Information/Write-up
Teresa Stratas’s recording of “This Is Canada” and its companion piece “The Night” remains one of the most unusual and least-known entries in her discography, a Canadian-pressed 7-inch on the 20th Century Fox Records Label manufactured by Quality Records, almost certainly issued in early 1961. At the time, Stratas was still in the earliest phase of what would become one of the century’s most celebrated operatic careers. Born in Toronto and trained at the Royal Conservatory, she had only recently made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1959 after winning the MET National Council Auditions. Although her voice would soon be synonymous with Puccini heroines, Weill’s shadow-soaked cabaret, and daring contemporary roles, this modest soundtrack single captures a moment before all that — when she was simply a remarkably gifted young Canadian soprano at the threshold of international recognition, invited to lend her voice to a patriotic theme for a Hollywood film.
The film was The Canadians, a 20th Century-Fox CinemaScope western directed by Burt Kennedy and starring Robert Ryan, John Dehner, Torin Thatcher, and Burt Metcalfe. Released in 1961, it dramatized a fictional encounter between the North-West Mounted Police and a group of Sioux refugees led by Chief Eagle Shirt. Though framed as a frontier action drama, it drew on a real historical moment and reflected Canada’s self-image as a refuge amid the turmoil of the late-19th-century Plains conflicts. Its wide landscapes and solemn tone offered Fox an opportunity to craft musical themes of national character, and for that they turned to Ken Darby, one of Hollywood’s most respected vocal directors and composers, whose credits ranged from The Wizard of Oz to The King and I.
Darby composed “This Is Canada” and “The Night”, both reflecting his widescreen harmonic language: pastoral, stately, and built around a large orchestra and chorus. The recording was conducted by Harry Simeone, the influential choral arranger best known for popularizing “The Little Drummer Boy.” Though Stratas appears only briefly in the film, contemporary reviewers noted that her voice provided one of its few musical highlights. For the Canadian market, Fox commissioned a stand-alone single featuring the young soprano, whose luminous clarity and operatic warmth lend unexpected emotional weight to what might otherwise have been a routine studio tie-in. Her interpretations are poised and highly musical, offering an early glimpse of the emotional immediacy that would later define her career.
Because Fox issued no full soundtrack LP, this Canadian 45 remains the only commercial release of these Darby-Simeone themes. That alone makes it a curiosity among soundtrack collectors, but Stratas’s presence elevates it further. She recorded very few pop-oriented or film-related singles; her career remained anchored in opera, recital work, and later her definitive explorations of Weill, Shostakovich, and Greek Rembetika. That makes “This Is Canada” arguably her earliest widely available commercial recording, and certainly one of the most unusual in both genre and purpose.
Part of the single’s enduring appeal lies in how it mirrors the film’s tone: a restrained, landscape-driven frontier story rather than a typical Hollywood western. Stratas’s voice was used to evoke not action but grandeur, refuge, and national idealism, reinforcing the film’s vision of Canada as a place of solemn beauty. What survives, more than six decades later, is a snapshot of the country's cultural imagination and an early testament to a young singer on the cusp of becoming a Canadian icon.
-Robert Williston
Teresa Stratas: vocals
Written by Ken Darby
Orchestra and chorus directed by Harry Simeone
From the 20th Century-Fox film release "The Canadians"
Produced by 20th-Fox Record Corporation
Manufactured by Quality Records Limited
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