Meet our lecturers

Simon Boccanegra - Simon Williams

Simon Williams is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of California Santa Barbara. He is an authority on several aspects of European theater and drama and is known internationally as one of the leading authorities on the music dramas of Richard Wagner. He was recently invited to sit on the inaugural editorial board of the prestigious new serial publication, The Wagner Journal. His book Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre provides a through introduction to Wagner’s work and Wagner and the Romantic Hero, recently published by Cambridge University Press, has won very enthusiastic reviews. He reviews regularly for Opera News. He has lectured worldwide on Wagner and has served as English-language audience lecturer at the Bayreuth Festival. He has spoken on operas by Bartok, Berlioz, Britten, Mozart, Puccini, Richard Strauss and Verdi at opera houses and opera guilds in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle and Orange County. The operas he has directed at UC Santa Barbara include The Turn of the Screw, La finta giardiniera, Werther, Hansel and Gretel, and The Gondoliers. He is also the author of German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries and Shakespeare on the German Stage. Within the next few months he will have completed editing the first History of German Theatre in the English language, to be published by Cambridge University Press. He is about to embark on editing an Encyclopedia of Actors and Acting.

Idomeneo - Jonathan Khuner

Jonathan Khuner has been Artistic and Musical Director of Berkeley Opera in California since 1993, and has conducted five productions of Mozart operas there. He earns his living as Assistant Conductor and prompter for San Francisco Opera (since 1981) and the Metropolitan Opera (since 1997), and has appeared several times as well with the Lyric Opera of Chicago (prompting for their Ring productions in 1996 and 2005). In 1996 he was also the prompter for the Ring Cycle at the Bayreuther Festspiele.

Besides appearing frequently as guest conductor with various California opera companies—among them California Opera Association (Fresno), San Francisco Lyric Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera (San Luis Obispo), West Bay Opera, and Livermore Valley Opera—Khuner also initiated an opera workshop performance course for the University of California at Berkeley (2001–2004), and gave the San Francisco Opera Guild and San José Opera Guild lectures on La Rondine last season.

His particular experience with Mozart's Idomeneo includes prompting the San Francisco Opera production in 1999, and preparing a production at the New Israeli Opera, Tel Aviv while he was Resident Assistant Conductor there in 1992-93. He is a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, and earned degrees from U.C. Berkeley in Mathematics and Musicology.

The Elixir of Love - Alexandra Amati-Camperi

Alexandra Amati-Camperi, originally from Italy, holds a BA/MA in Slavic Studies and Philology from the Universita degli Studi di Pisa (Italy), degrees in piano from the Conservatory of Music of Lucca (Italy), and both an MA and a Ph.D. in Musicology from Harvard University. She has taught at Harvard, UC Davis, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and is presently Associate Professor and Director of the Music Program at the University of San Francisco.

Her interests include the Italian Renaissance, Italian opera, Romantic piano music, and German Baroque choral music. She has published and read paper on Renaissance and operatic topics in several journals and conferences. Her latest book, Philipe Verdelot: Madrigali a sei voici, was published in 2004. She is now putting the finishing touches on a volume of the Rossini Opera Omnia: the critical edition on his 1810 on-act farsa La cambiale di matrimonio, due out in 2008. This 2007-08 year she is doing research in Rome for her book on the figure of Euridice in the operatic renditions of the Orpheus myth.

She is a member of the Council of the American Musicological Society, the Past President of the Board of Directors of the San Francisco Bach Choir, and sits on the Artistic Advisory Committee of the San Francisco Boys Chorus. She is a professional program annotator and pre-concert lecturer for many Bay Area organizations, including the San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Bach Choir, San Francisco Boys Chorus, and others.

Boris Godunov - Richard Taruskin

Since 1987 Richard Taruskin has been a Professor in the Department of Music at the University of California at Berkley.  His specialties include theory of performance, Russian music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, theory of modernism, analytical methods and Stravinsky.  He is the recipient of great awards and honors

The author of many books, he is most recently distinguished for The Oxford History of Western Music (2005), a six-volume set with 4,560 pages. Joshua Kosman called him "the most important and influential musical thinker of our day."

Some of his other books and articles include, Defining Russia Musically, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Mussorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practices in the 1960’s, and Music in the Western World: a History in Documents.

Summer 2009

Tosca - Heather Hadlock

Assitant Professor Musicology, Stanford University; specializes in French and Italian Romantic Era music, especially female characters in literature, author of "Mad Loves".

Porgy and Bess - Lynne Morrow

Biographies of the lecturers will be available spring 2009