The Conversation: star baritone Russell Braun and musical theatre dynamo Louise Pitre

The place: Aria Ristorante The people: star baritone Russell Braun and musical theatre dynamo Louise Pitre The subject: belting it out in different languages

By Nathan Whitlock | Photography by Derek Shapton

Filling a room with the sound of your voice is hard enough—imagine having to do it in a second language. For an in-demand baritone like Russell Braun, delivering big emotions and big notes in another tongue is just part of the job. This month, Braun stars in the Canadian Opera Company’s French-language production of Kaija Saariaho’s lush and romantic Love From Afar. Louise Pitre is just as linguistically adept, having spent much of the past year touring North America singing tunes by Jacques Brel, Édith Piaf and Ira Gershwin (with room left for the odd number by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus). Now she’s unleashing her interpretive powers on her own work for a concert of original dramatic songs—in French and English—written in collaboration with her husband, actor Joe Matheson, and pianist Diane Leah. We brought these two polyglot singers together for a few glasses of wine and listened in.