This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area performing arts, host David Latulippe talks with Greg Eldridge, apprentice stage director at the 2019 Merola Opera Program, which concludes its summer festival with the Merola Grand Finale. This concert features the 29 young artists (pictured) who are part of the program and who have been selected from more than 800 international applicants.
Conducted by George Manahan, music director of the American Composers Orchestra and Portland Opera, the concert showcases a dazzling array of arias and ensembles from operas, including Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and La finta giardiniera, Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda and La fille du régiment, Offenbach’s La belle Hélène, Verdi’s Falstaff and La Traviata, and others.
The Merola Grand Finale is on Saturday, August 17 (7:30pm) at the War Memorial Opera House (301 Van Ness Ave.) in San Francisco.
From the San Francisco Choral Society, we talk with conductor and artistic director Robert Geary about the ensemble’s upcoming concerts, featuring the world premiere of teach your children, a new work by composer David Lang, who will join the conversation.
Also on the program: a semi-staged performance of Carl Orff’s boisterous masterwork, Carmina Burana. Performing with the members of the SF Choral Society are soprano Marnie Breckenridge; tenor J. Raymond Meyers; bass-baritone Eugene Brancoveanu; the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir; and the California Chamber Symphony. Concerts are on August 16 and 17 (8pm) at Davies Symphony Hall, (201 Van Ness Ave.) in San Francisco.
Plus, we talk with lead actors Evan Alexander Smith and Angela Grovey of the Broadway comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, which can be seen at the SHN Golden Gate in San Francisco - this week only, through August 18.
The Play That Goes Wrong won Best New Comedy at the 2015 Laurence Olivier Awards and has been described as a hilarious hybrid of Monty Python and Sherlock Holmes.
Open Air with host David Latulippe; heard live on Thursday, August 15 at 1pm. Listen now or anytime.