Program Announced for Schwabacher Concert

Following The Song as Drama, the next public performance to be presented by the Merola Opera Program will be an annual presentation of the Schwabacher Summer Concert. As in the past, the program will be structured around staged scenes, one of which will be directed by current Merolina Anna Theodosakis. The remainder of the program will again be directed by Omer Ben Seadia, a Merola alumnus from 2014. The conductor will be Louis Lohraseb.

Pierre-Auguste Lamy’s engraving of a scene from the third act of Gounod’s Faust (public domain, from Wikimedia Commons)

This year the program will consist of extended scenes from six decidedly distinctive operas:

1. Lucrezia Borgia: Gaetano Donizetti’s opera about Venice in the early sixteenth century based on a play of the same name by Victor Hugo about the machinations of the Borgia family
2. Faust: Charles Gounod’s five-act account of the narrative in the first part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust
3. Pagliacci: Ruggero Leoncavallo’s two-act (with prologue) account of infidelity among commedia dell’arte players
4. Cendrillon: Jules Massenet’s freely-adapted grand opera account of Charles Perrault’s familiar “Cinderella” fairy tale
5. La bohème: Giacomo Puccini’s highly popular account of Bohemian life in nineteenth-century Paris
6. Ariadne auf Naxos: Richard Strauss’ eccentric opera in which, after having been abandoned by Theseus, Ariadne is entertained by a troupe of commedia dell’arte players

This concert will be given two performances on Thursday, July 11, at 7:30 p.m. and on Saturday, July 13, at 2 p.m. They will both take place in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at 50 Oak Street, a short walk north of the Van Ness Muni station. Each date has a separate Web page created for purchasing tickets, as indicated by their respectively attached hyperlinks. Once again Merola will be offering tickets to those 25 and under for only $10. In addition, there will also be a $10 rate for those seeing their first Merola production, with specific directions for this offer on the associated Web pages. All other ticket prices will be either $35 or $65. Those purchasing tickets in advance should be informed that a discount will be applied automatically when tickets for all four productions are included in the online cart. There is a single Web page listing all of those productions (with all necessary hyperlinks for the individual performances).