Arts & Entertainment

Gerald Carpenter: Soprano Patricia Racette Christens Opera Santa Barbara’s New Season

Curtain lifts at 5 p.m. Sunday for gala performance of selected works

By Gerald Carpenter, Noozhawk Contributor | November 20, 2010 | 11:14 p.m.

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Soprano Patricia Racette opens Opera Santa Barbara’s 2010-11 season with a gala concert at The Granada at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Soprano Patricia Racette, in her recent Met triumph, Il Trovatore.

The concert, with a full orchestra conducted by Valéry Ryvkin, will serve as a kind of preview of the new season, as well as glimpses seasons to come. Joining Racette on stage for part of the evening will be mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack. Mack and Racette will sing several duets and Mack will solo in arias from the mezzo repertory.

Racette has been very busy of late, scoring hige successes as Cio-Cio San in Anthony Minghella’s acclaimed staging of Madama Butterfly and as Elisabetta in Giuseppe Verdi’s Don Carlo. Her singing of the standard repertoire has attracted the attention of several of our more notable contemporary opera composers, who have composed operas around her special gifts. These include Carlisle Floyd (Cold Sassy Tree), Tobias Picker (An American Tragedy) and Paul Moravec (The Letter).

The program for the gala concert will include selections from operas by Giacomo Puccini (Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème), Léo Delibes (Lakmé), Verdi (Il Trovatore), Leonard Bernstein (Trouble in Tahiti), Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele), Georges Bizet (Carmen), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Consul), Jacques Offenbach (Tales of Hoffman) and Christoph Gluck (Orfeo ed Euridice).

Tickets for the concert run from $28 to $188, and are available from The Granada box office, 1214 State St., or by phone at 805.899.2222, or click here to order tickets online.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributor. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

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