Tag archives: Opera

State Street Ballet closes out its 30th season with The Brilliance Program: Balanchine, Arpino, and Beyond, a title meant to characterize the works featured on the May 9-10 performances at the Lobero Theatre – but also apropos for the company’s spectacular season, the first full one under the leadership of Artistic Director Megan Phillips and […]

Pianist-actor-playwright-producer Hershey Felder has appeared on stages across the world more than 6,000 times in original works focused on a single famous composer. His works include George Gershwin Alone, Beethoven, Maestro Bernstein, Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin, Our Great Tchaikovsky, and A Paris Love Story – Debussy. A few of his similar filmed creations have […]

It was an evening of decidedly high note – not to mention a few in between – when Opera Santa Barbara hosted its annual La Dolce Vita gala for 155 guests dying to be in the right aria at the Montecito Club, raising around $150,000. The gala committee was co-chaired by Karen Knight and Carol […]

Opera Santa Barbara’s latest production of Mozart’s classic work The Marriage of Figaro turned into the Love Boat when head honcho Kostis Protopapas and director Sara E. Widzer, set the location on the ocean liner SS Seville on the Mediterranean in the 1930s. The two-hour 40-minute Lobero show, with set and projection design by Yuki […]

April Amante hasn’t had a whole lot of opportunities to sing in Santa Barbara since earning her Doctor of Musical Arts at UCSB in June 2023. There was the concert in May 2024, where the soprano returned to campus for the UCSB Opera Gala, directed by her mentor Isabel Bayrakdarian, the soprano who heads the […]

Opera Santa Barbara’s latest production, Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci with conductor Kostis Protopapas at the Lobero, was a triumph! Under director Octavio Cardenas, New York-based tenor Robert Stahley as the principal character and Los Angeles-based soprano Alaysha Fox as Nedda were quite superb, with baritones Ben Lowe as Taddeo and local resident Matthew Peterson as Silvio, and […]

Opera Santa Barbara launches its 2024-25 season with a classic in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci at the Lobero Theatre on November 8 and 10. The tale of lust, jealousy, and murder inside a traveling troop of comedians features the famous aria “Vesti la giubba”, which closes the first act. OSB’s new production of the dramatic thriller, set […]

Carmen, Bizet’s classic opera, never loses its entertainment value. Having last seen it when it was staged by Opera Santa Barbara a year ago, the latest production at the Granada, courtesy of the Music Academy of the West’s Summer Festival, was a decidedly contemporary twist on the Spanish love story conducted by Daniela Candillari, principal […]

Santa Barbara warbler Katy Perry appeared topless in a new image shared on social media last week. The former Dos Pueblos High student was debuting her new album cover and announcing it is titled 143, revealing that the release date is September 20. 143 is code for “I Love You” after being used in the […]

Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä, 71, former musical director of the Seoul Philharmonic, was in fine form at the Granada when he led the Academy Festival Orchestra in its first performance of the summer festival season. The highly entertaining concert opened with Wagner’s Overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. and Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer, concluding […]

When Paige Cameron enrolled at Northwestern in her home state of Illinois to study vocal performance, the plan was to sing her way to stardom.  “I really thought I was going to be an opera singer,” said Cameron, who goes by either she or they and has recently decided to lop off her hyphenated last […]

Opera Santa Barbara’s 2024-25 season doesn’t start until November, but the opportunity to purchase single (non-subscription) tickets to OSB’s three productions for less than $30 ends with the month of May. The season features Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci (November 8 & 10), Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (February 21 & 23) and Donizetti’s The Daughter of the […]

Everybody was clearly in the right aria when Robert Adams, opera critic for Voice magazine, and his art historian wife Nancy Caponi threw a Silver Anniversary garden party at their charming downtown home. More than 50 guests turned out to congratulate the tony twosome who were married at the Mission after a lengthy courtship after […]

Opera Santa Barbara sold out both performances at the Lobero of its highly entertaining show Zorro by Hector Armienta, who wrote both the music and the libretto. The action character, a sort of Spanish Robin Hood, made his debut in a 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano by author Johnston McCulley. The action – with […]

One hundred and five years after Zorro first appeared in the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano by American pulp fiction writer Johnston McCulley, the dashing vigilante hero who defends the commoners and fights for his fellow indigenous people of California, shows up with all of his swordplay, cunning, and romantic flair to take the […]

Opera Santa Barbara took over the Paseo Nuevo’s Center Stage Theater when it staged Xavier Montsalvatge’s charming El Gato con Botas with singers from the Chrisman Studio Artists. Puss in Boots, to give it its English title, was a purr-fect production with director of the studio, Tim Accurso, on piano for the hour-long show, mezzo-soprano […]

The entire opera world and other cultural institutions are all taking note of Maria Callas again as the 100th birthday of the soprano who was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century approaches on December 2. That includes both Angelina Jolie, who will star in an upcoming biopic, and […]

Opera Santa Barbara kicked off its 30th season on a particularly high note at the Granada when it staged Bizet’s 1875 masterpiece Carmen, the first time in seven years. The hugely entertaining three-hour, four-act show with Kostis Protopapas, general director, conducting, featured mezzo-soprano Sarah Saturnino, a Grand Finalist in the Metropolitan Opera’s Laffont Competition, in […]

A lot of the buzz surrounding Carmen is, naturally, centered around Sarah Saturnino, the young mezzo-soprano who makes her Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) and role debut as the fiery heroine of the title. Deservedly so, as Saturnino, who in April was chosen as one of the winners of Metropolitan Opera’s prestigious nationwide Laffont Competition, has […]