Doing so many lectures around San Diego County on our season, I'm being asked what my favorite moments are in the various operas I'm talking about.  Here's a post-Thanksgiving offering, then.  My own favorite arias and ensembles from our upcoming season, just to whet your appetite for what's just around the corner!  Enjoy!

Nabucco might have been Verdi's first success, but it was his third opera.  What were the first two like?  And how about the two that followed that success in 1842?  Let's explore the operas of Verdi, the early years.

San Diego Opera is producing the evergreen standard "La boheme" by Puccini, an opera that all opera lovers know and love.  But what about one of his lesser known works?  Not terribly long ago, I discovered "La Rondine" and realize what a get this opera is.  Let me introduce it to you so that you can come to love it as much as I do!

Maybe you haven't noticed, but recitative is treated differently in different  eras of opera history.  Earlier operas utilized harpsichord and other keyboard instruments to accompany recitative, later operas used the full orchestra.  But are operatic characters treated differently, even within the same opera?  Let's explore!

OK, I'm a sucker for gorgeous melodies, the perfumed atmosphere of lush orchestrations and over-the-top dramatic singing.  No, not Puccini...but Massenet!  He's one of my all time favorite opera composers, call it a guilty pleasure.  Let me introduce you to some music that you may not know from Massenet's output.

Impress your opera-loving friends with your newly found knowledge of one of the most exciting musical events in most standard repertory Italian operas and that even occasionally shows up in the French and German repertoire!  The Concertato…here it is.  Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask.  Free of charge.

You may well wonder: was there such a thing as a German opera composer before Wagner?  His works so outshone every other German composer within his lifetime that we tend to forget about people like Weber, Spohr, Nicolai, Lortzing and Marschner.  Who??

Let's get familiar with the music from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet by exploring some of the great artists who essayed these roles in the past.  Does the name Eide Norena ring a bell?  Or Georges Thill?  both of them will become favorites of yours after you hear this!

Now here's a sample of wonderful music from operas that I'm sure you've either never seen or never WILL see!  You'll hear music by such diverse composers as Cilea, Catalani, Auber, Thomas and...Rossini.  Enjoy this excursion into the unknown.

Let's take a few minutes to listen to excerpts from our 2010 Season which feature the secondary principal singers, roles like Marcello, Ismaele, Mercutio and Germont.  You can have the greatest Rodolfo and Mimi in the world, but you'd better have a Marcello who can match them!