’s LESSONS IN LOVE AND VIOLENCE at Tanglewood under the composer’s baton. An early music specialist, he has performed many of J.S. Bach’s major works and more than 30 of his church cantatas with conductors including Masaaki Suzuki and John Harbison.

BroadwayWorld spoke with McGrew about the friendship that led him to Opera Atelier, the poetry that shapes his Orpheus, and why an encounter with beauty is enough.

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What does it mean to you to be making your Canadian debut with Opera Atelier, a company so closely associated with this distinctive blend of Baroque music, dance, and theatre?

What this company does is distinct and really quite special. Co-artistic directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lajeunesse Zingg and their team enact a kind of alchemy whereby an assiduous commitment to historically informed practices yields something uncannily fresh. I’m thrilled to be working with Opera Atelier.

How did your connection with Mireille Asselin lead you to this role, and what has it been like building the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice with her?

Since 2019, Mireille and I have been singing together as members of the Mirror Visions Ensemble, which focuses primarily on contemporary vocal chamber music. She’s a treasured friend and colleague and has, of course, been performing with Opera Atelier for years. I recall her mentioning on a few occasions that I should consider singing for Marshall. This eventually came to pass, and that audition led to the invitation to sing Charpentier’s Orphée. I’m very grateful to Mireille for her essential role in establishing this connection.

As for our relationship in the show, for what little time we spend together onstage, she’s either dying, dead, or a sort of ghost. The piece has little time for exposition; it’s devastating, in fact, in its leanness. Anyway, if you’re going to make your first entrance just as the actress playing your fiancée takes her final breath, it’s certainly helpful to have established chemistry with that performer. Mimi is my dream Eurydice.

What draws you to Orpheus as a character whose power lies in music and emotion rather than physical strength or conquest?

For me, the Orpheus myth is a meditation on the power of the lyric imagination, the value of art, and the experience of beauty. To give form, through language, music, or movement, to the morass of human experience seems to me a miraculous, perhaps even divine, function of the imagination. Other than a musician, the only thing I ever passionately dreamed of being was a poet. But I don’t have that gift. As a passionate reader, I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite poets and their reflections on Orpheus: Ashbery’s “Syringa,” Rilke’s astonishing SONNETS TO ORPHEUS... There’s no end to what we might discover as we read and reread and misread these myths.

Though not explicitly concerned with Orpheus, there’s a poem by Heine that has been on my mind. Its final stanza (in my own unvarnished translation from the German) reads:

I, a foolish child, am singing
Presently in the darkness.
Though my song may not delight,
It has freed me from fear.

Orpheus’s art may not finally conquer death, or even overcome the searing pain of loss, but it gives those realities a kind of meaning, a kind of beauty. And in so doing, it makes us less alone in our painful, disorienting, contingent lives. This is a kind of victory, even a kind of redemption, perhaps as close as we come to triumph.

How do you approach portraying the emotional arc of devotion, grief, hope, and fear that defines Orpheus’s journey into the underworld?

My approach is simply to be present with the material and with my colleagues as the experience unfolds in real time. Like one of the strings of Orpheus’s lyre, my work is to vibrate when struck. The piece moves me as I perform it: the music, the libretto, the gorgeous work of my generous colleagues, the incisive movement and gesture Marshall, our director, has given me... these are all doors into the emotional world of the piece.

Charpentier’s opera is known for blending soaring emotion with the formality of 17th-century French prose and music. How do you navigate that balance as a singer?

I’m not sure I consciously navigate it. Of course, there are considerations of style: ornamentation, musical gesture, tempi, etc., ubiquitous considerations. But for me, the piece seems so completely and beautifully realized that I don’t experience any abrupt seams between the expressive content and its form.

What has it been like working with period instruments and Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra under Christopher Bagan’s direction in bringing this score to life?

Christopher Bagan is such a generous musician. I find him keenly perceptive of anything I may be trying for in terms of vocal color, and he’s really led us all in an experience that’s infinitely more reminiscent of chamber music than opera can typically afford to be. The playing and singing in the pit are every bit as imaginative and engaging as what’s happening onstage, and that’s as much as can be hoped for in opera.

What is it like originating this role in Canada’s first fully staged production of this particular Charpentier work?

Yeah, wow, I’ve spent zero time thinking about that. It’s a strange and humbling thought. My concern, really, is just to do well by the piece, which moves me deeply, and by all my incandescent colleagues onstage, backstage, in the pit, etc. I think Marshall and his team have made us such a beautiful show; I feel lucky to be in it.

What do you hope Toronto audiences take away from seeing Orpheus’s story told through this particular combination of music, movement, and design?

Just that they leave having had an encounter with beauty, something that moved them. That’s enough, and more besides.

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