San Francisco Opera – September 2023 to June 2024
Works by up to date composers Mason Bates, Rhiannon Giddens and Kaija Saariaho convey recent voices to San Francisco Opera’s subsequent season on the War Memorial Opera House and continues a development to current new works.
Adding to final fall’s world premiere of Antony and Cleopatra by John Adams and this coming June’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego by Gabriela Lena Frank, these three items place San Francisco squarely in an period that’s reviving curiosity in fashionable opera.
Recently, new operas have been among the many best-attended occasions in main American opera corporations’ seasons, which can be one cause why San Francisco Opera’s plans for 2023 and 2024 lean closely on them. Cultural variety additionally performs a major position in these selections: the co-commissions for subsequent season come from composers with roots in a spread of heritages.
Bates, whose energetic music revels in electronics, noticed his opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs debut in 2017 at Santa Fe Opera. The piece’s debut in San Francisco had been deliberate for the 2020 season however was derailed by the pandemic. This biographical opera focuses on the founding father of Apple and his wrestle to reconcile the pc world with the true world round him, and opens on 22 September.
Giddens, who fronted the Southern string band Carolina Chocolate Drops, collaborated on Omar with composer Michael Abels, who has written works for the Kronos Quartet and penned award-winning scores for a number of large Jordan Peele films. Based on the self-written story of an African scholar captured into slavery within the early 1800s, Omar debuted final 12 months at Spoleto USA. It opens on 5 November.
Saariaho’s ethereal music, steeped in her native Finland, informs Innocence, her fifth opera in a two-decade profession. The tense, 90-minute, one-act piece, which debuted in 2021 in Aix-en-Provence, explores a household’s guilt and innocence after a traumatic occasion. It opens 1 June 2024.
Mexican tradition and artwork are the touchstones for Frank’s opera about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their fraught marriage within the midst of constructing beautiful artwork. (It debuts 13 June 2023.) Also within the present season, is John Adams’s opera, based mostly on the Shakespeare play and reflecting the worlds of historic Egypt and Rome.
2023-24 launches an initiative through which music director Eun Sun Kim conducts a piece by Giuseppe Verdi and one by Richard Wagner in every season, with plans for a Wagner Ring cycle in some unspecified time in the future. Verdi’s Il trovatore with soprano Angel Blue in David McVicar’s manufacturing would be the first opera within the season, which can even embrace Lohengrin with David Alden’s manufacturing from Covent Garden.
Rounding out the autumn season, Kim conducts The Magic Flute with native favourite Amitai Pati as Tamino. And, in a departure from tying the season-opening Opera Ball on 8 September to a particular work, the occasion can be a part of a night with tenor Roberto Alagna and soprano Aleksandra Kurzak in live performance with the opera orchestra.
Besides Saariaho’s Innocence, June 2024 options Pene Pati, Amatai Pati’s brother, in The Elixir of Love, and a well-deserved revival of Handel’s Partenope within the juicy Christopher Alden manufacturing that was successful in 2014. Soprano Daniela Mack and tenor Alek Shrader reprise their roles, and Christopher Moulds conducts.
Harvey Steiman