David Soar

Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony in two Orchestral Series programs, November 10–12 and November 17–18, featuring works by composers with California ties: Emerging Black Composers Project winner Jens Ibsen’s Drowned in Light, Gabriella Smith’s Breathing Forests, Salonen’s own kínēma, and three works by Igor Stravinsky.   

All new rehearsal photos have been released for the English National Opera's Peter Grimes  at the London Coliseum. Check out the photos here!

This September, opening the 2023/24 Season at the London Coliseum, the English National Opera (ENO) presents Benjamin Britten’s searing psychological drama, Peter Grimes. David Alden’s production returns for its second revival. Following its premiere in 2009, this production won a South Bank Sky Arts Award in the Opera category.  

Single tickets for the San Francisco Symphony’s 2023–24 season go on sale Saturday, July 15 starting 10am via the Davies Symphony Hall box office and will be available online and via phone beginning 12pm the same day.

The English National Opera announces a one-off concert of Benjamin Britten's Gloriana this December.

The Southbank Centre today announces details about Inside Out, a brand-new online season of music, literature and comedy from 17 September - 30 December.

Acclaimed German director Tatjana Gürbaca and designer Klaus Grünberg make their English National Opera (ENO) debuts with ENO's first new Rusalka in two decades, with Corinne Winters in the title role and David Butt Philip as the Prince.

In a minimalist setting, Benjamin Britten's 20th-century reflections on Herman Melville's novel are deftly captured musically and visually.

The best versions of La boheme are simple enough to let the genius of Puccini's opera shine, rather than distracting the audience with quirky updates and subliminal messages. The ENO's decision to return to Jonathan Miller's luscious production for the fourth time in a decade, is a beautifully pitched celebration of beauty in penury, love and heartbreak.

In opera, there is often nothing more dangerous than female sexuality. Salome is a story where a woman's love becomes dangerous obsession, leading to bloodshed and necrophilia. From a feminist perspective, the story is challenging to say the least, but as Richard Strauss' opera, the result should be both brutal and beautiful. In this new production from the ENO, Australian Director Adena Jacobs makes her UK debut with a supposedly feminist perspective of the story that at times entertains, but more often baffles.

Carmen is the best-known work by French composer Georges Bizet, and one of the most famous operas in the entire art form - numbers such as the Habanera and the Toreador Song have permeated the popular consciousness as little else has. The opera's heady combination of passion, sensuality and violence initially proved too much for the stage, and it was a critical failure on its 1875 premiere. Bizet died shortly after, and never learned of the spectacular success his Carmen would achieve: the opera has been performed more than five hundred times at Covent Garden alone.

Giacomo Puccini's LA BOHEME will play at The Metropolitan Opera through March of 2018, and the critics are weighing in!

Puccini's La Boh me, the most-performed opera in Met history, returns to the repertory this season with 15 performances of Franco Zeffirelli's production from October 2, 2017 to March 10, 2018. Initial performances feature soprano Angel Blue making her Met stage debut as Mim , with the role sung later in the season by Anita Hartig and Sonya Yoncheva. Three acclaimed tenors, Dmytro Popov, Russell Thomas and Michael Fabiano, share the role of Rodolfo. Sopranos Brigitta Kele and Susana Phillips play Musetta with baritones Lucas Meachem and Michael Todd Simpson as Marcello.

Due to pregnancy, German soprano Anett Fritsch has withdrawn from singing the role of Mica la in Carmen. The role will now be sung by Russian soprano Kristina Mkhitaryan, who will make her Royal Opera debut as Mica la. She has recently sung the role of Mica la for Norwegian National Opera in Oslo.

Beautiful, unknowable Lulu - all things to all men, who has 'never pretended to be anything by what men see in me' - is the chameleon-heroine revealed in Berg's musical mirror. But just as she reinvents herself with each new gaze, so the opera itself morphs and shifts with passing time, reflecting back the concerns of each age. A smudgy parable about German economic growth becomes by turns a sharply-drawn feminist critique or a Freudian exploration of pleasure. This week, in a post-truth world crowned by a Trump presidency, Lulu looks like a timely tale of illusion and reality and the danger when you can no longer tell the difference between the two.

Francesco Demuro and Michael Fabiano will sing the role of Rodolfo in the remaining 2014 performances of La Bohème, replacing Ramón Vargas, who has withdrawn from the remainder of the performances due to illness.

Sonya Yoncheva will make her North American role debut as Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata at the Met this January. Yoncheva was originally scheduled to sing Musetta in La Bohème at the Met this season. Instead, she will sing Violetta, one of her most acclaimed roles, as a replacement for Marina Poplavskaya, who has withdrawn from the performances. Yoncheva sings the role on January 14, 17, 21, and 24.

Hei-Kyung Hong will sing the role of Mimì in Puccini's La Bohème on September 26 and 29, replacing Ekaterina Scherbachenko, who is ill. As previously announced, Hong also sings the role on October 4.

Last heard at the Proms in 1977, The Midsummer Marriage is Tippett's answer to Mozart's The Magic Flute, an opera rich in symbolism and psychology, trials and transformations. Paul Groves and Erin Wall are Mark and Jenifer, Ailish Tynan and Allan Clayton, Bella and Jack, two couples tested by a series of supernatural interventions on the shortest night of the year.

Ildar Abdrazakov takes the title role in Don Giovanni for the first time at the Met beginning November 28, conducted by Edward Gardner, in his second major Mozart role assumption of the season. The first revival of Michael Grandage's 2011 production features a cast of rising stars, almost all of whom make house role debuts in Mozart's classic opera of seduction, vengeance, and retribution. Other cast members singing their first Met performances of their roles include Susanna Phillips as Donna Anna,Emma Bell as Donna Elvira, Ekaterina Siurina as Zerlina, Charles Castronovo as Don Ottavio, Erwin Schrott as Leporello, and David Soar in his Met debut as Masetto; they are joined by Raymond Aceto as the vengeful Commendatore.