Seattle Opera announced today its new chorus master & head of music staff is Michaella Calzaretta, an experienced conductor acclaimed for her high standards and superb preparation skills. Calzaretta will prepare the 36-member Seattle Opera Chorus, which will be featured during the 2022/23 season in The Elixir of Love, Tristan and Isolde, Samson and Delilah in Concert, and La traviata. Additionally, Calzaretta will oversee the company’s musical activities, aiming for the highest standards in musical performance.
Monday, June 27, 2022
Seattle Opera Appoints Michaella Calzaretta Chorus Master & Head of Music Staff
Friday, June 17, 2022
A Thousand Splendid Suns Synopsis
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Photo by Philip Newton |
Music by Sheila Silver
Libretto by Stephen Kitsakos
Adapted from the novel by Khaled Hosseini
Fifteen-year-old Mariam, the cast-off bastard child of a rich father, is forced to leave her rural home after her mother’s suicide and marry a middle-aged shoemaker from Kabul named Rasheed. Alone, scared and forced to wear the burqa, something unfamiliar to her, she tries her best to be a dutiful wife but is unable to conceive a child. Consequently, she lives a loveless existence with a husband who abuses her regularly for her failure to give him a son.
Tuesday, May 24, 2022
A CONVERSATION WITH MEZZO-SOPRANO J’NAI BRIDGES
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Photo by Todd Rosenberg |
Friday, May 6, 2022
Black Opera
The Afro Future
By Naomi André, Ph.D.
In her final essay of this three-part series, Seattle Opera Scholar-in-Residence Naomi André speculates about the future of Black Opera. Using the lens of Afrofuturism—a cultural aesthetic that combines science-fiction, history, and fantasy to explore the African American experience and aims to connect those from the Black diaspora with their forgotten African ancestry—André charts one path forward. In this essay, she uses historic events, music, and the writings of Octavia E. Butler to point the way.
Naomi André is a professor in the University of Michigan, where her teaching and research focus on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her writings include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her publications include Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and African Performance Arts and Political Acts (2021), which she co-edited. She has served as Seattle Opera’s Scholar-in-Residence since 2019.
Thursday, March 24, 2022
Racial Equity and Social Impact Plan: Progress Report—Year One
For nearly 60 years, Seattle Opera has used these words to guide creative innovations, to develop richer community partnerships, to increase access to the art form, and to enrich people’s lives. Today, these same words inspire our commitment to enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion in opera and the community that surrounds us. This report highlights Seattle Opera’s drive towards a more equitable art form and world.
Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Director's Outlook: A Thousand Splendid Suns
By Roya Sadat
A Thousand Splendid Suns' Stage Director, Roya Sadat, shares her perspective on this new opera and how it reflects the culture of her native Afghanistan.
Roya Sadat is Afghanistan’s first woman film and television producer during the post-Taliban era and the winner of more than 20 international film awards, including the 2021 Kim Dae Jung Nobel Peace Film Award and the 2018 International Women of Courage Award presented by the United States Department of State. Sadat is among the BBC’s 100 Inspiring and Influential Women for 2021. Her three films—A Letter to the President (’17), Playing the Taar (’08), and Three Dots (’03)—have been invited to more than 60 International Film Festivals. A Letter to the President was selected as the official entry from Afghanistan for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. In addition, she has produced eight documentary films, three television programs, as well as a music video.
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Praise for Blue
Read some of the reviews for Seattle Opera’s current production of Blue, from critics and audiences alike.
Photo credit: Philip Newton |
Tuesday, February 15, 2022
A Conversation with Sheila Silver
The Composer of A Thousand Splendid Suns
Friday, February 11, 2022
Black Opera
The Golden Age
By Naomi André, Ph.D.
Will Liverman as Charles M. Blow in The Metropolitan Opera's premiere of Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Terence Blanchard |
Naomi André is a professor at the University of Michigan, where her teaching and research focuses on opera and issues of surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her writings include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her publications include Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement and co-editor of African Performance Arts and Political Acts (2021). She has served as Seattle Opera’s Scholar-in-Residence since 2019.
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Black Opera
Looking Back: A Historical Perspective
By Naomi André, Ph.D.
The cast from National Negro Opera Company's 1941 production of Aida. |
The opera world is currently presenting more productions that articulate African American experiences than ever before. Companies around the country are staging works such as Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Charlie Parker’s Yardbird, and The Central Park Five, to name a few. Therefore, Seattle Opera invited our Scholar-in-Residence, Naomi André, to place Black Opera in historical, contemporary, and future perspectives. This article by André is the first of a three-part series. In this essay, André highlights several historic milestones in Black Opera. Her second article—to be published in the Blue program—will investigate contemporary titles and artists. In her final piece—published in The Marriage of Figaro program—André speculates on future Black Opera stories and productions.
2022/23 Season
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