It’s not something being exploited because it has popular songs in it. It’s the first time under my aegis there’s been a fully operatically scaled production. Should we amplify? Should we take the chorus downstage? But this year, we have 50 choristers, a full orchestra. That was also a summer season, directed by Lotfi Mansouri. But when we later brought that small company to the Opera House, the production was dwarfed. It worked well in smaller, commercial houses, like the Golden Gate Theatre or the Orpheum. Yes, the point is that we always tried to keep the costs down, working out of Houston. That was the first time you brought Porgy to San Francisco, right? When you were running the Houston Grand Opera, you staged Porgy and Bess as a real opera for the first time. Northside San Francisco sat down with him to talk about this phenomenally American masterpiece. Gockley, the opera’s general director, took the stage and exclaimed, “Play opera!” And the game, according to Puccini, began.īut it’s Porgy and Bess that holds a special place in Gockley’s heart. “Say, there are some pretty good voices here tonight,” marveled the S.F. People stood in the house and in the stadium to sing the national anthem. Beer, hot dogs and arias are compatible after all.īack at the Opera House, the ballpark crowd was part of the performance. That’s 4,000 more than last year’s event at the ballpark. One of the season’s highlights was the simulcast of Puccini’s Tosca at AT&T Park. Tickets were reportedly being scalped at $600. Porgy and Bess was a sell-out from the day the box office opened. Tosca, with wonderfully tight, well-crafted performances, and La Traviata, with Anna Netrebko, the most famous soprano in the world, were on their way to being completely sold out at this writing. There was a mad rush for tickets to all three productions. Opera’s boss, looks back at successful summer seasonĪs the San Francisco Opera’s Summer Season draws to a close, it’s being heralded as one of the most successful runs on record for the company.
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