Krista de Silva had a great uncle with a beautiful baritone voice whose operatic career was cut short by imprisonment during WWII. Despite this genetic link to opera, she didn’t grow up listening to classical music. Her close-knit family in Fort McMurray, Alberta, listened to R&B, jazz, reggae, and popular music recordings at dinner every night. “My dad played the guitar,” recalls de Silva. “He and I sang mostly Beatles tunes. My mother’s brother was a huge part of my musical knowledge; he had a very large collection of recordings in every genre of music and educated my brother and me about musicals, gospel and jazz.” De Silva had the added bonus of cultural exposure through extensive travel with her family visiting relatives in Italy, the Seychelles, England, Australia, and Austria as well as taking in other locales like Hawaii, Mexico, and China along the way.

When de Silva was ten years old, she entered herself in a music festival in Fort McMurray, and then started singing lessons at 13. She took a break from music and pursued a degree in Kinesiology at the University of Calgary, and after a brief stint playing volleyball at a small college in the United States, returned to Calgary to finish her degree. While there, she studied voice independently with Winston Noren who assigned de Silva her first opera aria, Violetta’s “Addio del passato.” “After that taste of opera, I just kept adding more arias,’’ she laughs.