Transitions

Hawai’i Opera Theatre has appointed Elizabeth Askren as its inaugural principal guest conductor. Askren has served as a master teacher at both The Dallas Opera’s Hart Institute for Women Conductors and the Paris Opera’s Academy.

James Barbato has been appointed general director of Palm Beach Opera, succeeding David Walker. An alumnus of OPERA America’s 2021 Leadership Intensive, Barbato previously served as the PBO’s director of artistic administration.

Detroit Opera has hired Andrew Berg as chief development officer. Berg has previously worked in development for educational institutions including the University of Chicago.

The Dallas Opera has appointed Paolo Bressan as chorus director and head of music beginning with the 2024–2025 season. Bressan has served as an associate conductor with the company since 2015.

Pittsburgh Festival Opera has hired Mark Burnett as director of development. Burnett most recently led development and communications at Pittsburgh’s Sarah Heinz House, a youth services organization.

LA Opera announced that James Conlon will conclude his 20-year tenure as music director at the end of the 2025–2026 season, becoming conductor laureate.

Stuart B. Holt, previously director of learning and engagement at the Metropolitan Opera Guild, has been named president and CEO of ArtsFairfax, the local arts agency of Fairfax County, Virginia.

Seattle Opera has appointed bass Kenneth Kellogg as its inaugural artistic ambassador, a role in which he will advise the company on season planning, racial equity initiatives, and other community partnerships.

The Metropolitan Opera announced that Tilman Michael, currently chorus master of the Frankfurt Opera, will join the company as chorus director beginning in the 2024–2025 season.

Cindy Sadler has joined Tulsa Opera as director of marketing and communications. She comes from Florida Grand Opera, where she served as director of media relations and creative services.

Maria Todaro, who has been serving as interim general director of Florida Grand Opera, has been named general director of the company. Todaro will continue in her role as general director of Hudson Valley International Festival of the Voice.

Zannie Voss has announced that she will retire as director of SMU DataArts. Jen Benoit-Bryan, currently research director, will take over as director.

Kudos

Tyshawn Sorey won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Adagio (For Wadada Leo Smith), a concerto for saxophone and orchestra. Sorey, along with lyricist Terrance Hayes and tenor Lawrence Brownlee, wrote the 2018 song cycle Cycles of My Being, which premiered at Opera Philadelphia and was later seen at Lyric Opera of Chicago and Opera Roanoke. Sorey was composer in residence at Opera Philadelphia from 2019 to 2023.

LA Opera awarded its 2024 Eva and Marc Stern Artist Award to three individuals in recognition of their artistic contributions to the company: conductor Louis Lohraseb, who has led works including Tosca and The Barber of Seville; stage director Kaneza Schaal, who directed Omar and Highway 1, USA; and administrator Patricia McLeod, the company’s senior director of development. They will split the $75,000 prize.

San Francisco presented the Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor, to director Michael Cavanagh shortly before his death in March (see “In Memoriam” below). The award recognized Cavanagh as a guiding creative force behind several important new productions for San Francisco Opera.

The winners of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024 Eric and Dominique Laffont Competition were sopranos Lydia Grindatto and Emily Richter, mezzo-soprano Meridian Prall, tenor Daniel Espinal, and baritone Navasard Hakobyan. Each received a $20,000 cash prize. Mezzo-soprano Maggie Reneé won Opera Columbus’ 2024 Cooper- Bing Competition, earning a prize of $10,000.

In Memoriam

Sir Andrew Davis, music director emeritus of Lyric Opera of Chicago, died on April 20 at age 80. Davis was born in Ashridge, England, and as a music student, studied both piano and organ, later playing both instruments with the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. He made his conducting debut in 1970 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; the next year, he made his U.S. debut leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. His opera-conducting debut came in 1973: Strauss’ Capriccio at the Glyndebourne Festival. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1981 with Salome. He met his wife, American soprano Gianna Rolandi, when she played Zerbinetta in a 1984 Met run of Ariadne auf Naxos with Davis at the podium; the two married in 1989.

Davis made his Lyric Opera of Chicago debut in 1987 with Le nozze di Figaro. In 2000, he was named the company’s music director and chief conductor, and he and Rolandi moved to Chicago that same year. She became a mainstay of the Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center, Lyric’s young artist program, serving as its first direc­tor of vocal studies (2001–2006) and then as the program’s director (2006–2013). Rolandi died in 2021; that same year, Davis retired as music director. During the course of his Lyric Opera career, he led nearly 700 performances of 62 operas.

Winnipeg-born director Michael Cavanagh died at age 62 on March 13. Cavanagh originally trained as a singer, but in the early 1990s shifted to stage directing and artis­tic administration roles at Manitoba Opera and Edmonton Opera. He also wrote, directed, and performed at the Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, creating the librettos for two one-act operas, Gisela in Her Bathtub and City Workers in Love. His breakthrough production came in 1995, when he directed Turandot at Edmonton Opera; in 1998, he was named that company’s artistic director. Cava­nagh went on to direct more than 150 productions at 30 opera com­panies in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. At San Francisco Opera, he directed six new productions, including stagings of the three Mozart/Da Ponte operas. In 2020, he was named artistic director of the Royal Swedish Opera.

Production manager and admin­istrator Dan Duro died on March 26 at age 69. Over the course of his career in opera and theater, Duro served as production director at Palm Beach Opera, the Santa Fe Opera, Portland Opera, and Opera Pacific. He was vice president of facilities and operations at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center (2001–2005) and production man­ager at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2005–2008). From 2008 to 2016, he worked at Boston Lyric Opera as managing director and planning advisor.

Péter Eötvös, the prolific Hun­garian opera composer, died on March 24 at age 80. His 2004 Angels in America, based on Tony Kush­ner’s epic play, had its U.S. pre­miere in Boston in 2006 and was subsequently performed in Los Angeles, Fort Worth, and New York. His one-act Senza Sangue was per­formed in concert by the New York Philharmonic in 2015.

Soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez died on February 2 at age 75. Fernandez attended the Academy of Vocal Arts in her native city of Philadelphia and subsequently studied at the Juilliard School. In the 1970s, she toured as Bess in Houston Grand Opera’s acclaimed pro­duction of Porgy and Bess, which brought her a two-year contract with the Paris Opera. In 1982, Fernandez debuted at both New York City Opera and Detroit Opera, and in 1994 sang Aida amid the ancient Egyptian temples at Luxor. She is perhaps best remembered for her sole venture into film, in the title role of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1981 cult classic Diva.

Seiji Ozawa died on February 6 at age 88. The Japanese conductor was most associated with the sym­phonic repertoire, especially at the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where he served as music direc­tor for nearly three decades. But Ozawa also had a significant opera career. He was music director of the Vienna State Opera from 2002 to 2010, and he regularly led opera performances at the Saito Kinen Festival, which he founded in Matsumoto, Japan, in 1984. At the Metropolitan Opera, he conducted Eugene Onegin in 1992 and The Queen of Spades in 2008.

The German composer Aribert Reimann died at age 88 on March 13. Productions of his nine operas were largely limited to Europe, but his 1978 Lear, written for his frequent collaborator Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, came to San Francisco Opera in 1981, with Thomas Stewart in the title role.

Scottish conductor Stewart Robertson died on February 12 at age 75. From 1988 to 2006, he was music director of Glimmerglass Opera (now the Glimmerglass Festival) and was subsequently named music director emeritus. He also served as artistic director and principal conductor at both Florida Grand Opera (1998–2009) and Opera Omaha (2005–2008). He led perfor­mances at companies across North America, including Lyric Opera of Chicago, Detroit Opera, Opéra de Montréal, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, Opera Philadelphia, Des Moines Metro Opera, and New York City Opera. Robertson made commercial recordings of two Glimmerglass productions: Stephen Hartke and Philip Lit­tell’s The Greater Good, in 2006; and Richard Rodney Bennett and Beverley Cross’s The Mines of Sulphur (2004), which was nominated for a Grammy Award as Best Opera Recording.

American soprano Margaret Tynes died on March 7 at age 104. Born in Virginia, she studied at the Juilliard School and Columbia University, toured as Bess for six years, and made her New York City Opera debut, as Lady Macbeth, in 1952. But it was nonetheless an era when U.S. opera stages were largely closed off to Black singers, and in the 1960s and 1970s, Tynes worked primar­ily in Europe — notably in Luchino Visconti’s 1961 production of Salome at the Spoleto Festival in Italy and at the opera houses of Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. Her Metropolitan Opera career was brief, consist­ing of just three 1974 performances in the title role of Jenůfa. Out­side of opera, Tynes sang on Duke Ellington’s 1957 album A Drum Is a Woman and appeared alongside Harry Belafonte in the 1956 musical Sing, Man, Sing!

Michael Willis, former direc­tor of press and public relations at the Glimmerglass Festival, died on February 16 at age 81. A former publishing executive, he served at Glimmerglass from 1995 to 2004 and succeeded in attracting national and overseas press cover­age for the festival.

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