Tag archives: Opera
The Music Academy of the West’s astonishing guest composer series reaches its crescendo with this pair of weekend performances of Kevin Puts’ annually produced opera Elizabeth Cree, from MAW’s Lehrer Vocal Institute. The one-act opera Elizabeth Cree is a macabre gothic thriller adapted from Peter Ackroyd’s similarly titled book. Set in Victorian times, it serves […]
Somewhere between a swirl of silk gowns and the clink of champagne flutes, Opera Santa Barbara’s Moonlight Masquerade invited guests to slip behind velvet masks and enter the Rosewood Miramar for an evening of operatic enthrallment and Venetian glamor. As people entered to servers smoothly interweaving the masked crowd with caviar and canapés, they were […]
The Westmont Opera Orchestra and more than a dozen cast members will sing, dance and swashbuckle their way through Pirates of Penzance, a hilarious story of adventure, danger and romance on Friday, Jan. 23, and Sunday, Jan. 25, both at 7 pm in Porter Theatre. “Pirates is a roaring fun show that allows for flexibility […]
‘Twas the weekend before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. Unless “house” refers to the Granada, where all sorts of creatures, including mice, rats, and other critters and characters won’t just be stirring but also leaping, pirouetting, gliding, and spinning all over the stage as State […]
Condor Express owner Hiroko Benko hosted a romantic evening cruise along the Santa Barbara coastline, delighting opera lovers with a stunning live performance at sea. Guests enjoyed powerful numbers by American Idol contestant and soprano Micaela McCall, baritone Brian Hotchkin, and pianist Renée Hamaty, who performed opera favorites during the two-hour sunset cruise. Hotchkin sang […]
Opera Santa Barbara’s new singular focus on performing meticulously crafted works solely at the Lobero Theatre – which Artistic and General Director Kostis Protopapas calls “right-sizing and refocusing on our mission” – brings three works spanning both genres and centuries of operatic repertoire. Pietro Mascagni’s 90-minute Cavalleria Rusticana (November), directed by Layna Chianakas, updates the […]
After the extravagant production of the doom and gloom-infused morality and reckless wreckage-and-punishment tale of Don Giovanni at the Granada in mid-July, things turn a bit frothier and lighthearted with the Music Academy of the West Lehrer Vocal Institute’s performance of one-acts. Stripped down to the bare essentials and staged much more intimately at Hahn […]
Opera director Mo Zhou made her Music Academy of the West debut two summers ago with a reimagining of La bohème – from 1830s Paris to Brooklyn in 2011. This weekend, Zhou and the talented MAW vocal and instrumental fellows take on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, with the director moving the time and place from Spain […]
Opera Santa Barbara has neatly transformed itself into an efficient juggernaut that seems to have made the company more sustainable, at least for the moment, by staging all of their opera productions twice at the Lobero, rather than ranging from the grand stage of the Granada to the Lobero and the intimate Center Stage theatre. […]
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 […]
