SFO Begins 101st Season on September 8

Eun Sun Kim conducting the San Francisco Opera Orchestra (photograph by Stefan Cohen, courtesy of San Francisco Opera)

We are now less than a month away from the beginning of the second century for San Francisco Opera (SFO). This season there will be an opening weekend of festive activities before the first performance of the season’s first opera production, Giuseppe Verdi’s Il Trovatore. As usual, the “heart” of those activities will be the annual Opera Ball; but there will also be several performance opportunities.

The first of these will be the Opening Night Concert, which will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, September 8. Program details have not yet been finalized. However, there will be two vocalists serving as guest artists, tenor Roberto Alagna and soprano Aleksandra Kurzak. They will perform with the SFO Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Music Director Eun Sun Kim. A Web page has been created for purchasing tickets. Ticket prices range from $30 in the Balcony to $300 in the Grand Tier and the Dress Circle. It will also be possible to purchase a livestream of the performance for $27.50. Because it is “live,” there will be no replay period for this video.

The weekend will conclude with the annual performance of San Francisco Chronicle Presents Opera in the Park. Kim will again be the conductor. She will lead the SFO Orchestra in a program that will feature arias and duets performed by vocalists that will be starring in fall season SFO performances. The program will begin at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, September 10. The venue will be the Robin Williams Meadow in Golden Gate Park. The event is free and open to all.

This year SFO pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg will be one of the many participants in the annual Flower Piano event. For those not aware of this event, it involves installing a dozen grand pianos on the 55 acres of the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. Greenberg’s performance will take place on Saturday, September 9, in the Zellerbach Garden. (Anyone that enters Flower Piano will receive a map showing the locations of all the different venues.) Beginning at 3 p.m., Greenberg will present a one-hour program that pairs virtuosic arrangements of selections from grand opera with works by Impressionist composers.