Comedy, CAMA & ‘Rigoletto’

Opera Santa Barbara launches its 2026-27 season this week having settled comfortably at the Lobero, the mid-size theater that was originally known as an opera house before the 1926 Santa Barbara earthquake. The season – the 10th under the baton and leadership of Kostis Protopapas – gets underway with a perennially popular tragedy in Verdi’s Rigoletto, although OSB has transformed the setting from Italy during the Renaissance to more of a gothic Victorian horror story, running November 6-10, just a week after State Street Ballet’s Dracula plumbed that genre. New this season is a third performance on Tuesday evenings to augment OSB’s traditional Friday night and Sunday afternoon shows. That’s also the schedule for another time-tested comic tale in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, which performs February 19-23 before the season closes with the company’s latest production, Craig Bohmler and Steven Mark Kohn’s contemporary American opera Riders of the Purple Sage, which is based on Zane Grey’s Western novel and debuted less than a decade ago. Sage is set for shows on April 23 & 25. 

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The Canellakis‑Brown Duo visit Hahn Hall in the second installment of the Music Academy of the West’s Mariposa Concert Series on Tuesday, November 10. Cellist and filmmaker Nicholas Canellakis, a 2001 alumnus of MAW back when Hahn was still Abravanel Hall, teams with pianist‑composer Michael Stephen Brown for a program called Humor & Harmony that features chamber music, comedy, and Canellakis’ short film My New Cello. Works by Chopin, Brahms, Saint‑Saëns, Gershwin, and originals (plus lots of nourishing banter) are on the slate. 

Visit www.musicacademy.org/mariposa

CAMA commences its 108th concert season with Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, the New York ensemble that was one of the first – dating back more than half a century –  to play without a conductor; fostering the collaborative philosophy that involves deep listening between musicians and applying chamber-music instincts to the orchestral stage. Long considered one of the world’s premier chamber orchestras, the Orpheus will be joined by British pianist Isata Kanneh-Mason – herself no stranger to Santa Barbara – to perform Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat Major, K. 595.” The program will also feature the Southern California premiere of Katie Jenkins’ “Elixir of Life,” which was co‑commissioned by Orpheus. Also on the bill: Selections from Handel’s “Water Music,” and Haydn’s “Symphony No. 91 in E-flat Major.” 

Visit www.camasb.org