Fall Lecture Series

Tuesday, September 2

Simon Boccanegra, by Giuseppe Verdi - Simon Williams, University of California, Santa Barbara and Chair of Department of Dramatic Art; Wagner authority; author of Richard Wagner and Festival Theatre; Richard Wagner and the Romantic hero, also books on the German theater and on Sharkespeare. The opera contains a melodramatic plot full of intrigue, about a fourteenth-century Genoese freebooter who rose to become Doge of Venice. A famous highlight of the opera is the Council Chamber scene - one of enormous vividness and power in this compelling operatic creation of the Italian master, Verdi.

Tuesday, September 9

Critic and journalist Ken Smith has traveled widely, covering music on five continents for a range of publications including the Los Angeles Times, Travel & Leisure and Opera News.

He currently divides his time between New York, where he serves as a North American correspondent for Gramophone magazine, and Hong Kong, where he is the Asian performing arts critic for the Financial Times, a featured columnist for China’s Opera magazine and a regular commentator for RTHK Radio 4.

He has given lectures and pre-concert talks for Santa Fe Opera and Central City Opera, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic, the University of Hong Kong and Columbia University’s Miller Theatre.

He is co-music director of Dong Folk Songs and Miao Music for China’s MediaFusion group, and an advisor to the Western China Cultural Ecology Research Workshop. An active collaborator with Stewart Wallace and Amy Tan’s research in China, he is the author of Fate! Luck! Chance!...The Making of The Bonesetter’s Daughter Opera, published by Chronicle Books.

Tuesday, September 16

Mitchell Morris teaches in the Department of Musicology at UCLA. Among his wide-ranging research interests are: opera; music, gender, and sexuality; problems of musical ethics; American popular song; Russian and Soviet music; whale songs; and film and television music.

Winner of multiple distinguished teaching awards, Professor Morris has spoken widely at conferences and music festivals in the US and abroad.

Closely involved with the LA Opera, he is currently assisting preparations for the upcoming LAO production of the Ring cycle. His book The Persistence of Sentiment: Essays on Display and Feeling in ’70s Popular Music, is forthcoming.

Tuesday, September 23

Preview of 2008-09 Season, West Bay Opera Company. The speaker, José Luis Moscovich, will give highlights of the WBO season, aided by live singers of the company.

Tuesday, September 30

Preview of 2008-09 Season, Opera San José. Larry Hancock will speak about the OSJ season, with musical excerpts illustrated by live singers.

Tuesday, October 7

Idomeno, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Jonathan Khuner, Assistant Conductor and Prompter of the San Francisco and Metropolitan Opera Company, as well as the Bayreuth Festival of the Levine Ring; Artistic and Musical Director, Berkeley Opera. He illustrates his lecture with piano examples, amply showing his knowledge of opera, and his love in sharing the joy he feels in music. This operatic masterpeice, premiered when Mozart was two days shy of his 25th birthday, is filled with floried vocal writing and eloquent orchestra episodes.

Tuesday, October 21

Boris Godunov, by Modest Petrovich Musorgsky - Richard Taruskin, University of California, Berkeley, since 1987; Russian opera authority; author of many books on Russian composers including Musorgsky. He also is author of the acclaimed six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. A popular lecturer, Dr. Taruskin, always has new insights into the characters, settings, and historical tales of the operas he presents. This complicated story of a Russian Czar, haunted by his past, who disintegrates before our eyes, should provide exciting musical theater.

Tuesday, October 21

The Elixir of Love, by Gaetano Donizetti - Alexandra Amati-Camperi, is Associate Professor and Director of Music Programs at the University of San Francisco; a specialist in the Italian Renaissance, Italian opera, Romantic era piano music, and German Baroque choral music; she also is the author of books and articles on operatic topics in journals and encyclopedia; and a professional program annotator and pre-concert lecturer. With her delightful sense of humor in play, this very knowledgeable speaker, who just returned from a year in Rome, will prepare the audience for a charming comedy celebrating innocence and love, with a 1915 setting in the Napa Valley of California.

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