Tag archives: Opera Santa Barbara
Opera Santa Barbara was again in fine form when it presented Handel’s Semele at the Lobero, which was first performed in 1744 at London’s Covent Garden. A fusion of elements of opera, drama, and oratorio, the popular work is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses with Semele, the mother of the god Bacchus, superbly played by soprano […]
Opera soprano Jana McIntyre’s first public performance as a singer came at age five right here in Montecito. Except she wasn’t supposed to be singing. “We had to recite poems at our graduation at Crane,” said McIntyre, recalling her first year at Crane Country Day School, the K-8 school where academic challenge is balanced with […]
Just a couple of weeks after launching its new season with mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna at the Granada, the singers, accompanied by talented dancers from the State Street Ballet and the Opera Santa Barbara Orchestra under artistic director Kostis Protopapas, were at the top of their game with a delightful double […]
The singers, under artistic director Kostis Protopapas, launched its first post-pandemic season with mariachi opera Cruzar la Cara de la Luna (To Cross the Face of the Moon), a 2010 commission from the Houston Grand Opera with music and lyrics by Jose “Pepe” Martinez. With inspiring music from Grammy winners Mariachi Los Camperos, the production, […]
It’s not much of an exaggeration to suggest that Opera Santa Barbara General Director Kostis Protopapas almost single-handedly kept live music alive in town during the worst months of the pandemic. In February, Operation Eurydice, part of Opera Santa Barbara’s Arts Advocacy campaign, created three live music series to bring in-person concerts to the public, […]
Everybody was in the right aria when Opera Santa Barbara’s Marylove Thralls hosted a sunset soirée to launch an entertaining new book, La Mia Pazza Famiglia by Kay Lemke. The dynamic duo met when Lemke, who hails from a small community, San Fior di Sopra, north of Venice, volunteered to help the opera and the […]
My job here at the Sentinel as a Man About Town encompasses keeping everyone informed about what’s been going on around town in the performing arts in and near State Street and beyond, even if some of it’s on the down low. The thing is, these days in my case the DL refers more to […]
If vocal fellow Byron Mayes’ name seems familiar, you’re not imagining things. The baritone, like all the other 2021 fellows matriculating at MAW’s Miraflores campus in Montecito this year, was part of MARLI, the Music Academy’s virtual-only season during the early part of the pandemic last summer. But the singer’s Santa Barbara-connected tenure goes back […]
Opera Santa Barbara won’t ease back into action, instead taking on a first-time production of Das Rheingold at the Lobero Theatre Anyone who thought Opera Santa Barbara might ease its reentry into live indoor operas with something out of the standard repertoire clearly doesn’t know Kostis Protopapas very well. OSB’s artistic and general director has […]
With the continued easing of pandemic restrictions, PCPA is returning after two summers to the Solvang Festival Theater, the charming outdoor amphitheater in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley village. The stars will be live on stage as well as visible in the sky above starting in mid-July, when PCPA debuts an original production […]
The Amazons of the Music Academy of the West were positively unleashed after more than a year of monthly meetings via Zoom for a “Sip n’ Stroll” sunset soirée on the picturesque terrace of Hahn Hall on the Miraflores campus. “It is an absolutely fabulous feeling,” exclaimed event chair Roberta Grant. “Everybody has been absolutely […]
It was all two grand for words when Roger and Sarah Chrisman, just back from their home in Indian Wells after six months of lockdown, opened the doors of their charming Ennisbrook home for a concert by singers from Opera Santa Barbara’s Chrisman Young Artists Program. A pair of grand pianos, a Steinway and a […]
It was all Greek to many when Kostis Protopapas, general director of Opera Santa Barbara, celebrated his half-century with a delightful evening of music and song at the University Club. Kostis, who was born in Athens and moved to the U.S. in 1993 on an Onassis scholarship to study piano at The Boston Conservatory and […]
Opera Santa Barbara hosted an evening of high note with its fifth annual Sings For You! at the University Club, with soprano Alaysha Fox from the Young Artists Program of the Los Angeles Opera and Nicholas Roehler at the piano. With an eclectic program of works from Wagner, Verdi, Strauss, Cole Porter, Rodgers, and Hart, […]
The opening sequence of UCSB Dance Department’s COVID-coping triptych of dance films shows a series of eerily empty spaces all over the seaside campus. But it’s not meant to be a metaphor or pandering to the pandemic, said artistic director Delila Moseley, a longtime professor of dance at UCSB. Moseley has been able to actually […]
Opera director Josh Shaw has never been one to follow conventions. After setting aside a career as a tenor (his resume includes appearing at the now-defunct “Opera Under the Stars” series at the Arts and Letters Café in the Sullivan Goss Gallery back in 2010), he co-founded Pacific Opera Project a decade ago to provide […]
Ed Lister, who is known in both Los Angeles and Santa Barbara as a skilled scenic artist with credits in the theater credits and mural making, has created a series of vibrant abstract silk screen prints, or serigraphs. They were made starting in the early 1970s while he was teaching printmaking at the Chelsea School […]
Given the lockdown, I spent Christmas Day virtually streaming a host of entertaining Santa Barbara events that I was unable to attend, as I have done annually for the past 13 years. Susan Keller’s Santa Barbara Revels Venetian Celebration, taped at the Marjorie Luke Theater, “was as close to a live performance as was possible […]
TEDxSantaBarbara founder and executive producer Mark Sylvester realized early on as COVID-19 crept into our consciousness that he’d probably have to cancel his annual convention that each fall brings together as many as 10 speakers with local spins on the TED trio of topics (technology, entertainment, and design). That’s when the disappointment set in. “It […]
A cabaret for Christmas might seem like the mixing of metaphors, but the idea made a lot of sense for PCPA as a way to produce something during the pandemic. That was partly because a show that’s akin to a revue could be done from people’s homes during lockdown without damaging the storyline. But it […]
