Melody Moore has been growing as a singer under our eyes, here in the Bay Area, we can claim her as ours. She came here from Cincinnati to attend the SF Opera Merola program, a summer camp for future opera stars. She stuck around as an Adler Fellow, another learning program of the opera where the young singers get to act as understudy for the big name singers and play supporting roles in the main stage productions. She got rewarded with several roles there that she totally nailed: the countess in The Marriage of Figaro or Mrs Pinkerton in Butterfly. And the biggest role to come this fall, married on stage to Thomas Hampson in the world premiere of The Heart of a Soldier. Now she alternates gigs all over the country with more local events like an homage to Pauline Viardot with Lotfi Mansouri, cabaret with the SF Ballet, or concerts with the New Century Chamber Orchestra. more ›

Music directors in San Francisco are like airports: they must have a TLA. Alongside MTT, we have NSS, aka Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who heads the New Century Chamber Orchestra. NSS is actually the name of her music label, we did not just ascribed that tag to her. more ›

The Fall music season has been launched in orbit with a glitzy gala at the Symphony. This week continues with classical music galore: the other heavy hitter, the SF Opera introduces his new music director, Nicola Luisotti, in Verdi's Il Trovatore, tonight. The all-star cast includes Dmitri Hvorostovksy, Sondra Radvanovsky and the comparatively simple to spell Stephanie Blythe in a story that makes Harry Potter look realistic. We don't go to the opera to watch reality tv, and the arias are sublime. You can check for yourself, for free, at a live simulcast of the War Memorial Opera House performance on a giant screen at the AT&T ballpark on Saturday, September 19th. Also, you can get the pupu platter sampler of the upcoming season, also for free, zilch, zero, nada, with the traditional Opera in the Park concert. Please arrive early, it gets really crowded on the Sharon Meadows lawn, and you don't want to miss SF Chronicle's editor-at-large Phil Bronstein's unintentionally hilarious attempts at a stand up comedy routine, if he's MCing again this year. more ›