We can hardly believe it, but we are at the end of our 2023/24 mainstage season! Opera is a team sport, and we could not be more grateful for the artists, directors, designers, dramaturgs, BLO staff, backstage crew, board members, volunteers, and audiences that make what we do possible. THANK YOU! For the first time since August, our team has an opportunity to look back and see all that we’ve accomplished — and we’re pretty proud, if we do say so ourselves! Here are some of our favorite moments from the past year. A groundbreaking Madama Butterfly This September, [...]

Anne Bogart to be Presented with Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF) Gordon Davidson Award for Lifetime Achievement and Distinguished Service in the American Theatre (New York, March 7, 2024) Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDCF), the not-for-profit foundation of Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), announces that director and theatre visionary Anne Bogart will receive its 2023 Gordon Davidson Award. Named in honor of the founding artistic director of Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group and one of the visionary leaders of the resident theatre movement, the Gordon Davidson Award recognizes a director or choreographer for lifetime achievement and [...]

BLO Artistic Advisor and Boston Conservatory faculty member, Vimbayi Kaziboni joins a group of legendary conductors who have received the esteemed honor of the Ditson Conductor's Award. Columbia University has announced that Vimbayi Kaziboni has won the 2024 Alice M. Ditson Fund Conductor’s Award, a prestigious honor recognizing conductors who have a distinguished record of performing and championing contemporary American music. The Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University established the Conductor’s Award in 1945. It is the oldest continuing award honoring conductors for distinguished contributions to American music. The Zimbabwean-born conductor becomes the 79th recipient of what is [...]

Even with centuries of classical music available to us, Black composers and their works are still underrepresented, both on the opera and concert stage. It’s time we celebrate and bring in the voices of Black composers who have helped influence our musical landscape! In February, we celebrate Black History Month, a time for us to honor the triumphs and struggles of African Americans throughout U.S. history. Even though we are only highlighting five composers in this blog post, there have been hundreds of notable Black composers throughout American history, and thousands more we may never have the opportunity to [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799) was born into one of the most contradictory eras of modern European history. On the one hand, the valorous ideals of the Enlightenment caught fire during Bologne’s lifetime, as Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called for the individual to pursue knowledge and to expand their worldviews. On the other, the horrifying principles of scientific racism, coupled with the booming market of the transatlantic slave trade, unleashed violence upon the Atlantic world in a manner that remains unprecedented. Joseph Bologne arrived into the world when, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes, “Enlightenment-era [...]

Did Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart ever meet? Contemporaries, both prodigies and musical savants, one French and the other Austrian, Bologne and Mozart did indeed cross paths at least once in 1778, for about three months when they both were hosted in the French quartier, Chaussée d’Antin, in Paris. Mozart lived at the home of Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, who was also well acquainted with Bologne. Joseph Bologne lived across the courtyard, working as the music director of Madame de Montesson’s private theater, which the two residences shared. Bologne was over a decade Mozart’s [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de SaintGeorges, was one of the innovators that helped to define what is now known as the Classical Period in music – spanning approximately 1750 through 1820.  His earliest works were a series of string quartets and several sonatas written for keyboard and violin, composed in 1770-71. They demonstrate a distinct break from earlier Baroque Period conventions. His sonatas poised the keyboard and violin as equals, differing from the basso continuo Baroque style, which used a steady undercurrent of unobtrusive accompaniment. Bologne wrote some of the first-ever French string quartets, designing formal schemes that are now [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges’ legacy is broad. He was a biracial Frenchman, child prodigy as both a champion fencer and a virtuoso violinist, and later a celebrated and sought-after music director, composer, and officer in the French Revolution. He lived during a time that was full of innovation amid great political struggle and war across the Western world. Joseph was born on Christmas Day in 1745 on a coffee and sugar plantation on the Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe to Georges Bologne de Saint-Georges and a teenaged, enslaved Senegalese woman named Anne, known as Nanon. Despite being married to [...]

“Don’t look at me. Don’t look at me!” Eurydice implores her soon-to-be husband, mere minutes into Act I. Foreshadowing the moment of the backwards look, the moment which centuries of artists have repeatedly sought to capture, her words prompt us to ask several questions. Does she want Orpheus to lead her out of the underworld? What do we assume about what she feels in that fateful glance, that instant which symbolizes—as Greek mythology does so well—the eternal and unchanging capacity of humans to err? Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s version of the ever-popular tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is, [...]

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges was a busy man. A fixture on the musical scene of eighteenth-century Paris, he might be found seated in the violin section of the orchestra Le Concert des Amateurs; performing the solo part of his many virtuosic violin concertos; directing a theater; or composing a string quartet, a symphony, or an opera. (And this is to say nothing of his astonishingly varied extramusical pursuits as a champion fencer, a soldier, and a political thinker.) Bologne’s atypical status – he was a Black composer in an overwhelmingly white art form, and he was accomplished in [...]