This week on Open Air, KALW’s radio magazine for the Bay Area performing arts, guest host Kevin Vance talks with American bass Soloman Howard, who sings the role of Angelotti in San Francisco Opera’s current production of Tosca. Also, a conversation with Merola Opera Program artists Edward Graves and Mikayla Sager about Back Home: Through the Stage Door, a digital video production featuring all 2021 Merola participants as they prepare for their return to the theater. And we broadcast episode eight of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s summer series Tales of the Resistance - Volume 2: Persistence, as part of our Corona Radio Theater Initiative.
San Francisco Opera inaugurates its 99th season with five performances of Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, for the first time with Eun Sun Kim as the Company’s music director. Tosca is the first opera staged in the War Memorial Opera House since the pandemic shutdown. Kim leads the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, Chorus and a cast headed by Ailyn Pérez in the title role, tenor Michael Fabiano as Cavaradossi and Alfred Walker as Scarpia.
American bass Soloman Howard performs the role of Cesare Angelotti, who is a former consul of the Roman Republic and an escaped political prisoner in Rome of June 1800, when Tosca takes place.
Soloman Howard is winner of the Kennedy Center’s 2019 Marian Anderson Vocal Award and a graduate of Washington National Opera’s Domingo-Cafritz Young Artist Program. This coming season, he is scheduled for debuts at the Opéra National de Paris in a new production of Aida and at the Glyndebourne Festival as Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte.
From the Merola Opera Program, we talk with program artists, tenor Edward Graves and soprano Mikayla Sager about Back Home: Through the Stage Door, a digital video production filmed at the Herbst Theatre and featuring all 2021 Merola participants, plus music by Dominick Argento, Vincenzo Bellini, Carlisle Floyd, Francis Poulenc, and Anton Webern, as well as Handel, Mozart, and others. The streaming on-demand production goes public on August 27.
Plus, we broadcast episode eight of the Mime Troupe’s summer series Tales of the Resistance - Volume 2: Persistence.
The eighth episode is titled: Hobos in Space - In the near future, the Starship Manifest flees a dying Earth for a better, brighter future among the stars. Hobos in Space follows the struggles of the Hapless Outcasts of Bureaucratic Obsolescence as they attempt to rejoin their new society. Can they survive in the underbelly of this luxury space utopia? Can dashing Captain Bacay and kind Counselor Dara help them get what they need? Or, will they all remain adrift in the vast emptiness of space?
Open Air with guest host Kevin Vance, heard live on Thursday, August 26 at 1pm, to be archived at this very location until the Internet dies. Listen now or anytime…