In the News
Over the decades, I’ve never seen the job [of the Merola Grand Finale] dispatched with the elegance, verve and sheer theatrical imagination that Aria Umezawa brought to it on Saturday night in the War Memorial Opera House.
San Francisco Chronicle
Excerpts from recent news articles
29 Dec 2019
Associated Press
Soul-searching in opera world after tumultuous #MeToo year
It was a tumultuous year in the opera world, a year in which sexual harassment allegations against superstar Placido Domingo prompted his disappearance from American stages and sparked deep soul-searching...
— Read article
11 Oct 2019
barczablog
AMPLIFIED OPERA @ birth: The Way I See It
I was among the audience present at the Ernest Balmer Studio for the birth of Amplified Opera, the brain-child of Teiya Kasahara & Aria Umezawa, in the first of three different programs to launch a new opera company...
— Read article
23 Sep 2019
ABC News
Artist labor union hosting anti-harassment training in wake of Placido Domingo allegations
The American Guild of Musical Artists (AGMA) is hosting a forum on harassment and intimidation in Los Angeles on Monday in the wake of allegations of sexual harassment against opera star Placido Domingo...
— Read article
17 Feb 2019
Stage Door
(La) voix humaine
Against the Grain Theatre, Toronto’s acclaimed independent opera company, has begun an exciting new programme – the AtG Incubator Initiative. Its first project, styled as (La) voix humaine, casts a tenor instead of a soprano in Francis Poulenc’s 1959 setting of Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monodrama La Voix humaine...
— Read article
6 Jul 2018
SFGATE
Merola’s Schwabacher Concert in SF puts opera in context
Most performing opportunities for opera singers fall into one of two categories: doing the entire show or singing individual arias and duets. So it’s a rarer and slightly offbeat pleasure when you get a chance to hear young artists show off their talents in extended scenes...
— Read article
2 Jul 2018
The Mercury News
How SF’s Merola program aims to make opera rich
Aria Umezawa has a talent for bringing opera to life. You can see it in every scene she directs. There’s an immediate, richly imagined quality to her work that brings out the best in young artists and makes audiences sit up and lean in...
— Read article
11 Dec 2017
San Francisco Classical Voice
Adler Fellows Shine in their Finale Concert
San Francisco Opera's Adler Fellows program is famous as a training ground for opera's next stars. In their year-end concert (" The Future is Now"), the current class of fellow promised to continue that tradition...
— Read article
4 Oct 2017
San Francisco Chronicle
Operatronica dance party gives EDM an operatic twist
There’s nothing like an offbeat collaboration to get people to pay attention to things they might dismiss with a shrug. Croissants and doughnuts. Rihanna and Puma. Lady Gaga and Metallica. And now, opera and electronic music...
— Read article
15 Aug 2017
SFGate
West Edge Opera strikes a blow in favor of Ambroise Thomas’ ‘Hamlet’
Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, defies most attempts at operatic adaptation. Anyone coming at the Bard with music paper in hand had better be Verdi, and even he backed down at the prospect of turning “King Lear” into an opera...
— Read article
13 Jun 2017
San Francisco Classical Voice
Merola’s Own Celebrate Opera Program’s 60th Anniversary
In a thrilling, star-studded concert, famous alumni and the youthful Class of 2017 joined together on Sunday to mark the Merola Opera Program’s 60th birthday. Supporters of the program filled Herbst Theater, following a sold-out gala dinner in City Hall...
— Read article
15 Mar 2017
7x7
SF Opera Lab Brings Interactive Opera to Oakland Nightclub
Launched last spring, SF Opera Lab strives to bring operatic music and performances outside of the War Memorial Opera House and into small, unusual spaces around the Bay Area. This month's venue, a nightclub in Uptown Oakland, is not exactly where you would expect opera to be belted out on stage...
— Read article
15 Nov 2016
Flare
Screw the Status Quo: Meet the Millennial Who Made Opera Cool
Aria Umezawa saw her first opera, Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, when she was an eight-year-old living in the 6. The experience stayed with her long after the final curtain fell, but she had no schoolyard friends to share it with. Even then she knew she wanted to retell classic opera stories in a way that would resonate with people under the age of a million years old. Make opera cool? NBD...
— Read article
21 Aug 2016
SFGate
Merola finale displays talents of vocalists — and young director
The Merola Grand Finale — the procession of operatic solos and duets that concludes the San Francisco Opera Center’s summer training program — represents an annual challenge for a stage director. Each scene is drawn from a different dramatic world featuring diverse characters, and it’s up to the director to make the evening somehow feel like more than simply a highbrow variety show...
— Read article
10 Jun 2016
Schmopera
Die Fledermaus? Die Fleder-Fabulous!
Did you ever wonder what it what a anime-circus-drag operetta would look like? I give you, Opera 5's Die Fledermaus (#O5FM). Johann Strauss II's stalwart favourite was given one of my favourite treatments last night. At The 918 on Bathurst Street (a former church then Buddhist temple), Opera 5 pulled out all the stops...
— Read article
7 Jun 2016
The Globe and Mail
In Opera 5’s Die Fledermaus, the audience is the party
Here's a sales pitch you don't often hear: "Free Beer – Opera Included." But Rachel Krehm and I have decided this is a perfect way to attract audiences to her opera company's creative production of Die Fledermaus that opens Wednesday for a four-performance run at the Bathurst 918 Theatre...
— Read article
7 Aug 2015
The Globe and Mail
Met’s Otello casting begs the question: Is whitewash better than blackface?
In a move that many would consider basic human decency, the Metropolitan Opera in New York has decided to break from tradition, and forgo the use of blackface in its upcoming production of Verdi's Otello (based on Shakespeare's Othello)...
— Read article
