Merola Grand Finale 2025

The Merola Opera Program, a summer boot camp for young professionals at the beginning of their careers, concluded Saturday evening with its annual Grand Finale concert accompanied by the magnificent San Francisco Opera orchestra conducted by Kelly Kuo. Based on the earlier Schwabacher Concert and the fully staged Le Comte Ory, this year's crop of singers is the most consistently excellent I have ever heard at Merola. (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The Grand Finale programming was its usual potpourri of arias and opera scenes that sometimes worked well together and sometimes not. My favorite moments included an exquisitely beautiful duet from Handel's Giulio Cesare between soprano Ana Maria Vacca as Sesto and mezzo-soprano Sadie Cheslak as Cornelia.

Charlotte Siegel gave a few star performances this summer, continuing with the Io son l'umile ancella aria from Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur. Some of the performers understandably appeared a bit frightened holding the stage alone in the huge San Francisco War Memorial Opera House, but Siegel has a regal diva energy that grabs you immediately and the glorious soprano voice to back it up. She seems ready to hit the big time.

She was followed by a delightful quartet from Verdi's Falstaff, with Chea Kang as Nannetta, Alexa Frankian as Alice, Meg Brileslyper as Meg, and Sadie Cheslak as Quickly. The direction by Merola director Elio Bucky was funny and engaging, which was true for the entire concert.

Bass-baritone Wanchun Liang gave an amusing, resonant account of the title character conspiring in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi.

Another star of the summer program was Minghao Liu. His high, flexible tenor was amazing as the title character in Le Comte Ory a month ago, and so was his tackling of the impossibly difficult aria Ah, mes amis...Pour mon ame from Donizetti's La Fille du regiment.

When Sheri Greenawald was in charge of Merola Opera programming, a lot of obscure, mediocre 19th century French opera was represented, but the new Curator and Artistic Director Carrie-Ann Matheson seems to have a fondness for Gaetano Donizetti instead. Joshua Kosman, on his Substack site On a Pacific Aisle, wrote an amusing complaint about the 66% Donizetti count at the earlier Schwabacher concert, and the Grand Finale offered more of the same with three selections from old Gaetano. This included a beautifully sung duet from Lucia di Lammermoor, with soprano Eva Rae Martinez as Lucia and baritone Gabriel Natal Baez as a surprisingly sympathetic Enrico.

Then there were two songs orchestestrated by Berlioz, including the composer's La spectre de la rose performed nicely by mezzo-soprano Ariana Maubach, and Schubert's Erlkönig, with Benjamin Dickerson above doing a good, creepy job of telling the story of a boy stolen by the elf king.

The concert ended with a series of English language selections, starting with soprano Sofia Gotch singing the Willow Song from Douglas Moore's Ballad of Baby Doe. Tristan Tournaud sang well in Lonely House from Weill's Street Scene, and bass John Mburu did magnificent justice to Jerome Kern's Old Man River. The final number was the duet Wheels of a Dream from the musical Ragtime by Stephen Flaherty and Terrance McNally, and it was a disaster. This was through no fault of the performers, bass-baritone Justice Yates as Coalhouse and Charlotte Siegel as Sarah. The problem was that somebody decided to amplify the two singers' voices, Broadway style, and after an entire evening of listening to fabulous unamplified voices filling a 3,000+ seat opera house, it sounded awful. To add insult to injury, the entire cast finished the concert singing a choral arrangement of Golden Days from The Student Prince. I can deal with Donizetti but I draw the line at Sigmund Romberg.

Merola Grand Finale 2024

The Merola Opera Program, a summer-long training session for aspiring opera professionals, closed out its 2024 iteration with a Grand Finale in the San Francisco Opera House last Saturday night. Though I didn't attend any of their public concerts this summer, the consensus from friends was that this year's roster featured a particularly talented group of singers. The grab-bag Grand Finale concert, with 23 singers performing 20 different operatic scenes, proved them right. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Here are a few of my favorite moments: Moriah Berry was an expert stage comedian and her soprano perfectly crystalline as Norina in Donizetti's Don Pasquale ("Pronta io son"). She was ably supported by baritone Olivier Zerouali as Malatesta.

A rather dull duet from Mozart's Cosi fan tutte ("Ahime! Che cosa avete?...Il core vi dono") was enlivened by the lovely interplay between mezzo-soprano Lucy Joy Altus as Dorabella and baritone Justice Yates as Guglielmo. Yates also returned for a great solo aria from Terence Blanchard's Fire Shut Up in My Bones ("Lord, take this wanting from me").

A rarity from Mascagni, L'amico Fritz ("Suzel, buon di") was sensitively sung by tenor Michael John Butler as Fritz and soprano Viviana Aurelia Goodwin as Suzel, depicting a gentle flirtation while springtime is busting out all over with ripening cherries.

The showstopping number of the night was the famous duet from Bellini's Norma ("Mira, o Norma..."), performed by soprano Lydia Grindatto and mezzo-soprano Simona Genga as Adalgisa. They sang it better than a few professional sopranos I have heard over the decades at the San Francisco Opera. Grindatto also performed the title role in a quintet from Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and an operetta ditty from Emmerick Kalman's Die Czardasrustin ("Tanzen mocht ich"), and was superb in all three.

I have always wondered how the assignments at the Grand Finale are chosen because sometimes singers appear in two or three scenes while others barely get one. One example was mezzo-soprano Lindsay Martin as Sister Helen and soprano Elizabeth "Hanje" Hanje as Sister Rose in a scene between two nuns from Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking ("Now and at the hour of our death"). I would have loved to hear more from Hanje but this was it for the evening.

At least there were two appearances by the brilliant young tenor Giorgi Guliashvili, in the Lucia di Lamermoor scene and in a duet with soprano Alexa Frankian from Tchaikovsky's Iolanta.

The final 20 minutes of the long concert leaned into "light classical," beginning with Longing for Diamond Mountain, a Korean art song by Young Sup-Choi. It was performed beautifully by soprano Hannah Cho, baritone Hyungjin Son, and bass-baritone Donghoon Kang. All three of them were outstanding in various scenes on the program, as was Kara Morgan in her brief appearance as Charlotte in Massenet's Werther. Good luck to all of the young artists embarking on a professional career.

Merola Grand Finale 2016

The Merola Program, San Francisco's summer opera boot camp for aspiring young professionals from around the globe, wrapped up its season with their annual Grand Finale concert at the San Francisco Opera House last Saturday. 23 vocalists sang arias and duets over a professional orchestra, and as usual the event felt like it went as long as Wagner's Götterdämmerung, but at least it was a fun Götterdämmerung. The talents onstage ranged from the good to the not-quite-up-to-snuff to the spectacularly talented, and half the fun was making up your mind which was which, a completely subjective endeavour. Following are a few of my favorite people. (All photos by Kristen Loken.)



Countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen gave a ravishingly beautiful account of Orfeo's scena with Eurydice (the lovely soprano Teresa Castillo) when he unfortunately looks back during Gluck's Orfeo ed Eurice. Cohen has a great future ahead of him in the odd repertory for male sopranos that includes early music and contemporary operas.



New Zealand tenor Amitai Pati, as he demonstrated during his wonderful performance as Ferrando in Cosi Fan Tutte earlier this summer, has a smallish, exquisitely on-pitch tenor that is unforced and beautiful. The selections for the various performers are always weird, a mixture of old chestnuts and total obscurities like the scene from Berlioz's Beatrice et Benedict above with Pati and mezzo soprano Alexandra Schenck as the quarreling Shakespearean lovers.



Pati returned for one of those old chestnuts with baritone Andrew G. Manea, singing the famous bromance duet, Au fond du temple saint from Bizet's Les Pecheurs de Perles. There is certain operatic music that benefits from young, unhardened voices while others profit from an older, more developed edge, and the Bizet duet turned out to be a perfect vehicle for the former. This was the most beautiful rendition of the duet I have ever heard live, and much of the reason was the sense of innocence and the sheer beauty of Pati's voice and phrasing.



Mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven and soprano Mary Evelyn Hangley sang a long scena from Donizetti's Anna Bolena, and this was a case of an opera that profits from older, more seasoned singers. I liked the voices of both sopranos very much, especially during an earlier Schwabacher concert, but this difficult piece didn't particularly bring out the best in either of them.



Soprano Yelena Dyachek with tenor Brian-Michael Moore sang a duet from Flotow's Martha, which was depressing because Dyachek has one of the most extraordinary young voices I have ever heard and Martha, at least from the evidence of this scene, is dreck. She was also in the earlier Merola production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte, in the lead role of Fiordiligi, a performance that reminded me of Carol Vaness in her early 20s singing Vitellia in Mozart's La Clemenza de Tito. What both performances shared was an ability to sing fiendishly difficult music as simply and naturally as if one was warbling to oneself before breakfast. I envy everyone at the Houston Opera, where Dyachek is headed to join their young artist program, because she has what can be called a porno voice. There are plenty of singers with pretty voices and plenty of singers with huge voices, but they very rarely coincide in the same person. Dyachek is one of those special combos, and her musical instincts are good besides.



Tenor Kyle van Schoohoven sang a huge aria from Wagner's early opera Rienzi, and though he's not quite ready for heldentenor prime time, he's just about there. Plus, the student stage director Aria Umezawa gave him six supernumerary women with candles to do fun movement around him, and it worked well as did most of the rest of her staging with minimal props, schtick or sets.



Baritone Cody Quattlebaum sang Guglielmo in that already legendary Merola Cosi Fan Tutte this summer with Dyechka and Pati. In the Grand Finale, he sang There's a law, a weird, sexist aria from Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti that he managed to fill with charm. He arrived onstage with a manbun and halfway through pulled out the restraints and let his long hair down. Quattlebaum has a lovely baritone and stage charisma to burn.

2010 Merola Grand Finale

Young opera singers' boot camp, otherwise known as the Merola Opera Program, finished up its 10 weeks of instruction with the traditional Merola Grand Finale at the San Francisaco Opera House on Saturday evening. It was a three-hour concert of operatic scenes featuring the 21 graduating singers accompanied by the full Opera orchestra in the pit. The Finale used to be a competition, with cash awards given out under various sponsors' names, but that has changed over the years, and now the competition involves being chosen for one of the coveted two-year Adler fellowships by the company.



The set for the evening consisted of four tall prop cypress trees from the last act of Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" which is being presented yet again this fall season in the old Zach Brown production which must be about 30 years old. The conductor was the young Dean Williamson, who was fine in the two Richard Strauss selections, but took just about everything else at much too lugubrious a tempo. The first number was from the opening of Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress," and after a shaky start, Alexander Lewis and Janai Brugger-Orman (above), along with Kevin Thompson (below), were wonderful.



Thompson ended the first half of the program with an aria from an obscure Strauss opera, "Die schweigsame Frau," and he was great, filling the house with his monster bass and ending the piece with a sustained low note that seemed to last for a good ten minutes.



A few of my favorite other moments were Eleazar Rodriguez and Abigail Santos Villalobos (above) in a duet from Donizetti's "La Fille du Regiment." Although the schtick from director Ted Huffman in this scene was a bit much, looking like "Anything You Can Do" from "Annie Get Your Gun," the performers made it work.



I also loved the stage savvy Thomas Florio (above) as Bottom in a long scene from Britten's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" along with the lovely sounding Hye Jung Lee as Tytania. By the end, I was wishing they'd just continue and perform the whole, wonderful opera, except for the fact that they used adult women as The Fairies when they are expressly written for boy sopranos. This is the third time in a row I've heard this substitution, and I don't want to have to say this again: It doesn't work!



The penultimate number was a duet from Gounod's "Romeo et Juliette," yet another selection from 19th century French opera, a genre that is not on my list of musical favorites. It was sung by Daniel Montenegro and Nadine Sierra (above), the two leads in "The Elixir of Love" earlier this month at Fort Mason, and they were fabulous, though the director had them pawing each other so aggressively, it seemed as if they might end up naked a la Zeferelli's movie version.

(All performance photos are by Kristen Loken Ansley.)

2026 Merola Grand Finale

Over the last couple of decades, I have written eight posts about the summer-ending Merola Grand Finale at the San Francisco Opera House. As Joshua Kosman notes in his short wrap-up of this year's concert of aspiring professional opera singers, "Good luck to any critic trying to write about it, though. There’s no story on offer aside from Here are the Merolini to give you one last glimpse of what they can do." (All photos are by Kristen Loken.)

Somebody once left a comment on one of my Merola posts to the effect that "you always say that this year had the best overall crop of singers ever," and they were probably right about the repetitive hyperbole. This year I am not making that claim, however, and if you can't say anything nice, refer to people who can. Steven Winn wrote an extensive, appreciative listing of his favorite moments at SFCV, Charlise Tiee at the Opera Tattler did the same, and educator Matthew Travisano offered a sweet-spirited account at Parterre Box.

Most of the operatic greatest hits selections were love duets, and one of my favorites was Ariana Maubach as Charlotte and Charles Styles as Werther, singing Il faut nous separer from Massenet's Werther. Styles's voice is too small to be singing this role in a large opera house at this point in his career, but it's a very pretty tenor, and his interaction with mezzo-soprano Maubach made me remember how lovable this opera can be.

Another duet was performed by mezzo-soprano Theo Claveles as Didon and Matthew Sink as Enee, singing Nuit d'ivresse et d'extase infinie from Berlioz's Les Troyens. It may be my favorite operatic love duet in the world, and the pair did it justice.

Near the end of the three-hour long concert, there was a huge bolt of energy from tenor Ryan Bryce Johnson, singing the grotesque Aria of the Worm from Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles. The young singer has stage charisma to burn and it was a joy to see him light the place up. Johnson's evolving career should be be interesting to watch.

Merola Opera Grand Finale

The Merola Opera Program summer bootcamp for aspiring professionals came to an end last Saturday with a Grand Finale concert at the San Francisco Opera House. In many respects, the annual concert is a bittersweet affair, because making a living as an opera singer may be one of the trickier career goals in the world, requiring extraordinary musical talent, a deity provided voice, a huge amount of work, connections, and luck. On the other hand, the highly competitive program is offered for free, with places to bunk at the homes of patrons, a small stipend, and colleagues who often stay supportive friends for life. (All production photos are by Kristen Loken.)

The Grand Finale concert is always a strange grab-bag of arias and scenes from operas that span centuries, styles, and languages. This year the selections were tilted towards the obscure, with a few exceptions such as a duet from Leoncavallo's I Pagliacci sung with feeling and grace by baritone Dimitri Katotakis above and soprano Alexandra Razskazoff (not pictured), making one actually care about the characters.

After a lovely aria from Massenet's Cendrillon by mezzo-soprano Ashley Dixon, tenor Andres Acosta above sang an aria of joy at being free of his wife, from Donizetti's one-act opera Rita. Student stage director Victoria Crutchfield turned it into a production number where our hero is finally free to be gay, which was borderline offensive, but not as offensive as the original story which is a comedy about domestic abuse. Acosta sang and danced all over the David Hockney Turandot stairs which were the backdrop for the second half of the evening, and he and his buddies performed with such panache that the number was a triumph. Plus, Acosta has a beautiful voice.

Another highlight was a scene from Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, with mezo-soprano Samantha Hankey as the serious drag king composer and soprano Jana McIntyre as the frivolous and flirtatious Zerbinetta. Hankey in particular sounded gorgeous and it made me wish for a full production of my favorite Strauss opera.

The penultimate scene before the all-hands-on-stage finale involved a quartet of singers from Donizetti's La Favorite. Acosta returned as Don Gaspar, as did Ashley Dixon as Leonor, accompanying bass-baritone Szymon Wach as the king, and tenor Addison Marlor above as the young lover Fernand. They were all wonderful, especially Marlor who had already impressed everyone during the first half of the program in a scene from Ambroise Thomas' Mignon.

The conducing by Antony Walker was very Goldilocks, sometimes too fast, sometimes too slow, and sometimes just right. Overall, I thought he and the orchestra did a fine job with the many kinds of music they were performing. Crutchfield directed the scenes so they flowed smoothly from one to the next, and managed not to be completely overwhelmed by the weirdly inappropriate Turandot sets. Good luck to all the Merolini, and may some of them make it all the way upstream to a professional singing career.

Merola Grand Finale 2012

The Merola Opera Program's summer training of young professionals came to an end on Saturday evening with their annual Grand Finale, which involves standing, singing and sometimes acting out various Arias and Scenes from operas that have nothing to do with each other. This summer's crop of singers was unusually strong overall, with a couple of star standouts in soprano Jennifer Cherest and tenor Chuanyue Wang. (All photos in this post are by Kristen Loken.)



In fact, all the tenors in this year's program were very good, including Andrew Stenson, Theo Lebow, AJ Glueckert, Yi Li, Casey Candebat, and Joshua Baum (above left, with Seth Mease Carico and Gordon Bintner in an amusingly staged trio from Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri.)



The conducting by the Philharmonia Baroque's Nicholas McGegan of the San Francisco Opera Orchestra was all over the place, sometimes superb and occasionally running off the tracks. The same can be said for the stage direction by apprentice stage director Jennifer Williams. Most of the acting was great, such as the lascivious duet between Rose Sawvel as Eurydice and Joseph Lattanzi as Jupiter, above, in a scene from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld. Other scenes, like a chunk from Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, didn't fare as well.



If there was any serious criticism to be made of the evening, it was the physical production itself. They used a huge wall backdrop with handholds on it from the upcoming Moby Dick production this fall, which served as an acoustically friendly backdrop for the singers. The problem was that the lighting was godawful, with the singers wandering in and out of visibility all evening.

There was also a single, piercingly annoying ghost light in the middle of the stage all evening (it's being hugged above by tenor Andrew Stenson during an aria from The Merry Widow). The only other props were some overturned chairs and an overturned divan. This is the third Merola production in the last year where I have seen overturned furniture as part of the concept, and I still don't get it. When an upstage chair was picked up and sat on properly by one of the singers an hour into the evening, a gentleman behind me muttered, "It's about time."

Merola Opera Grand Finale 2009

The Merola Opera program wrapped up its twelve-week summer training program with a grand finale concert featuring its 24 graduates in scenes and arias from all over the repertory. (The onstage photos are by Kristen Loken Anstey Photography.)



Thanks to "apprentice stage director" Fernando Parra Borti (above), this was the best staged version of the annual concert I've seen. There were a few complaints that there wasn't enough movement in the various scenes, but I appreciated the lack of gimmicks and overacting that tend to pop up at these concerts. Plus, the stage-within-a-stage was not only beautiful but versatile enough to make for seamless entrances and exits for the succession of scenes that had nothing to do with each other. The only real clunkiness involved announcements over a loudspeaker by the stage manager with the names of who was going to be singing in the next installment. This wasn't Borti's fault, as it seemed the program insert listing the musical selections and their singers had gone missing in a storage room overnight, probably stolen by the Phantom of the Opera.



The concert started with one of the best all-purpose introductions imaginable with baritone Alexsey Bodanov (above) singing Tonio's Prologue in Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" where he introduces the audience to the performers with the line: "Evo piuttosto che le nostre povere gabbane" (Ah, think then, sweet people, when you behold us clad in our motley)." The performers were certainly a motley crew, ranging from a contralto to a countertenor, and for the most part they were very good and sometimes even splendid.



Definitely in the latter category was contralto Suzanne Hendrix (above left) who sang an aria from Handel's "Giulio Cesare" with an absolutely beautiful voice. She was followed by a duet from Strauss' "Arabella" with Susanna Biller (above right) singing Zdenka and Lori Guilbeau as Arabella. Though I'm not a big fan of the opera, the two of them sounded great and easily soared over the huge Strauss orchestra. Hendrix and Biller also teamed up with mezzo Maya Lahyani (above middle) for a scene from Berlioz' rarely done "Beatrice et Benedict," an opera I would love to see performed some day.



Lahyani also performed as Carmen with Brian Jagde as Don Jose (above). Her voice, stage deportment, and physical beauty are good enough that she's probably at risk of being typecast in that role for the rest of her career.



Because of the Merola program's structure, with its two staged operas at Fort Mason and two concerts with operatic scenes, some singers receive a lot of exposure and others get relatively little. This year it seemed that tenor Eleazar Rodriguez (above) was getting the shaft, with a tiny part in "L'Amico Fritz" and nothing more than a walk-on in the final ensemble. However, somebody must have decided this wasn't right, and he was a surprise addition to the program, singing a solo aria from Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio" that was fiendishly difficult. Though the performance was imperfect, Rodriguez's voice is special and his rendition was impressively beautiful.



I have to confess I'm not a big fan of countertenor voices with a few exceptions like Brian Asawa and David Daniels. Ryan Belongie (above), singing a florid aria from Handel's "Xerxes," joins that exceptional group with an honestly lovely voice.



The evening's biggest problem was that it went on too long at over three hours, and I wasn't exactly looking forward to the penultimate number, which was that old bore Alidoro's aria from "La Cenerentola" being sung to Ellie Jarrett. However, Michael Sumuel (above) turned out to have one of the most exciting voices of the entire concert. There aren't that many baritones in the world who can sing the ornamented music of Rossini convincingly, and Sumuel is one of them. In fact, he sounds ready to sing in any opera house in the world.



The evening ended brilliantly with the entire ensemble singing the finale from Verdi's "Falstaff," telling us that everything in the world is a jest. It was so well performed and conducted by Antony Walker that it made me want to see the whole opera immediately, a feeling shared by Janos Gereben (click here). I wonder if the San Francisco Opera still has that wonderful Jean-Pierre Ponelle production, or if it's gone the way of all old sets.